On September 1st, 2019 Hurricane Dorian made landfall in Elbow Cay, Bahamas.
For the next two days, the storm hovered over several small islands in the Bahamas costing thousands of people their lives and leaving a trail of unprecedented damage in its path.
Sol Relief, an aviation-based disaster relief nonprofit operating out of St. Petersburg, FL, immediately launched a full-scale relief effort. As part of its disaster relief effort, the nonprofit launched a PR & social media campaign to raise funds, collect donations, and garner community support.
The response to the campaign was overwhelming.
The small nonprofit was suddenly receiving hundreds of phone calls per day, while also trying to effectively organize its response and focus on its mission.
Sol Relief administrators quickly realized they could not keep up with handling the influx of calls.
Many callers were complaining that Sol Relief’s line was either ringing indefinitely or returning a busy tone even after callers had attempted to call several times. The nonprofit’s management knew they had to find a way to address this issue quickly because being unavailable to a community of people that were offering support was not acceptable and they were missing important phone calls that could have really made a difference.
Sol Relief reached out to AnswerFirst about utilizing AnswerFirst’s 24/7 Live Answering Services to handle inbound calls.
AnswerFirst was able to prioritize setting up Sol Relief’s account and began answering calls within 24 hours.
AnswerFirst operators were able to effectively answer callers’ questions about donations and volunteer opportunities while also taking monetary donations from callers and routing critical calls to appropriate Sol Relief team members. This level of account customization took a huge burden off of Sol Relief’s small workforce and allowed the organization to focus on their mission – helping survivors of Hurricane Dorian get the help they needed.
AnswerFirst is proud to have partnered with Sol Relief during this response and we look forward to working with Sol Relief on future disaster relief efforts.
