How a Charity Can Use iPads to Change More Lives

@Furniture_Bank @bigkiteconsult Would love to hear more about what you’re doing. Other orgs could benefit. Case study, perhaps?

— Marco Campana (@marcopolis) September 12, 2014

What we’re doing is introducing iPads so we can furnish more homes and empower more lives.

In a recent blog post we highlighted how 1 pad will change 500 more families lives solely based on the time saved from ditching clipboards and paper and introducing tablets and automation.

Here’s the short version why:

Our show room guide volunteers have always been provided with clipboards to record our clients furniture selection. Every sofa, houseware box, bed, table, light, tv, mirror, frame, and other furniture item has been manually added, tracked and ultimately handed back to a Furniture Bank staff. At that point the entire ‘check out process’ must be hand transferred back into our Salesforce.com account before the delivery and checkout can be arranged.

Time Lost to Paper:

• Average wait time for client check out = 16  Minutes (2013 Median)
• Average client appointments per day = 20  Appointments per day (2014 Median)
• lost time per day  = 320 minutes lost each day (that we could use for more clients)
• lost time per week = 1600 minutes lost each month
• lost time per year = 80,000 minutes lost each year (50 working weeks)

Time lost to paper will be a thing of the past thanks to our work with BigKite Consulting – a Salesforce solution firm that has generously donated their time and expertise to get this project off the ground and iPads up and running so we can serve more clients.

We had the BigKite team in for a day of volunteering yesterday so they can experience the showroom guide experience using clipboards before we go live with iPads in the coming weeks. They’re the ones holding the iPads in the photo squished between us Furniture Bankers.