Trans charity Gendered Intelligence approached us because they were struggling to manage the quantity and variety of emails they were receiving via their web inquiry form, and it was starting to cause issues of fatigue and stress in their overstretched volunteers. We worked with them to explore their own ideas for solutions, and a range of other potential bespoke and off-the-shelf solutions.

Through discussion and research, we realised that the heart of the issue was their struggle to get emails into the right inbox. People contact GI about a wide range of issues, and different teams at the organisation deal with different areas. Emails were getting bounced around internally, leading to delayed responses and additional workload for those tasked with directing them to the right places.

We discussed several potential solutions to this issue, and ultimately landed on a bespoke ‘wizard’ (which we call ‘Enquiry Witch’) for the site which would help guide people to the correct inbox. GI provided us with an anonymised collection of over 400 of these ‘initial contact’ emails which we analysed to establish the full range of potential themes that people contact them about. Using this analysis, we built our bespoke ‘enquiry witch’ tool, which helps guide potential contacts to the correct inbox, or in many cases, to find the answers to their questions on other areas of the GI website, or other places on the web.

Since implementation, Gendered Intelligence have noticed a marked improvement in their ability to manage these first contacts.