In The Wake Of A Disaster, Team Comeback Kids Gets Students The School Supplies They Need

In The Wake Of A Disaster, Team Comeback Kids Gets Students The School Supplies They Need

In August of 2016, torrential downpours caused catastrophic flooding across Southern Louisiana. It dropped the equivalent of 7.1 trillion gallons of water, devastating parishes across the state. Louisianaians were salvaging what they could from the disaster, while scrambling to find a way to prepare their kids for the first day of school. Many low income residents did not have the financial means to replace their kids’ school supplies lost in the flooding.

Team Comeback Kids raced against the clock, rallying to help their neighbors. In a matter of a month, they delivered over one million dollars in school supplies to kids across Louisiana in time for their first day at school. Delivering over 9,500 backpacks across the state with no time to spare is a logistical endeavor as much as it is an altruistic one. Comeback Kids used Twilio SMS, powered by Twilio.org, to assemble and empower volunteer squad to help the kids of Louisiana.

A Fantastic Opportunity (Presented in the Form of a Logistical Nightmare)

Team Comeback kids sent one SMS blast to their volunteers that Friday. Ten minutes later, they had the 30 volunteers they needed. By the end of the weekend, those supplies were out of their headquarters and in the hands of kids.

Dennis Lomonaco, Executive Director of WYGWG, sent the text blast to volunteers himself, calling it a “eureka moment.”

“Ten minutes later we were set,” said Lomonaco. “That would have never happened with email.”

Mobilizing an Army of Volunteers

“The texting platform allowed us to get near 100% open rates and responses within minutes of sending. With email, our open rates were never close to that high, and even when they did get read, it could take a day or more,” said Lomonaco.

Using the Frontline SMS platform, powered by Twilio, Dennis can send SMS to curated lists of volunteers without having to write a line of code. “A lot of nonprofit work we do is limited by the tech stack we have available,” says Lomonaco. The Frontline SMS platform put the Twilio API in reach for Lomonaco.

Now that kids affected by the flood are back in school, fully equipped with desperately needed supplies, Lomonaco is shifting his focus. With his other venture, Story Block Media, he is aiming to give nonprofits access to the tools they need to help others with a quickness.

“We want to create a one stop shop for nonprofits to communicate with the donors and volunteers and all the people they need to talk to,” says Dennis. “Communication is the biggest struggle for nonprofits in or out of disasters.”