The Result
Adopting Tonkean helped Shopping Angels address the biggest operational issue in the organization. Instead of asking state coordinators to spend their time manually assessing which volunteers were in the closest proximity to each other and contacting them one-by-one, they automated that process, giving state coordinators more time to fix issues and interact directly with shoppers in need.
“Tonkean provides the most value to us because none of us at Shopping Angels are professional technologists,” said Collins. “Certainly a few of us understand this workflow, but what if one of our less technical coordinators in another state wants to do things differently? What if they prefer a different template or process for communicating with volunteers in that region? Instead of needing to know some sort of Python code, or learn a new platform, they can use the tools they know already like Slack and Gmail to communicate, and we can just click and drag throughout the Tonkean platform to make that happen. And we can change things in seconds rather than hours. Doing all that work in Tonkean is saving a ton of time for the organization.”
In the near future, the Shopping Angels team plans to bring Tonkean to every state in the country and some international locations, integrating further with more Trello boards and Google’s API. That will allow them to, for example, send out more emails personalized by every state. Improving this process matters because even after a vaccine is introduced and coronavirus dissipates, there will still be demand for the services that Shopping Angels has built.
“There are always going to be people that are mobility-challenged. And that population is only increasing as our overall average age increases as a country,” said Collins. “I see Tonkean being able to continue helping us make those connections, matching people up and keeping this process running smoothly as we scale it up.”