The COVID-19 pandemic has been at the centre of our lives for the past few months. As the chaos begins to settle (slightly), we thought we’d take the time to reflect on our response to the virus. 

Let’s go back to the 17th of March. Following new advice from the government to cut all non-essential contact with others, TeamKinetic closed our office and made the switch to working from home. 

Business as usual?

Being a provider of volunteer management, we had to wonder whether volunteering could even continue if people were being told to stay at home. However, there were at-risk people out there who were in need of medical supplies and food.

The biggest question we had was how exactly we could help these people in a safe way for both those who were at-risk and the volunteers. We not only had to consider the physical safety of everyone involved, but also the safety of their personal data.

We quickly set to work developing a new system that would connect volunteers wanting to help in their community with people who were in need of help.

New Features Developed

  • A new simpler, customised home page for organisations to let their volunteers know what their options and opportunities are during the COVID pandemic
  • Brand new community task feature set that allows for the creation, assignment and management of community requested tasks for vulnerable and at need individuals
  • API for the community task management
  • Progressive Web App for volunteers to search/find/join and complete community tasks
  • Volunteer ID card and QR code for the community task app users
  • Chat between the assigned volunteer and organisation admins
  • Push notifications

New Hardware and Infrastructure

Furthermore, we were anticipating spikes in traffic as various announcements were made so made some internal changes to help manage these spikes.

  • Transferred community task load to AWS elastic servers
  • New Google map management and capacity (for directions and geo location)
  • New logging and monitoring installed to check capacity and demand in near real time

Overall, with the new system changes it is now easier and faster to create volunteering opportunities (now called tasks). We believe this significantly helped combat the chaos felt by volunteer managers in the early stages of the pandemic.

Next, we had to find a way to make all our current users aware of this system while also targeting organisations that we thought could benefit from using it.

Creating awareness

The enterprise version of the system is entirely free of charge for the duration of the pandemic. By offering this extended trial period, we hoped as many organisations could get their own systems up and running to spread the positive influence of volunteering as much as possible!

We also hosted a string of webinars showing how to use the system. This allowed viewers to interact with our developers, ask questions, and raise any concerns they had. This seemed to be very beneficial for both us and our customers. It was great to hear from people directly, especially if the comments were full of praise!

You can read all our blogs related to the COVID pandemic by clicking here.

What’s next?

The system is being continually developed to meet the needs of our customers and make the volunteer management process as easy as possible. It’s also important to consider how the system can be used in a post-COVID world. Which is hard to imagine right now! The activities done by these volunteers don’t have to be confined to this pandemic, they can be done at any time. We believe that the kindness shown by these volunteers to help the more vulnerable members of their communities should be the norm across society.

Why can’t we continue to help each other on a daily basis?

Want to try it for yourself?

If you’d like to see how the TeamKinetic system can help you recruit and manage volunteers during COVID and beyond, check out our website to get started with a free trial.