Case Study: Resilient Lismore manages volunteers for flood relief

Community-run disaster response network Resilient Lismore has been at the forefront of the emergency response to the floods in the Northern Rivers this year.

Elly Bird, executive director of Resilient Lismore spoke to Digital Nation Australia about the organisation’s use of digital tools to manage volunteer deployments.

According to Bird, Resilient Lismore initially deployed software platform Recovers.org to manage the 2017 floods.

“[Recovers.org] was brilliant at the time. It was really excellent. It was easy to use, easy to start up. We knew that when this one kicked off, based on our experience with that one that it wasn't going to be big enough. It wasn't going to do what we needed it to do. We knew that we had to have something that would respond to scale,” said Bird.

The organisation then turned to platform Volunteer Local, which she described as a “tech nightmare”.

“[Volunteer Local] was aimed at volunteers signing up for shifts. But it really was not fit for purpose and it was incredibly cumbersome. It was very difficult to drive the back end, very difficult to prioritise export, search even.”

Finally, the not-for-profit settled on Monday.com to manage the administrative arm.

“The benefit of using Monday.com was that it was very simple for us to train volunteers to use,” said Bird.

“We use Monday.com as a very simple to use front facing website registration. People enter what they require help with, and then we sort through that work and manage the workflow in the back end with a team of volunteers.”

The organisation is working through 650 jobs in the system that they are allocating to volunteers using the platform.

Dean Swan, VP APJ at Monday.com outlined the quantifiable metrics of the implementation.

"There have been over 730 individual volunteer registrations through Monday.com forms, plus hundreds belonging to large groups not in the system. Since May of this year, 2,000 plus volunteers matched on the Work OS platform with Resilient Lismore based on specific needs to help flood-affected victims rebuild their homes and their lives. In addition, a total of 1,120 jobs were logged using Monday.com, leveraging essential data to help continue projects within flood zones," he said.

According to Bird, the biggest challenge Resilient Lismore faced in implementing the solution came down to migrating data from one system to another.

“I described it at the time that we had to change horses mid-gallop. We were going flat-out managing a huge caseload. We had to take all of our current live data from one system and migrate it over into another system without disrupting that ability to keep meeting the needs of our community.

"That was pretty chunky and we had to do very rapid training programs to bring everyone up to speed into using the new system so that we were able to keep it rolling,” she said.

Resilient Lismore also leveraged collaboration tools from Atlassian and Slack (now part of Salesforce).

"We also had a lot of support from Atlassian, particularly from some local employees of theirs who supported us by providing a focused team to help us transition and set us on our new pathway and operating system," said Bird.

"They worked with Monday.com to design our new system and train our team in its use. We still use Slack for our communication with up to 100 of our volunteers and we used Confluence to streamline consistent messaging for our social media moderators during our last flood warning."

According to Monday.com's Swan, the Resilient Lismore project was bespoke in nature, bringing multiple vendors together.

"The Monday.com team worked very closely with Atlassian employees to help bring the floodhelpNR platform to life. With natural disasters, there’s a critical nature to every single project in the field and technology can help provide speed and duty of care to every project at scale."

Resilient Lismore used the platform free of charge through Monday.com's social impact initiative.