Helping Save the Children Finland to support a brighter future for youngsters

Executive Summary

Save the Children Finland wanted to better adapt their volunteer capacity to the demands for counselling that they receive via their NetariChat service. With BearingPoint's help, the NGO can now use data-driven insights to streamline its services and offer on-time support for young people in Finland.

Supporting young people – a priority for a healthy society

Children and young people oftentimes face challenging situations that may cause them distress. In order to help  them manage overwhelming emotions better, Save the Children Finland created, in 2004, Netari, the only national online youth club. Operating in all main online communities, Netari welcomes 13 to 20-year-old people to hang out, meet friends and chat with youth workers and reliable, trained volunteers. In 2021, over 16 000 young users received support through Netari services.

As these types of requests are time sensitive, Save the Children wanted to ensure they could align optimally the counselling demand with the volunteer capacity, thus preventing prolonged on-hold queues. The organization needed to analyze its data – concerning frequent topics, recurrent situations, or chat duration – to reduce waiting times. As good results inspire good deeds, they also wished to better leverage data that shows volunteers the positive impact they bring to the youngsters they assist.

Customizing a business intelligence dashboard to benefit young people and volunteer

Recognizing the importance of children’s wellbeing, BearingPoint offered to help Save the Children in their effort to make a positive change in youngsters’ lives. The joint team decided to add a Business Intelligence software to the existing chat tool, enabling decision-makers to use data-driven insights in their chat volunteer capacity planning. They first analyzed the data by creating a statistical demand analysis in Python and Jupyter Notebook. This revealed that NetariChat service requests fluctuated heavily across the year, while the average length of a chat being 40 minutes. They identified the drop rate as a suitable indicator for balancing demand need and supply capacity. Other KPIs were also created – such as queue-time tolerance, user and chat volunteer feedback, and goal-seeking – and integrated into Microsoft PowerBI, resulting in a comprehensive business intelligence dashboard.

Additionally, BearingPoint created an online form to reflect volunteers’ well-being, based on the emotional intensity recorded in their daily activity. This allowed the NGO to understand trends in the topics requests, while also considering the impact on the chat volunteers’ welfare.

Leveraging data-driven processes to achieve timely online emotional support

Save the Children is now able to streamline its services to meet the needs of young people optimally with the existing on-call volunteer staff capacity, based on data-driven insights. The organization benefits from consistent and detailed information regarding all interactions between youngsters and chat volunteers, such as chat length, number of contacts in a certain period, and user volumes. This enables a more data-driven process, leading to more efficiency and faster service response.

Additionally, volunteers now have a clear overview of the number of young people they have helped to achieve better emotional health, which raises their sense of fulfillment and inspire other people to join Save the Children’s mission.

The collaboration with BearingPoint has opened new ways for us to consider developing our work from an analytical perspective in the future, allowing us to handle the data collected from the chat in a more systematic and versatile way. This is especially important because children and young people have a growing need to connect with a trusted adult. Based on data analysis, we can streamline our services to best meet the number of on-call volunteer staff and the needs of young people.

Lauri Sundberg, Project Planner at Save the Children Finland

Client

Save the Children Finland is a politically and religiously independent non-governmental organization founded in 1922, which fights for children’s rights in order to immediately and permanently improve children’s lives in Finland and all over the world.