As some of you may know, I used to be a USAID funded aid worker. Now, because of DOGE, I’m just a guy.
Anyway, I want to develop a proposal for a not for profit I volunteer at. I don’t, however, have the technical expertise to know what kind of IT specialist I need for this project (I don’t know what I don’t know). Once I have the proposal written, we’ll shop it around to some local foundations.
Here is what the project would do:
Between the hours of 9-5, the user would be able to call a single number and on the other end a volunteer would help them; and
Various volunteers would sign up for shifts to be on call. When the user calls the number, the call is transferred to the volunteer’s number. If that volunteer doesn’t pick up, or is already on another call, the call would be forwarded to another volunteer.
So basically, the users would call one number and an available volunteer would pick up from their own phone.
For the proposal, what kind of IT experts would I need to design this? Is there off the shelf products I could purchase and adapt for this?
In my old career, I had an IT department who would help me design a project like this. Now, I’m just a guy. Any advice is appreciated.
It would be silly to try to build this device / system from scratch. That would be about the equivalent of a meals-on-wheels program deciding to first build cars from scratch for their volunteers to drive.
The general term for what you’re looking for is “call routing”. I’ve been out of the biz long enough that my knowledge about vendors & specific tech and such is woefully out of date.
But all this should be buyable from a commercial provider. Heck your local phone company may sell it, but probably not as cheaply as some VOIP provider.
There are online virtual phone systems which do that kind of call routing. They give you a 1-800 number and your volunteers register their phone number with them. When a call comes in, the service can ring all the phones at once or ring them one at a time. Grasshopper is one company that does it, but there are lots of others as well.
Thanks again. Sorry for the stupid question, but what about the scheduling component? Sam is on duty 12-2 and Sally is on call from 2-3? I assume that is easily covered.
If you had to budget for this, what would you use as a plug numbe? This is in the US only.
Yeah, they typically have the ability to set schedules as to which numbers are active at which times. You pay per person per month. I’m not sure exactly how much it costs. Maybe $10-15 per person? I haven’t actually set up these systems personally, so I’m not sure of the details.
It is probably going to be cheaper (for the nonprofit and grantmaker) to find an off the shelf solution like that (there are many many providers) than to hire a developer to write your own, unless the developer is also going to volunteer their time.
With a cloud service, it’s all handled for you and you don’t have to buy or maintain any phone infrastructure of your own. You get a VOIP phone number, either a local number or a toll-free one, and then the website lets you specify who to call, when, and handle vacations and holidays and voicemail and all that.
So I took another look and PagerDuty seems more designed for “notifications” (like sending texts or pre-recorded timessages to the right team member when some event is triggered). It does support live call routing too, but that’s a separate add-on. Anyway, take a look, but compare it to some alternatives too.
Here’s a few more choices, in no particular order. They are all just basically “call routing” providers, as @LSLGuy said, aka “call distribution”, though sometimes that’s just rolled up as one feature in a bigger call center platform.
They are usually designed for non-technical users to set up (i.e., you probably won’t need to find a developer, just spend half an hour going through it yourself).
On the off chance you do need help, though, just post back here and I’m sure we can figure it out collectively
Thanks again. Basically, I’m trying to get the core concept and a basic price tag to shop around to some foundation to try a pilot. This is all good stuff.
Makes sense! Most (but not all) of them have transparent pricing, usually around $15-$30/seat/mo. Several offer nonprofit discounts. Depending on volume and/or charisma, you might be able to negotiate it down too… these services, like most cloud software, don’t have much of a per-user cost. The bulk of it is in the software development costs (staff, etc.), so it doesn’t cost them very much to give your small nonprofit a few lines.
Also, if your nonprofit is small enough to have a fiscal sponsor, it’s possible that sponsor (or another nonprofit it works with) already has such a system in place. It’s pretty common for anyone running a hotline, etc. In that case, it may be cheaper for them and you to just add one more number/routing setup to their existing license than for your small nonprofit to buy its own license.
I just heard back from a friend who works for a nonprofit* suicide hotline, and this is what they said:
We use NICEinContact. There’s also something called RingCentral that uses the NICEinContact telephony platform and throws a CRM on top of it, but I haven’t used RingCentral.
NICE allows for designating agents to different lines/skills, allows for prioritization of different lines, let’s you setup custom phone tree behavior, has granular data on agent state (outbound call, inbound call, away, working on documentation after the call, break, etc). Also has some workforce planning capabilities
It’s a good system if you need to monitor call volume and how agents are performing (we have hundreds of people taking calls)
Hundreds in total taking calls, we have like 20 people on shift at any given time
So that’s what it looks like at a bigger scale — probably more than you need for just a handful of volunteers.
* Side note: I sure hope suicide hotlines are nonprofit by default, lol, and that there’s not one trying to make it a business.
If you engage a company like Rival 5, which is the company our school district uses, they set all that up for you as part of their initial service to you.
I have experience with RingCentral. It’s way overkill for what you’re trying to do. Even if they have some bare-bones pricing plan, you’ll have trouble getting any support for a small nonprofit.
