VolunteerMatch

COMPANY PROFILE

VolunteerMatch is the Web's largest network for volunteer engagement, with more than 80,000 participating nonprofits, 150 network partners and 8 million visitors each year. Founded in 1998, VolunteerMatch offers solutions to make it easier for individuals, nonprofits and companies to make a difference.

The Challenge

VolunteerMatch serves two distinct but very broad audiences at its well-known website: people looking for volunteer opportunities and the nonprofits that use the platform to recruit volunteers. From its start as a mission-based organization, a big part of VolunteerMatch’s service has been its commitment to being helpful and approachable to users. To support these groups, the VolunteerMatch team started out with a traditional support model: provide some basic FAQs on the website and a support email address for further questions. While email support allowed VolunteerMatch to answer user questions, the support team was answering the same questions over and over again via email. In addition, an email-based support system didn’t give the volunteers or nonprofits the opportunity to connect with each other on best practices or other shared interests.

In mid-2011, the trend towards the convergence of customer support and social networking was becoming apparent to the VolunteerMatch team. The question was which solution would be a good fit. “A board member asked if we had thought about using Get Satisfaction,” says Vicky Hush, Vice President of Client

Relations & Strategic Partnerships. “We had seen the Feedback tab before and liked the idea of a customer community, so we

started to look into our options.”

The Implementation

VolunteerMatch worked with Get Satisfaction to create a community solution that met the needs of their support team and user base. The VolunteerMatch community is Single Sign On, which means that anyone with a VolunteerMatch account is automatically able to participate in

their Get Satisfaction community using their VolunteerMatch credentials. This also means that users are required to log into a VolunteerMatch account before they can participate in community discussions. Having a user identity attached to each community member helps the support team keep track of user participation.

CASE STUDY

Web’s largest network for volunteer engagement brings together nonprofits and volunteers in a community of interest and decreases support emails by 40%

“We use Get Satisfaction to announce product launches, post webinars put on by our Education & Training team, and we even have our engineers jump in to address technical questions.” Vicky HushVolunteerMatch VP of Client Relations & Strategic Partnerships

Hush. “Anyone with a web presence should be thinking about how they can use online networks to connect with their customers and let their customers connect with each other around shared interests.”

Numbers worth noticing:

1,035 community members

882 community topics

40 % decrease in inbound support emails

Share on Twitter Share on Facebook

Click here to read more success stories.

Get your community up & running in 30 seconds. Start your free trial at

http://getsatisfaction.com/plans/

Once they were ready to launch their community, VolunteerMatch replaced their previous Help link with a link to their Get Satisfaction community. That way, Get Satisfaction serves as a first tier of support for anyone on the VolunteerMatch website. In addition, VolunteerMatch uses a custom Get Satisfaction Feedback widget on every page of their website so that users can easily ask questions and search for answers in the community.

The Outcomes

Just six months after launch, VolunteerMatch has a highly active Get Satisfaction community. The community-generated content is easily searched within the community and is also indexed by search engines, providing a wealth of information for customers with general or specific questions about VolunteerMatch. As a result, the support team has seen a 40% decrease in inbound support emails since the launch of their Get Satisfaction community. “We still provide email and phone support, but directing more users to Get Satisfaction lets us give more attention to the users who need it and less time telling users how to re-set their passwords. We even have a ‘P.S.’ at the end of every support email template that instructs users to check out the community for a faster response,” says Hush.

With almost 800 community topics and close to 1,000 users already participating, the VolunteerMatch community isn’t just a place for users to find answers to basic questions. “We use Get Satisfaction to announce product launches, post webinars put on by our Education & Training team, and we even have our engineers jump in to address technical questions,” says Hush. “The community is also a place where nonprofits can start a dialogue on volunteering best practices generally.” With Get Satisfaction, customers can connect with each other and employees in every department of a company.

VolunteerMatch uses a customer support community to provide more than answers to questions. “We’re all trying to provide a great service, not just provide basic support,” says

400 Second Street, Suite 400San Francisco, CA 94107

(877) 339-3997 Toll-Free

getsatisfaction.comtwitter.com/getsatisfaction

What is Get Satisfaction? A simple way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. More than 60,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to provide a more social support experience, build better products, increase SEO and improve customer loyalty.

Get Satisfaction communities are available at www.getsatisfaction.com

“We’re all trying to provide a great service, not just provide basic support. Anyone with a web presence should be thinking about how they can use online networks to connect with their customers and let their customers connect with each other around shared interests.”Vicky HushVolunteerMatch VP of Client Relations & Strategic Partnerships