Food banks are an essential part of social support structures – they ensure that people with little or no food are able to remain fed and offer support to people who are financially struggling. In light of the challenges of the past couple of years, food banks have begun to look at the idea of mobile service and home delivery. These ideas aren’t necessarily new, but have been made newly important by COVID-19 and restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the virus.
Sending messages manually to a given area when the mobile food bank service is going to be available would be a logistical nightmare. You would need a list of food bank clients that would have to be updated each time client interactions happen, and then you would need to divide up those lists based on geographic location. Then you would need to ensure that you have no miscommunications, missed messages, and that only the clients in your next area of service are contacted.
Alternatively, you can set up an automated solution to handle the communication procedure and allow people to sign up who might otherwise not engage with the service. Automated communications, much like mobile food bank services aren’t new, but are newly important. This way, you ensure the right message goes to the right client at the right time, minimizing the potential exposures. This allows you to function without worrying about the health of your clients or your volunteers.
However, automation can feel unapproachable for those without technical skills, or for organizations whose budget can’t accommodate all the requisite tools. It’s a challenge to adopt such a solution on its own.
SimplyCast presents the idea of the Food Bank Service Notification use case, a purpose-built, all-in-one communication solution that will handle your service notifications and allow you to expand on your automated, personalized communications from there.
We have built an easy four-step guide for building a food bank service notification solution for you to try out.
Setting Up a Food Bank Service Notification Solution
Step 1: Form and QR Code Setup
Once your form is constructed within your solution, it can be made available internally and externally. This will allow for people to sign up for service notifications from home making those who are in need more likely to come forward. It also allows you to more accurately ensure that local areas benefit the most when you’re operating in that specific area.
Step 2: Personalized Messaging
Any communications with clients can be difficult to automate, as they soon feel impersonal and distant – which in turn makes clients feel less valued and pushes people away. Personalized messages ensure that there is information in each message unique to each given client, preserving that personal connection despite automation being present.
Step 3: Regional Filtering
By setting up specific rules, you can create lists of clients filtered by their postal information. Setting this up in advance means that when the personalized messages you set up start sending, they will be going to the right people at the right time.
Step 4: Responses and Reports
Once your messages start going out and clients are being engaged with, you need to keep an eye on replies and reports from these clients. This will help you identify early if there is someone having difficulty or not receiving the right messages. It will also help you identify patterns. Are there messages in your notification campaign that are being opened more often than others? Are there messages being ignored? All this information is contained within the reports and will help you to refine and perfect your solution until you have a process that works for you.
Once you are done with all these steps, you have a complete food bank service notification solution!
Great idea! What now?
If you find this process interesting, you can always create one for your organization. However, as mentioned before, building all parts of this process from scratch is a difficult task. Although, if you are using a variety of different digital tools like a separate form builder, email blaster, CRM, etc., you end up spending large amounts of money – not to mention the number of technical tasks you need to perform to streamline and integrate all these tools. Even a simple integration issue can break down the whole process.
What’s the solution then?
SimplyCast anticipated this issue and created a complete food bank service notification solution. With our in-house automation technology, we have streamlined our form builder software, email marketing software, and CRM system to create a fool-proof solution that automates nearly every task related to capturing and storing client data and communicating with your clients in a way that feels good to them.
The best part? All these tools are under one single platform, so you do not need to worry about streamlining these tools. You are also saving money and resources by not using multiple platforms!
Our solution is 100 percent ready to go and fully customizable based on your needs. Depending on your business requirements, our consultants can help you to design a perfect food bank service notification solution using the service notification use case.
Why wait? Speak to our experts today! Click the button below to request a demo of the solution today!
