SCALING THE IMPACT OF A CHARITY
Service Design for A Sound Life
The problem.
Since 2014, A Sound Life have trained and empowered a team of hundreds of volunteers to deliver free music, yoga and meditation programs. The programs are aimed to build well being and resilience in vulnerable Australians in need within hospital, aged-care, disability and mental health facilities around Australia.
In June 2019, Australians had just experienced the worst bushfire season in the nation’s history and mental health was shown to be at an all time low. A Sound Life’s free services were needed more than ever around Australia and yet A Sound Life (ASL), a Sydney based charity, was struggling to a) keep volunteers engaged and volunteering, and b) onboard volunteers to deliver our programs outside of Sydney.
I had a vision that through a digital transformation and a service redesign we could improve volunteer engagement while enabling new volunteers to be onboarded, trained and rostered anywhere in Australia, AND with the same budget and staff resources the charity was currently operating on. I successfully pitched my vision to A Sound Life’s management team, gained funding and built a role for myself to lead a Human Centered Service Design process, to redesign the charity’s end-to-end volunteer journey.
Putting the charity’s volunteers at the front and centre of the design process the question I started with was: “How might we provide A Sound Life volunteers around Australia with an engaging and inspirational volunteer journey?”
Provided expertise: Design Strategy | Service design | UX design | Blueprint Custodianship | Project Management | Staff Training
Research.
Mapped the current end-to-end AS IS volunteer experience: Organised our ASL programs team to undertake a series of one on one interview surveys with a broad sample of volunteers. Choosing extreme users, from our biggest volunteer fans, to those volunteers who left the organisation was important to building insights about the volunteer customer journey.
Synthesis.
I led a journey mapping workshop with the ASL team to map the AS IS volunteer journey, including their emotional pain points. Some of the identified customer pain points and insights included:
1) loss of interest because of long on boarding wait times - volunteers had to wait up to 4 months from registering their interest to become a volunteer to then attending an information session.
2) confusing onboarding instructions - due to poor instructions, volunteers consistently failed to do all of their checks (police check, working with children checks etc).
3) frustrating program placement processes - volunteers going back and forth over email, coordinating with a program administrator.
4) volunteers found unique value through moments of personal interaction with A Sound Life staff, including information sessions and trainings.
Several ‘moments that matter’ were selected within the volunteer journey to be redesigned based on the influence that the moment had on the customer experience and where there was greatest opportunity for improvement. ‘How might we’ statements were created for these selected moments.
Make.
I facilitated two staff ideation workshops to address the ‘how might we’ statement for the selected ‘moments that matter’.
Some of the most voted upon ideas from the ideation session included:
1) To address long wait times whilest utilising the potential for unique value that personal interaction between staff and volunteers provided, the idea was to hold more regular and online zoom based information sessions as opposed to less regular in person information sessions;
2) To address confusing onboarding instructions, to provide pre recorded onboarding informational videos with clear instructions on how to complete needed checks; and
3) to address frustrating volunteer program placement process - a digital volunteer app and website that would enable volunteers to roster themselves after their trainings at their own convenience online as opposed to back and forth email coordination.
I prototyped the best ideas using storyboarding and later used proof of concept testing to test the new prototypes with volunteers and internal staff.
Service Blueprint.
The final prototypes were brought to life in a service blueprint which mapped the the ideal TO BE volunteer journey as well as the ASL team’s actions and the CRM’s jobs to be done.
Blueprint Operationalised:
I then became the custodian of the blueprint. I put on my hat as a Digital Producer, created a project plan and in collaboration with several external contractors including video producers, web developers managed the implementation of the Blueprint. This included scripting and shooting ASL trainings, creating new online information session workshops and more.
I setup all the digital infrastructure that sat underneath the blueprint including a new LMS, calendar system and transitioned the organisation from Salesforce as a new more suited volunteer management system. I ensured all the pieces talked to eachother and that the volunteer and staff experience was bug free.
I continued to operationlise the Blueprint by creating a company operation manual which has enabled the staff delivery teams to clearly understand their duties and role descriptions. Further I have led staff training around delivering the updated service.
Results. improved volunteer engagement + growth of charity’s reach & scale of impact.
Volunteer engagement showed a marked improvement - In previous volunteer service journey (2020) only 15 % of volunteers who expressed interest in volunteering finished their training to become active volunteers, compared to the new volunteer service journey (2021) where 72% of volunteers who registered interest in volunteering became trained and active volunteers.
National expansion: digital transformation of the volunteer journey has to date enabled charity to scale its impact and reach to Queensland, Victoria and Regional NSW.
Interviews with ASL administrative staff have reported marked improvement in capacity to onboard, train, and roster volunteers.