Our 80-year partnership with the Good Friday Appeal

Challenge

Scaling a national phone room within 24 hours

The Telstra-powered GFA phone room operates as a one-day contact centre, in which dedicated volunteers handle calls from generous Australians eager to donate. This advanced phone room connects donors nationwide with our GFA volunteers, ensuring thousands of donations are collected annually.

“The phone room is vital for our operations as thousands of people call us on the day to donate, it’s a popular tradition as part of the Good Friday Appeal. We needed a solution in place so that donors have a personal interaction where they can talk to someone before donating, another alternative to donating online,” says Rebecca.

Telstra Genesys Cloud provides a cost-effective and simple to manage solution by eliminating the need for investment in data and voice networks, enabling donors to have a personal interaction.

“It's a contact centre solution based application which allows organisations to provide their contact centres with the technology that gives their users and their customers a great experience in terms of being able to have a choice of how they interact, whether it's through voice, whether it's through email and chat and even chat bots and AI technologies, which is something that is emerging today and it's all available on this platform,” says Frank Rivellese, Telstra Contact Centre Sales Solution Specialist.

All voice calls are delivered via Telstra’s SIP network and PSTN, to either a softphone (WebRTC) or physical phone. The agent desktop is web-based and accessed via the public internet. This means the solution is fast to deploy with no dedicated network or complex data and voice design required. 

Solution

Smart, scalable, seamless support

Telstra’s dedicated contact centre practice team, who have delivered over 200 Genesys Cloud solutions, deployed the solution at the Good Friday Appeal site and Telstra’s partner, Genesys, donated the licenses for use during the event.

“We needed a contact centre solution that was simple to use, quick to deploy and easy to scale,” said Rebecca.

The solution was configured remotely, which provided the flexibility. The intuitive and user-friendly interface of the solution helped the phone room volunteers to quickly adopt the Contact Centre technology and ensured they could log in and start answering the calls within minutes. The benefit of the user-friendly UI is that volunteers can receive some fast-track training prior to the event and then be up and running within minutes.

“It’s fabulous because no infrastructure is required. Everyone’s got a laptop and all they need is the internet and it works,” said Rebecca.

Key features of the GFA phone room:

• an autoscaling solution to handle high call volumes in short time period
• best-in-class solution with Human Centric interface enabling over 250 volunteers to handle voice interactions each year
• enterprise grade resilient network infrastructure
• online real-time reporting dashboards of the phone centre metrics enable operation decisions to be handled in real time internet access within the Media Centre.

Approach

Comprehensive performance monitoring 

The performance monitoring features of Genesys Cloud provided complete visibility of the phone room including the number of calls answered, queued and on-hold.

The live supervisory dashboard plays a key role in maintaining the right number of volunteers at any one time, which helps streamline call traffic and coordinate volunteer breaks. And real-time data visibility enables supervisors to manage calls more efficiently, resulting in a noticeable drop in abandoned calls and faster connection times.

“We're losing less calls each year because of the Genesis Cloud technology. The real time reporting's important for us. On the day we can see exactly how many calls have come in and where the donations are at,” shared Rebecca.

And with access to smart technology like Genesys Cloud, Telstra can offer the GFA more options for interaction including contactless payment and engaging potential donors through social channels.

Impact

Technology that enabled community generosity

The Good Friday Appeal phone room has been a remarkable success this year, handling almost 6,400 calls and collecting over $1 million in donations. Regional Victoria alone raised an impressive $5.4 million, while online fundraising pages contributed $3.2 million through 1,800 pages. On Good Friday, the website saw over half a million visits, and online donations exceeded $5 million.

These generous donations are funding lifesaving care at The Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, covering areas such as research, education and training, technology, and patient and family-centred care. Additionally, $3 million is being allocated to health services across regional Victoria to improve children's health outcomes.

Since its inception in 1931, the Good Friday Appeal has raised over $492 million and this year, the Channel 7 telethon expanded from an 8-hour event to a 14-hour marathon, running from 10am to midnight.

The success of the Good Friday Appeal phone room is a testament to the power of community and the dedication of volunteers, ensuring that vital funds are raised to support sick children and their families.

“As part of our sponsorship, the Telstra team implement a contact centre solution as well as the networking required to support a successful event on the day. So, leveraging the technology that we provide and also the skill of our people, it really enables us to support the significant amount of money that the Good Friday Appeal raised for the community and it's something we're really proud of,” says Nadine Russell, Local Government, Corporate and Community Services - Telstra.

“The amount of work and support that Telstra provides leading up to the event, on the day and post event is phenomenal,” said Rebecca.

Telstra is honoured that the GFA has trusted in us to partner with them for the past 80 years and we look forward to continuing to innovate, collaborate, and create a positive impact together for many more years to come.