Case study: Lifeline Australia streamlines its backend processes

The country’s leading suicide hotline Lifeline Australia needed to get the right balance between using internal technology and external vendors to help streamline its call processes.

Peter Witt, national manager data and supportive services at Lifeline Australia spoke to Digital Nation on how the not for profit went through a significant digital transformation to keep up with the demands brought on by Covid.

He said the not for profit was on the hunt for a tool that an external vendor could develop for them so they could focus on other tasks.

“We also needed to improve the consistency, everyone is very busy and it's easy to make mistakes. Most not for profits result to doing everything manually, get a CSV file, load it or type it in manually is the easiest, lowest common denominator,” Witt explained.

“But there was just so much data coming out of us that we needed to improve the consistency and we needed to get it in faster.”

He said Lifeline had a lot of organisations and individuals that wanted to support the brand getting involved, which was great. But it required a lot of work integrating the data into its new CRM.

“We needed to get the right balance, because with our existing team, we had a certain level of technical skill and ability. But it wasn't up to the turnaround time that we needed for some of these fundraising opportunities,” Witt explained.

“We didn't have the breadth of skill to link up with all the different applications and websites that we needed to. So we are pursuing a strategy of trying to get the right balance between what roles we play and what roles we have external vendors for.”

Lifeline chose Workato and implemented the solution in May this year, which has streamlined jobs and processes for the business.

Witt said, "Every week, there's something new that our fundraisers throw at us, a new opportunity. We have to figure out how are we going to go about this. What's the best way to store the data? How should it be coded? Our people are spending more time looking at the business process, how it should be and then communicating that to the developers and then they implement that in Workato.”