Red Frogs is a charity organisation that provides a positive peer presence in alcohol-fuelled environments where young people gather. They educate young people on safe partying behaviours; and promote alcohol-free and/or diversionary activities that engage young people in these environments.
At each event the volunteers for Red Frogs need to undertake an extensive set of checks to ensure they are qualified to act in their roles. To improve the process and provide a better user experience Automatum in Cooperation with Q1 designs designed and developed a solution that Ref Frog uses across their organisation for all their volunteers.
Automatum platform provided Red Frogs with:
- Easy to deploy repeatable infrastructure
- Secure infrastructure to protect personally identifiable information (PII) data that is stored on the platform
- Flexible platform that allows for expansion and is fault tolerant
What challenges led to desire to change?
- Creating reports for the organisation could take weeks to months to generate.
- Paper-based organisation
- Human error when entering data
- Easier volunteering process
Why did the Customer reach out?
- Connections and affiliation with Griffith University
- Client had affiliation with the Volunteer Rescue Association
Was there a previous solution?
- Paper-based form record collection
- Various amounts of Excel Spreadsheets
- Attempts to bring other off-the-shelf solutions into their existing workflow
If so, why was it inadequate?
- Prone to many errors
- Data being inputted incorrectly
- Human error
- Reports couldn't be generated in a suitable time frame
- Validation of volunteer experience and documentation took too long
What solution(s) was proposed?
- Responsive web application
- Centralised database
- Cloud-based storage
- Australia based solution
How was Automatum engaged?
- Engaged via an existing project through Griffith University. Automatum Platform was used to deploy the infrastructure on AWS.
- Security Confidence
What were the key technologies used for this solution?
- IOS web-view
- Autoscaled EC2 instances for hosting
- S3 for storage storage
- Application Load Balancers
- Relational Database Service (RDS) for data storage layer
Were there any unusual or unique aspects to this project?
- Volunteer Rescue Association is mainly run by a generation that were not tech-savvy
- iPads had already been pre-purchased
- Data and storage to be based in Australia
Who is using the solution or affected by it?
- Volunteer workers
- Managers
- Team leaders
- Team supervisors
How well does the solution resolve the customer's challenge(s)?
- Reports that took weeks to months could be generated in real- time or in a matter of seconds
- Quality of data improved as form validation was implemented
- Data was simpler to record for volunteer events
- Solution uptime and scalability improved dramatically especially at times of emergency
What are the Business benefits? (Measurable!)
Cost Savings
- Reduced amount of time to generate reports
- Reduce the amount of time for them to enlist volunteers
Agility
- Key person risk was removed as the reports were being generated on demand instead of physically waiting for someone to build the reports
Reliability
- Data was always available in the form of dashboards and reports
End user satisfaction
- Quicker to submit details for an incident
- Data was readily available
- Team performance improved
