Customer Stories
Goggles for Docs helped facilitate the donation of nearly 50,000 goggles to healthcare workers on the front lines of COVID-19. Led by Jon Schaefer, the GM of Berkshire East and Catamount, hundreds of people chipped in with their time and hustle to make this happen. Among that group were more than a dozen Inntopians. We’ve been asked a few times about our involvement with the project, so we talked with some of those involved to find out how it went down.
How I Helped: Website, Donation Request Forms
“On Sunday, March 29, Trevor (our CEO) forwarded me an email from Jon Schaefer about the project. The potential of this idea instantly clicked. So I shot Jon a quick email to offer help and we jumped on the phone to chat about his vision. Immediately we saw the need to get a few things up and running as quickly as possible. Over the next 3-4 hours I built the website and helped Jon create the forms hospitals would use to request donations and the spreadsheets we’d use to track.
“Huge credit to Jon for seeing how this could work. I had my doubts about whether visitors would embrace our solution, but the initial concept worked amazingly well and really gave the project a successful launch. From there on out, my role was mainly keeping the site and forms up-to-date.”
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How I Helped: Donation Booking System
“Within the first few days of the project, it became clear that eventually we’d need a more robust, automated system. We’ve often touted our platform as being extremely flexible and this was a perfect example. We added all the hospitals who had requested goggles to a fresh Inntopia Commerce account the same way we’d add hotels to a resort’s or destination’s account. We then customized the branding, added current inventory levels at each location, and hid the credit card form so donations only required contact information.
“Instead of searching for a hotel and booking a room, donors were searching for hospitals who needed goggles and recording their donation. This all come together over a roughly 48 hour period. Our Engineering and Partner Services teams were incredible.”
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Volunteer Training and Managed Booking System
“I think people really underestimated the work behind the scenes required to make this happen. We really wanted to ensure no goggles went to waste – whether donated by an individual or a company – so every hospital was carefully vetted. When you consider that more than 1,200 hospitals requested goggles, this was a huge lift.
“There were already a few talented volunteers working nights and weekends to keep up with the demand, so as the booking platform came online, we helped streamline the fulfillment process and get everyone trained on the new system. It was amazing to see the transition of what was essentially a spreadsheet managed project to a full blown functioning ecommerce site processing thousands of goggle donations to hundreds of hospitals in need.”
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Email Communication with Donors, Volunteers, and Hospitals
“One of the big challenges Goggles for Docs faced as they grew was communication. Hundreds of people were offering to volunteer and we needed to communicate with both past and potential donors as more hospitals came online. So we set up a Goggles for Docs email account and loaded all of these email addresses as segments. Next, we developed a process to continuously communicate with new hospitals going live on the website so they could expect and prepare for incoming goggle shipments and know how to care for them.
“In terms of broader messages, everyone was extremely busy so we created an email request form other volunteers could use to ask us to get a message out. We had a team of five people on our side who got notified when a request come through so we could make sure one of us was always available to get that message pushed out to the appropriate list as quickly as possible.”
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