Purpose

As we are all having to quickly adapt to what our leadership needs as they are navigating the shifting Coronavirus landscape, our Outreach team approached me Monday with the task of creating a system in which at-risk people in our community could request assistance with grocery / medical supply delivery. The system needed to be semi-automated so that the requester and responder could exchange contact information once the request was accepted by the responder, allow for the responder to add their own notes to the request, be secure so that the responders couldn't just see all the private information of the requester, and allow the requester and responders to sign up easily via a form online. As of today, the system is fully functional and in place. I'm sure many of you may be needing the same kind of system, so I'm sharing what I did here.

Process

Volunteers

• A potential volunteer will fill out the volunteer application form
• They get put into the serving group as pending
• An email notification goes to our outreach team
• They screen the volunteer and ensure they have an active background check
• Once screened, they change the member status to active
• Once the member is active in that group, they will now receive notifications about new requests

Assistance Requests

• Someone who is homebound or at-risk fills out the request form
• A connection request is created with their information and details
• The outreach team is notified so they can review the request and ensure it's not supposed to be redirected elsewhere (someone needing electric paid vs asking for grocery delivery)
• If the request is where it's supposed to be, the outreach team will manually trigger the workflow "Notify the Response Team of New Request"
• Depending on the responder's communication preference, they'll either receive a text or an email with the request info
• They can click the button or link to see more information
• If they choose to accept the request, they can click "Assign to Me" on the more information page
• If they go to the more information page after the request has been assigned, they'll see a warning message indicating that the request has been responded to by another volunteer
• Once a request is assigned, both the requester and the responder will receive an email
  • The email that the requester gets is confirmation only and includes the responder's name in the subject. The responder's contact info is hidden to ensure their privacy.
  • The email that the responder gets contains the address, phone number, and email of the person requesting info. It also contains a link to enter notes and complete the request.
• At this point, the responder will call the requester, get the details, and fulfill the request
• Once completed, they click the button in the previous email so they can enter notes and complete the request.

How

• Connection Requests
  • New "COVID-19" Connection Type
  • New "Homebound Request" Connection Opportunity Type
• Groups
  • New Group Type specifically for the "Response Team"
  • New Groups for each response team
• Workflows
  • A lot of workflows 😅

The Juicy Details

Connection Requests

The new connection type is "COVID-19 Response" and the new connection opportunity is "Homebound Request". This can be adaptable in your own organization however you'd like. Once this opportunity is created, you can set the opportunity attribute in the "COVID-19 - Assistance Request Form" workflow. The only thing you'll need to do with the opportunity type is set up some workflow triggers once they are imported!

Groups and Group Types

The new group type "Response Team" may not be necessary, that's just how I prefer to keep information organized. The groups that I created corresponded to the response teams we have (food pantry and care response). The care response team are people who are willing to coordinate with people who are at risk and need food or medicine. These groups are used in the assistance request and volunteer workflows to keep it organized who has signed up to serve. We're intentionally placing people into the groups as pending, because we are ensuring we have active background checks for those who are making home deliveries. Once their background check has been verified, we change them from pending status to active status. The "Notify Response Team of New Request" workflow will only send requests to group members with an active status.

Workflows

The workflows tie everything together! They are attached in a zip file. Here's the way I have them organized:

The description of each workflow will tell you what things you need to change to make it work in your own organization, so be sure to check there first! Once the workflows are imported and updated based on the descriptions, and you have them triggering correctly on your connection opportunity, you should be good to go! 

The entry point will be the Assistance Request Form and the Volunteer Form, everything else should run from there!

I'm in chat as @leahjennings, if you have questions, just ask!