The Challenge
How can charities and social enterprises keep engaging with users during the Coronavirus Pandemic?
The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on people’s lives globally.
In addition to the havoc being wreaked on health, the economy tanked as well – and the charity and social enterprise sector was no different.
The inability of charities to use common fundraising and engagement techniques – such as street teams and live events means the sector has had to look at alternative innovative techniques to keep afloat. Seeing as though that is our stock-in-trade, we’ve been offering help to a variety of social enterprises and Non-Profits to automate communication, engage service users and keep the fundraising going.
The plan
Help as many Charities as possible – including Manchester Youth Zone – to use conversational AI to help automate requests, connect with users and keep up to date on services. For MYZ, their amazing youth centre is unfortunately closed, so we got together to work out how we could communicate the latest information to carers, parents and their own teams (with a number of staff having being furloughed)
What we did
Talking through the main issues and challenges with the core team was the first step – understanding how people use the centre and services, how young people interact, and ensuring they have access to youth workers and their key needs.
Taking a quick-start lean approach to our conversational AI framework diagnosis – we uncovered the most important FAQs, what people use their website and social channels for – what the most common questions were asked all helped to get a better view of how the conversational interaction could be most effective.
Getting it moving
With the quick start diagnosis complete, we then got cracking on the – Prescribe phase – from this we sketched out the flow and conversation within the chatbot, keeping in mind different user needs – from those who use the centre, carers and parents
Each was given a personalised route for the most important information to be relayed
Types of content
Automating communication and directing users of the centre or their carers/parents to talk to a youth worker, was clearly one of the most important parts of the chatbot.
This was surfaced immediately with the ability to quickly complete a simple conversational form that would automatically notify a qualified youth zone worker of questions, updates or possible issues.
We also added NLP elements to ensure if a young person was using keywords, slang or acronyms to flag up a potential issue that the chatbot could also respond in an appropriate way.
Bot workings
Coronavirus and its impact on the charity services – including the youth centre being closed – was also very important, this was available in the main menu areas – and through using NLP techniques users could ask questions on the subject.
We added an FAQ section (not just COVID-19 questions) to keep users up to date, encourage people to join and give out contact, location and direction details.
For donations, we utilised webview functionality to direct possible donators to the Youth Zone website, where they could join the effort to raise funds.
There was also the addition of a volunteering section, giving information about how to help as well as social feeds.
What to do next
We support charities, social enterprises and non-profits, helping them use conversational AI, voice, chatbots and automation to keep communicating with their users, donators and fundraisers.
Please drop us a line at hello@thesynthetic.co if you would like advice or to get a chatbot or voice intiative up and running quickly.
Conversations Worth Millions
