The Power of Systems in Response to Harvey. A Nerd Story.

I've told several colleagues about our response to Hurricane Harvey in Houston and where I've seen most peoples eyes widen is when I talk about the contact metrics. Yes, my friends are obviously nerds, but I thought there might be more data nerds out there that I don't know who would benefit from this experience.

As the rains kept coming down during Hurricane Harvey several of the organization heads that I work with in the Veteran Service Organization space inside Combined Arms wanted to contribute to the disaster recovery effort. Seeing as my organization, Lone Star Veterans Association focuses on building the community of veterans, a new unit when they leave the military, I decided we'd send out a message to check on everyone and see if anyone wanted to volunteer. I knew our client relationship management (CRM) system Nation Builder could send mass texts, but we'd never explored that. I thought, "Who responds to unknown texts?!" I was very wrong in that assumption.

We were able to restrict our database of 10,000 members and prospects to the geographic area around Houston where we had 3,600 folks that had given us their cell phone number. The initial send out was simple, here it is:

"This is LSVA, please let us know if you are in Houston will need recovery/rebuild services at your home or if you can volunteer to assist. txt STOP to leave"

In four hours we had 270 volunteers signed up and 70 people in need. That was not what I expected to happen. We have a 1% click rate on newsletters. This was a 12% response rate, 10X, what we've seen in email campaigns. My two staff were flooded in their homes. Some of the texts needed someone to call and talk to people. Some people confirmed my assumption and weren't happy that we texted them, some people were unsure who LSVA is. That last one hurt.

Realizing this was far beyond the capacity I currently had we began recruiting volunteers to stand up a call center and conduct outreach to these folks that had responded. A couple of guys threw everything out of my office into a corner of the building, and when I say everything, I mean everything. Except my white boards, you don't take away a man's white boards. That pile wouldn't get touched for weeks while we ran the call center daily until established disaster recovery organizations like Team Rubicon could move into town and running.

Our call center was only seven phone lines. It took a couple of days to find wires for two phones to connect to the wall and we never found a power cord for one phone. Eventually we had 10 or more callers and they had to use their cell phones. On average we had 5-6 callers per day. Recruiting callers was difficult as they had to be able to leave their home and get to our offices in East Downtown. Luckily another organization, Travis Manion Foundation, was working alongside us handling logistics for donation requests and offers. That relieved a lot of the stress when folks turned up needing a lot of things replaced or offering to help.

We began making 150 outbound calls a day with a 90% answer rate. That answer rate is huge in our community, but it had been preempted by the initial text blast. We soon found some people didn't want phone conversations, but text ones. However our text blast feature could only do that, text blasts en mass. Maintaining notes in the CRM was critical as volunteers might only work 1-2 shifts with us and we didn't want people impacted by the floods to have to relive those stories. Likewise I didn't want text conversations happening outside the system where we couldn't track them and make sure we fulfilled our commitments. Luckily Google Voice has a texting feature so we could have multiple volunteers texting simultaneously, then a different volunteer could pick up the conversation without losing a beat if necessary. Not ideal because the data doesn't sync to our CRM but we had access and control.

Along the way we experienced the usual highs and lows of non-profit work.

• We had someone very angry we were calling, but wanted help. Then reject the help. Then ask for it. Then ask for clothes, then literally throw the donated clothes in our volunteers face when delivered.
• There were volunteer signups who were upset that we weren't more responsive and told us to go to hell. There were volunteer signups that never were able to be assigned based on their location.
• There was the guy that had lost his wallet. Not in the flood, I think his wallet was a pre-flood bar night victim.
• There was the guy who said he'd only volunteer if we gave him Texans tickets, at least 2. He would call us 3-4 times over the next few days to see if we'd reconsidered his offer. We did not.

Those were lows, sometimes demoralizing and sometimes hilarious. I mean come on, the city is flooded and you're complaining about your wallet being missing. You can't tell me that's not funny. Try.

The highs keep you going in a non-profit where your currency isn't monetary, it's emotions, although good luck making payroll without money.

• There were hearing people tell us how grateful they were that anyone would call and check on them. Some people hadn't been to an event in years. Others couldn't remember when they'd joined and had never attended an event.
• One volunteer's first call was almost an hour on the phone with a gentleman that had lost everything he owned.
• We had one suicide intervention with an older vet that was alone and watching everything he owned literally float by him.
• We had volunteers that we were directing to houses for muck outs that might mention in passing that they too had been flooded. They felt compelled to first help others before helping themselves. There were dozens of those stories and they still give me chills to think about their selflessness. Luckily there's thousands of those stories that have come out of Harvey.

We kept in contact for days with folks that were out of their house, and seemed a bit annoyed that we were still calling. But once they had access to their house were on fire to have someone come help muck out their home. Every volunteer was briefed and coached on some basics in customer service and non-disclosure.

• Smile while you talk on the phone, they can hear it.
• No judgement
• Stay positive
• Don't over commit
• Don't keep any secrets
• Report anything distressing to staff

Initially while roads were still flooded we were able to act hyper-locally. Through geo-targeting we could visually see where on the map people in crisis were alongside where volunteers were located. In some cases it took only 2-3 minutes to find someone less than a mile away to help. We'd often connect them on a group text in Google Voice and they'd take it from there. We learned that in a rapidly developing situation like Hurricane Harvey this wasn't the time for top-down control. Once a volunteer or volunteers were on site at one home they'd find multiple homes on that street to assist before we could even reply back for their next assignment.

Once we began segmenting our contact list from that initial send out we began to response rates over 50% via text. That's when I also figured out auto-responders and response trees. How much time that could have saved us 5 days earlier? Who knows, still kicking myself for not learning the capabilities of our CRM sooner.

At one point we had excess capacity so I put the word out that we could plug any groups contact list into the process for the call center. Churches, companies, other non-profits. No problem. We had one list that was about the same size as our initial send out, 4,300 people. The difference was mission, the second list came from a group that mainly hold an annual event as opposed to the regular engagement we focus on in ours. We only saw a 2% response rate via text for the second list. That confirmed a lot of thoughts of ours as an organization about the importance of community building, as well as brand awareness. Another veteran service organization mentioned on a call that they're members wanted us to call them. They'd not dealt with us in the past, but had heard of us and trusted us calling them. We even had a publicly traded company as us to do these wellness checks with their employees in their local Houston office to coordinate muck outs and other services. None were veterans, but that wasn't the point. Most of those folks were fine, some signed up to volunteer, and a few had been devastated. The point of our organization isn't to be consumers of resources from the community as a non-profit. The point is to become leaders and resources for the community at large around us.

In the end our volunteers were the heroes, and to a lesser extent our systems that allowed us to coordinate efforts in consistent fashion. The work isn't over in Houston, but now we have a CRM that is full of notes, stories, and needs. We've been in contact with major corporations and celebrity athletes that want to help veterans. And we have a database full of details on those in need. We're actively looking to partner with other to provide our members resources and support in the months to come of this recovery effort.

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