Helping Samaritans Volunteers save lives
How we built a volunteer-led dashboard and system to help the Samaritans to support their 20,000+ volunteers
Samaritans work 24 hours a day with 201 branches, 150 staff and 20,000 trained volunteers to help hundreds of thousands of people. Yet despite this incredible support, Samaritans needed help. Samaritans volunteers are critical to the success of Samaritans' services, and they needed more volunteers than ever before to meet the growing demand for their helpline - estimating that 6,000 new volunteers would be needed within the year.
The scale was enormous and so was the potential to refine and improve processes and systems, ultimately enabling their team of dedicated volunteers to provide support even more people across the UK and the Republic of Ireland when it is needed most.
Samaritans' team of 20,000 volunteers are available, day or night, for anyone who’s struggling to cope, who needs someone to listen without judgement or pressure. Every day, they respond to around 10,000 calls for help. As the UK’s leading suicide prevention charity, they are quite literally saving lives. Through this project, we partnered with the Samaritans to support their volunteers by creating a volunteer dashboard and management system, giving them valuable insights at any given time on capacity and demand for support.
Starting with a Discovery process, we worked closely with Samaritans volunteers to understand their journey and their needs.
A significant challenge was not being able to ensure that these volunteers were available when they were needed- specifically, they needed a way of matching volunteer availability to demand from callers.
The Developer Society designed and developed an intelligent yet easy-to-use and interactive volunteer dashboard that helped identify trends in helpline demand. The dashboard uses a predictive model of capacity and demand to help volunteers. This meant that volunteers could match their availability to peaks in demand and help more people. We also integrated with SMS, phone and email services so volunteers could choose how they provided support.
By using the dashboard, Samaritans can ensure that their incredible volunteers are available - when they’re needed most. It means that they can help more people, and save more lives. You can see more in the Samaritans' write up about the dash board as part of their digital transformation journey.
“The dashboard is incredibly valuable. It’s hard to remember a time without it. It gives you a sense of being part of something and the importance of being there, with all those other volunteers, providing a service for people who may not have anywhere else to turn.”
Nicola, Samaritans volunteer