Aggregating Online Help Offers for Support Helplines

1. Inspiration

As people feel the urge to contribute in the fight against this crisis, we see a surge of activities within local communities themself, as well as a surge of online help offers on classified ad sites or chat groups. At the same time, most help-seeking people in the risk groups do not have access to the platforms on which the help is being offered, and resort to calling helplines provided from their local government, which are getting increasingly overloaded, and might not be able to offer help with the daily tasks where it's most needed. We aim to bridge the gap between these two groups with a crowd-sourced solution.

2. What is the problem?

People affected by the crisis are:

• Unable to access smartphones etc
• Unable to find information online
• Unable to contact volunteers
• Unable to reach official governmental hotlines
• Feeling helpless and dependant on other people while self-isolating

Organisations working on crisis management are:

• unable to support a reliable hotline due to lack of personnel
• facing too big of a demand for social help
• facing too big of a demand for services and basic goods
• facing the Increasing risk of infection due to people not adhering to the WHO guidelines while offering neighbourhood help

3. What it does

Our solution is to create a crowd-sourced support hotline and information aggregation. Apart from offering the information on the current situation, we would also offer to act as a link between the help-seekers and help-givers. Our goal is to create an aggregation of different ads of local help, and help those who need them to find it, without the need to use the individual sites the ads were originally posted on. To achieve that, we need the help of local governments to distribute the information about our service to the people from risk groups, preferably by mail. Our hotline and aggregation would be run by volunteers- those who, while unable to offer help to their neighbourhood, want to be involved in the fight against the crisis.

4. How to build it:

We first need to find a way to reliably reach everyone within the risk group. This is the part that cannot be done just by distributing information in the usual news outlets alone. While radio and television can be a good instrument to reach the elderly population there recently has been a growing distrust in them as well. To manage this crisis it is instrumental that everyone is not only informed but also realizes the gravity of the situation. It is therefore important to inform and provide help even to the least connected members of our society. To reach everyone we think it is best use the same system that is already in place to inform ppl about upcoming elections. As it is somewhat expensive to mail every citizen the cost and the time required to do so can be reduced by only sending out one letter per household. If necessary, only ppl in the risk grp can be targeted at first too.

The second challenge is to set up a hotline that isn't only run by a few government employees but rather to provide a platform that enables volunteers to take calls instead. To achieve this volunteers should sign up by leaving information about the languages they speak, at what time they would be available and how often they are willing to participate. Incoming calls on the helpline could then be redirected to matching volunteers, whereby multiple volunteers can be called at the same time to ensure a fast response. For a person calling the helpline no other information then their language is needed. That information can already be taken by providing different numbers for different languages. The software needed to take calls centrally and then redistribute them to remote working station is already available and in use within call centers. An existing solution could, therefore, be bought and fitted to this need.

The last challenge now is to find the needed help for people calling the helpline. As the helpline should be open to anyone for any need in this crisis some callers might be looking for emotional support or companionship which might already be solved by the first volunteer. If not we suggest that each volunteer takes notes on what a caller needs, researches it on their own time and then gets back to the caller. This method makes it possible to put less strain on individual volunteers and makes it possible to share the tasks with other volunteers in particularly hard cases. Should no matching help offer be available online already, the volunteers could also make an advert looking for helpers locally. We believe that it would be a good idea to have the phone line support always separate from the research part. This for one enables more volunteers to contribute, but it also enables volunteers to become more specialized at the task they choose, and to choose a task they are comfortable with in the first place. We also think that it would be helpful to match a caller to the same person for not only one call, but for a given period of time if possible.

A system like this needs a lot of volunteers and could never be run by paid employees. We think that currently there are many ppl that would want to volunteers in a way like we suggest, as being a volunteer doesn't mean manning a phone hotline for 8 hours a day, but rather means helping one person with 2-3 calls a week, or even lass if the volunteers specify it at signup. If it turns out that there are too few volunteers or the situation changes in a few weeks, the system can always be adjusted to provide help only within one call. To do that we would need to build a centralized database of all online help offers. Such a database could be built by volunteers or automatically crawled. But we don't think that that is currently the best option.

5. Challenges: Why isn’t an app enough?

Social media are not available to:

• People with some disabilities

• People without technical skills (ie. the elderly)

• People without access to internet, phone, phone number/contract

The apps are unreliable due to:

• Few users spread across multiple platforms

• Not enough/lack off moderating

• Lack of consequences for people misusing them, spreading false information, etc.

6. What's next for our project?

During the crisis:

• In the case of a success of our project on a local scale, we plan to extend it beyond the state borders.

• We hope to involve people of different backgrounds, both cultural and linguistic, to reach out to a diverse group of people in need of help.

• While we wish to provide help on a local level, we hope that the volunteers working with the phone line and aggregation will not be limited to their own place of living.

After/outside of the crisis:

• We think the idea of this project can be also used outside of the current situation.

• Most of the government-organised hotlines meet the same problems: not enough people to meet the demand for help.

• A crowd-sourced project like this could also be used in order to organise help for people struggling with mental issues, domestic abuse, or other common problems- during and after the pandemic.

7. What we learned?

We believe that government involvement is absolutely necessary to contact people within the risk group. Finding volunteers, on the other hand, does need a strong government involvement and is best done beyond borders anyway.

We also believe that this project can benefit anyone involved in it. Not only the people seeking help and offering it, but also our volunteers, who might have felt helpless before. The project will also benefit various non-profit organisations and charities, offering them a place to reach people in need, but also taking away some of the pressure to help everyone. Finally, various governmental organisations can benefit from a crowd-sourced organisation of neighbourhood help.