How Nonprofits Can Scale Direct Service

With more than 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. alone, and the increasing needs of a growing global population, nonprofits simply can’t keep up with the needs of the communities they serve, much less worrying about trying to grow.

Mobile workforce management can help get the right person to the right place at the right time, helping your organization to serve more clients each day. Traditional field service software doesn’t offer organizations to proactively monitor what’s going on in the field and make timely corrections—but mobile workforce management software does. Essentially, a mobile workforce management solution enables your nonprofit to fulfill a promise to the community and deliver on its philanthropic goals.

Let’s take a look at how mobile workforce management solutions help two key players in nonprofits: field staff and operational staff.

Enable Your Field Staff to Deliver on Your Promise

Field workers are not just employees, but passionate partners in your nonprofit’s community service. Therefore, it’s important to engage and communicate with your workers, give them the necessary tools to excel at their jobs, and structure their everyday routine to be as efficient as possible.

These days, traditional field service software just won’t fit the bill. Mobile workforce management solutions take field service software to the next level, promoting a positive culture and helping field workers flourish through its many benefits, including:

1. Building long-term client relationships

Your nonprofit is built on client relationships, so you need a solution that helps you solidify, strengthen, and maintain strong relationships. Unlike a typical time and attendance tracking application, a mobile workforce management tool intelligently assigns schedules. This can have a profound impact on the communities you serve. 

For example, a smart mobile workforce management platform reduces your field staff’s travel time. The worker’s schedule for the day is created based on clients’ locations—clients on the north side of town have appointments grouped together, and southside clients’ appointments are grouped together, as opposed to the worker bouncing back and forth all day across town. 

Furthermore, a mobile workforce management platform matches your workers’ skillsets with client needs. As a result, long-term relationships build and grow because you’re giving clients the best possible care from the best-suited worker.

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2. Spending less time on administrative tasks and more time helping communities

Traditionally, field staff would jot down client visit details on paper and then return to the office to enter those notes into an IT system. Your workers need every minute to do what they do best—making a difference in people’s lives. Using a mobile solution means workers can skip to entering client notes directly in the system, wherever they are located in the field. 

This significantly reduces paperwork and eliminates the redundant time spent on administrative tasks, both of which also offer the organization cost savings. Plus, this integrated approach streamlines field staff communication with office administrative staff.  

3. Establishing a partnership culture 

Passion and empowerment are at the core of nonprofits. If your workers at the ground level are empowered, they’ll deliver better customer service that will help your organization grow and make a difference in even more lives. 

A mobile workforce management system acts as a 24/7 virtual assistant, available from anywhere. Field staff can access job details and client history—even personalized details not typically in mobile platforms, such as a client’s favorite song or their pet’s name. Your team will be more prepared to truly make an impact on your clients’ lives.

Help Your Operational Staff Support Your Mission

The office staff that manages operations often have a different set of challenges from field workers. They have to juggle managing part-time and full-time workers’ and volunteers’ schedules, clients cancelling appointments or having urgent appointment requests, rescheduling an ill worker’s entire day, keeping track of PTO schedules, and more. 

Mobile workforce management tools help take away the stress and headaches so your office workers can focus on higher tasks and on additional ways to support your nonprofit’s mission.

With a mobile workforce management solution, an office staff has better visibility into the workload of field workers. The transparency and real-time data availability, along with the sophisticated scheduling processes that mobile workforce management offers, allow them to serve more clients. Thanks to mobile workforce management allowing field workers to enter job notes in real-time out in the field, office staff can see exactly who is out serving which clients, who is able and best suited to take an urgent appointment, and even look up complete, real-time customer histories to answer clients’ questions. Furthermore, the platform helps to forecast volunteer and staff levels during peak times of the year for proactive resource planning. 

Nonprofit Case Studies

For both the operational and field staff, mobile workforce management makes a huge difference in how they work and helps them focus on larger goals. Let’s look at a few success stories to understand how.

American Red Cross

The American Red Cross delivers premier health and safety training to individuals and businesses in the U.S. With more than 1,200 mobile trainers delivering 60,000 courses to 530,000 individuals, this nonprofit turned to mobile workforce management for efficient scheduling. As a result, it achieved a 30% reduction in scheduling costs while also bringing down the underutilization of its instructors by 31%.

Furniture Bank

Furniture Bank collects unwanted furniture and other clutter items and delivers them to needy families in Canada. When they expanded by adding more delivery trucks, their field operations suffered—there wasn’t a reliable way to contact drivers or course correct pickup and delivery issues on time.

A mobile workforce solution enabled their schedulers to manage pickups and deliveries better, and the office to quickly schedule field workers. With a tool like this, they were able to double their community impact.

The Royal Society for the Blind (RSB)

RSB, an Australian nonprofit, helps people with vision impairment to participate independently in the community. When they had to transition to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) mandated by the Australian Government, they faced issues such as the lack of infrastructure to process claims and manage their mobile workforce as effectively as the NDIS required.

With a mobile workforce management solution, RSB reduced their scheduling time and doubled their weekly appointments per week per mobile worker. Operational efficiencies on the ground resulted in a 15% reduction in staff count.

Cosgrove Care

This Scotland-based nonprofit, Cosgrove Care, helps people with complex health needs live independently in their communities. Cosgrove’s challenge was to ensure that their staff could deliver highly personalized care consistently in any location or environment.

A mobile workforce solution helped them streamline their processes, create optimal schedules, and provide more visibility to all its stakeholders. For example, caregivers could record daily support notes and post-appointment reports on an easy-to-use mobile device. These changes led to caregivers having more time where it counts—with patients.

Empower your workers with a mobile workforce management solution

You need tools that will help your organization live out its mission. With the right scheduling and tracking systems in place, you can get the right volunteers and workers to where they’re needed, when they’re needed. Empower your organization to provide the best customer service and make a difference, with the help of a mobile workforce management solution. 

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