Elevate Community and Social Services with Twilio

It’s no secret that nonprofits offering community & social services are facing an increasingly challenging environment to operate:

• There’s soaring demand for services, driven by converging crises around the world. In a recent survey, 75% of nonprofits are worried about meeting future service demand.
• The need to demonstrate proven impact has also never been higher. Organizations are under increased pressure from funders and key stakeholders to deliver measurable outcomes at-scale
• This is compounded by increasingly constrained resources.  Individual donations are plummeting, while private and public grant funding is becoming more competitive.

The current dynamic puts a premium on nonprofits who can do more with less. Specifically, this means those organizations that can maximize scale, quality, and efficiency in program delivery will have an edge.

While it’s generally understood that digital engagement strategies can play a key role in scaling program delivery, it’s not always clear how to adopt these practices. Check out the video below and read on to see how Twilio’s Engagement Platform (and AI!) can scale your organization’s impact:

How Twilio Can Transform the Client Experience

With Twilio, you can transform every part of your clients’ journey to be more scalable, impactful, and efficient. There are four main stages to the client journey:

1. Discovery and enrollment. Build awareness with target groups and onboard new clients at scale
2. Service delivery. Deliver personalized support tailored to each client’s unique needs
3. Case management. After your first interaction, Twilio can also help you deliver lasting outcomes through intelligent and streamlined case management.
4. Impact measurement. Custom feedback and reporting mechanisms to measure outcomes based on stakeholder requirements

Twilio’s engagement platform can give your organization the edge it needs to serve more people, improve outcomes for program participants, and secure critical funding to keep carrying out your mission. The true power of Twilio is unlocked for nonprofits when digital communications are paired with personalization and AI tools to transform client experiences.

Let’s take a closer look at common ways nonprofits are using Twilio to scale their programs across each state of the client journey. Use the below Table of Contents to jump to the use cases you’d like to explore:

Discovery and enrollment: (1) Self-serve client registration, (2) appointment management, and (3) personalized outreach campaigns

Service delivery: (4) Community alerts, (5) modernized helplines, and (6) client two-factor authentication

Case management: (7) Self-serve resources & referrals, and (8) predictive support with AI

Impact measurement: (9) Multichannel client surveys, and (10) customized reporting

Discovery and Enrollment

Self-Serve Client Registration

With Twilio, you can create interactive registration chatbots that allow you to enroll more people on accessible channels like SMS and WhatsApp. These chatbots can be customized to your organization’s unique requirements and program needs.

One example of the power of self-serve client registration is seen in cash assistance programs. Humanitarian organizations use interactive WhatsApp chatbots to allow displaced people around the world to quickly and securely apply for benefits without staff intervention. These self-serve chatbots have allowed some of the world’s largest humanitarian NGOs to serve millions of people impacted by large-scale crises, without delay.

Appointment Management

For in-person services, appointment reminders are another effective way to scale client onboarding. With Twilio, you can send automated SMS reminders before appointments with self-serve options to confirm, cancel, or reschedule. These appointment reminders can also be configured to support multiple languages, to ensure services are available to all the clients you serve.

One food assistance nonprofit reduced client wait times by 45 minutes per visit after adopting Twilio-powered appointment management.

Personalized Outreach Campaigns

With Segment, Twilio’s Customer Data Platform, you can create a personalized outreach campaign to increase awareness of your programs with target groups.

By creating golden profiles for your clients, you can use data to target specific groups based on demographics.. Segment can integrate with top nonprofit tools like Salesforce and Blackbaud to create a 360 degree view of each prospective client. Then, you can use profiles to drive targeting and automated engagement.

For instance, you can identify which of your client population is eligible for government assistance based on income and employment status, and automatically initiate a voice call nudge to encourage them to apply. And through using Twilio’s Branded Calling feature, you can announce yourself to call recipients to increase pickup rates.

This type of data-driven personalization and automation can help you efficiently promote your programs to the right eligible prospects.

Service Delivery

Community Alerts

Many nonprofits are interested in broadcasting timely updates to clients. With Twilio, they can send these notifications across multiple channels - text, voice, and email – all from a single trusted provider. This simplifies management and reduces operational costs.

What’s more, nonprofits can incorporate each client’s preferences to choose which channels they deliver the message. This ensures high open rates, and improves client satisfaction.

One notable example of community notifications is sending multi-channel alerts to communities impacted by a natural disaster. These timely messages contribute to community safety and assist in the response and recovery process.

Modernized Helplines

For organizations operating a helpline or hotline, Twilio Flex is a powerful contact center platform that can transform how agents and help-seekers engage.

Flex supports multiple communication channels – voice, SMS, webchat, and more – allowing your clients to reach out on the channel where they feel the most comfortable.

Flex also supercharges your contact center agents through unlocking remote access, integrating client data from key systems into a single interface, and supporting supervisor coaching tools out of the box.  Using Voice Intelligence, you can automate risk triaging with AI based on the help seeker’s initial messages – and automatically move high-risk contacts to the front of the queue.

The combination of these capabilities allow your agents to focus on serving more clients with the highest level of service. In fact, one national mental health nonprofit grew the number of help seekers they served by 70% after adopting Flex.

Client Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

Dependable identity verification is crucial to ensuring the right services and information are being provided to the right people. Twilio Verify allows you to send one-time passcodes (OTP) when clients are authenticating with digital services that must be provided in addition to a username and password.

In addition, Twilio’s Fraud Guard AI automatically blocks fraudulent SMS traffic to ensure you are only paying for legitimate login attempts. To bring this to life with a real example, nonprofit blood banks are using Verify 2FA to ensure authorized access to the web portal for blood donors.

Case Management

Self-Serve Resources & Referrals

Just like for appointment reminders, Twilio messaging can also be used for other client self-serve programs. Another popular example is using SMS and voice for 24/7 access to resources and referrals.

These resources can either be delivered through inbound or outbound communications. As an example, consider an addiction nonprofit sending timed SMS nudges to parents helping manage their child’s substance use issue. These resource delivery programs can be created to serve clients over a long period of time, contributing to lasting positive outcomes and scalable service delivery.

You can also use Twilio to facilitate seamless client referrals to related services without requiring staff involvement. Using the same example, imagine embedding a phone number in the outbound SMS that connects the client to a self-serve IVR that allows for easy transfer to a local clinic for in-person support.

Predictive Support with AI

But what if you could harness the power of AI to predict which clients you’re working with are at-risk, and proactively intervene? Twilio’s CustomerAI platform can solve this for you.

Informed by patient ‘golden profiles’ in Segment, Twilio’s Predictive AI can assign likelihood scores for any future event. For instance, you can use predictive traits to estimate risk of a negative outcome, and take preventative action based on these insights.

As a specific example, you could assign a future personal crisis risk score to each of your clients you’ve previously served through a mental health crisis line, and target the top 20% with an automated email campaign with a wellness check-in.

This is just one of countless ways you can leverage Twilio’s AI capabilities to reimagine client case management – unlocking personalization and intelligence at-scale.

Impact Measurement

Multichannel Client Surveys

One important way to measure client outcomes and improve program quality is through surveys.

Twilio allows you to conduct surveys over SMS or Voice, streamlining data collection from the clients you serve.

Both the questions asked and the survey triggers can be fully customized using Twilio Studio, our low-code workflow builder. Results of surveys can then be easily synchronized to your system of record for storage and analysis.

As an example, many nonprofits send a text survey after a voice call with a support center to measure performance of their agents. Survey results can be used to quantitatively measure impact, and insights fed back into future program development to improve quality.

Custom Reports and Insights

Twilio’s Voice and Messaging Insights products give you unparalleled visibility into client engagement metrics. This can help you demonstrate your reach and outcomes for use in communication to key stakeholders.

For instance, Messaging Insights can give your organization quantitative data on the number, and the location of the people you serve with SMS communication:

These types of metrics are instrumental in crafting powerful annual reports that unlock future funding. What’s more, these dashboards can be used to fuel program performance improvements based on data-driven insights. Imagine, as an example, adding support for a new language in your Voice IVR based on a surprising number of inbound contacts from a new country.

Partner with Twilio.org to scale your program’s impact

If you’re interested in learning more about any of these use cases, including getting access to getting started resources for nonprofits, I encourage you to speak with your Twilio account representative or contact our sales team.

Jeff Eiden is a Director of Product for Twilio.org, helping social impact organizations scale their missions with digital engagement.