Blog

Crisis Response Podcast Episode 3 Communications Technology for Crisis Call Centers with Twilio

Episode #3: Communications Technology for Crisis Call Centers | Twilio.org

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Amazon Music


Episode Transcript

*This transcript was compiled using automated software — spelling and punctuation errors are possible.

Jason: Hello Devin. Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast. It’s so nice to have you here.

Devin: Thanks so much, Jason. I’m so happy to be here!

Jason: Well, this is a real pleasure, because we at Trek Medics have been big fans of Twilio since our own inception, as we depend on Twilio for so much of our communications. For our listeners who are not familiar with Twilio, could you give a little background overview of the company, what you do, and what services you provide?

Devin: Yes, absolutely. So Twilio is probably most well-known for the role that we play with text messages, but we go a little bit beyond that. Our services are Web APIs, which are essentially programmable communication tools that allow for you to leverage a variety of communications channels to connect with your donors, your volunteers, your constituents, whatever that end person might be for you.

So that could mean sending text messages, making phone calls, emails, WhatsApp, I mean if you need the channel then we can pretty much connect you to it and connect you to your constituents.

The example I love to give at its most basic but helpful to paint a picture, is when you call an Uber and a random number texts you to let you know that they’re on their way. That under the hood is Twilio at work.

Jason: Right. That’s the exact example I give to people as well. But like you said, you are more than just text messages, you also do contact centers, call centers, could you share a couple more examples of everyday times people might come across your services without knowing it’s Twilio at work?

Devin: Really anything that’s going to be text based or when you call in is likely us. You know, if you call into a call center and they already know who you are, that’s an API at work to recognize you and to help provide some clarity as to the background of why you’re calling. That’s likely our call center at work.

We like to provide, it’s not necessarily out of the box, our contact center solution, but it provides some Lego blocks to allow folks to build the solution that’s going to make more sense to them. We’ve developed some tools around security, two-factor authentication is another great example of when you are almost always using Twilio, you get that text message with a secret code to verify who you are so that you can access your personal information.

And then another sweet spot for us has become the concept of chat bots. So, if you interact with maybe a vaccine hesitancy bot, you know, we do our best to make sure that it feels like you’re talking to someone, but secrets out, most of the time you are not, it’s a bot, at least until it’s escalated to an actual human being.

Overall, we just try to do our best to provide these tools that allow nonprofits and businesses to communicate with you quickly and then get you escalated to the right person.

Jason: So we use Twilio for their SMS for push notifications. In Haiti, the MOED program that we’ve been supporting for years uses your flex system to accept calls, and then uses text messages and push notifications to dispatch responders. You’ve got all these solutions, but another interesting aspect of Twilio is the whole social impact side of things. Twilio.org, and in particular the crisis response arm. You’re the program manager for crisis response, could you share more about Twilio’s involvement in that field and how they got involved into it and where you are at with it?

Devin: Yes, absolutely. So, to explain how twilio.org differs from twilio.com is essentially we are the social impact arm of Twilio. Still part of the company, not a separate entity, but we like to make that separation clear about the purpose of our work. Ultimately, we follow the 1% model, so we pledge 1% of our product people and equity.

And that’s the lens through which we view crisis response amongst some other major pillars of our work here at Twilio. So we have three broader focus areas of crisis response, which has evolved, and I’ll talk a little bit about that journey. We’ve got climate action, and then what we consider a category to kind of be long term wellbeing which is where we are excited to focus on global health equity which has obviously been made a clear gap after the pandemic.

So within these three pillars I see myself under one that we’ve just recently relabeled as humanitarian assistance. But really all three of them in my mind are crisis response prevention and recovery in a nutshell.

This focus in crisis has been something that we’ve held onto for a while. And really there’s been, you know, new variations of what that means for us. But it became clear very early on to Twilio that a communications tool can mean the difference between life and death and getting help in the exact moment that you need it, so that became almost a no-brainer for Twilio and for Aaron our Chief Social Impact Officer.

We launched a crisis prevention and response initiative and at one point we wanted to be part of all of it, right? We had five different areas that we were going to focus all of our efforts under the one umbrella of crisis, and that was sexual assault, abuse, suicide prevention, and mental health kind of bundled in one substance abuse and natural disasters.

And of course natural disasters is where we crossed paths with you all at Trek Medics.

Jason: That’s exactly right. We were actually recipients of one of the first Twilio.org impact fund grants, which was tied into our work in hurricane relief but also like you were saying in Global Health Equity.

So you started with five categories like that and how did it go? Because that’s a lot going on in those categories to handle all of that.

Devin: It’s a meaty bunch of categories and I would say we did find success and some really wonderful partners in nonprofit organizations within those categories. At one point we developed a really cool crisis response technology network to call upon customers using Twilio in some capacity, small or large, across the subset of five to ask them to help inform the direction that we should go in. And we just kind of took some time to look at what the data said and where we were shining and where we were making an impact. And while we were making some really great impact across a lot of these categories, we felt like if you’re focused on so much, are you making the depth of impact that we are striving for as a social impact organization who has so many resources to pull on.

Beacon Grayscale Lantern Logotype IMG

Join the thousands of responders using Beacon worldwide.

Beacon Mobile App

So we decided at the beginning of this year and a lot of this was probably also impacted by Covid and starting to understand what an active role in global health equity that we could play that we said maybe we need to come back to the drawing board and revisit if it’s better to be a little bit everywhere or really be in one place even more. So we had a whole incredible year with our team, a lot of workshops, digging into all of the metrics that matter to us to try and figure out where we should take it, what direction made the most sense for us. It was a really cool journey, looking at both revenue – which we can’t ignore – we looked at impact which is what drives us. We like to say we’re impact led and revenue fueled, which is tricky at times to find a home for both and not deprioritize impact. First, we looked at what our product set was, were their limitations to those products, were we US centric? We knew we wanted to be more globally focused and we kind of started to pick apart those categories.

We built a rubric and criteria, and our team really had a field day deciding the direction we should go in, and we are excited to say that humanitarian assistance was the winner.

Jason: Absolutely. Now, you’ve narrowed it down, though clearly you have users that are still doing all the other things, the other four categories, but you’ve put your focus now on humanitarian assistance and what does that translate to in practical terms? What kind of events have you been involved in? Obviously Covid is a big one, if you could talk a little bit about that response, and also beyond that what other types of incidents or emergencies you’ve been involved in recently?

Devin: What we first kind of realized when we looked at those five categories is that there were other ways to serve, some things likely could be put in multiple categories together, and I think in a good way. So we thought something like, how do we serve personal crisis intervention, but within disasters.

And just really not just responding right when a disaster happens. I think our sweet spot as we learned through Covid was how we kind of keep the world turning when no one can be in front of each other. And then we started to think about what happens when the disasters gone, and the initial donations stop coming because in the eyes of media and the world they stop looking.

So we really wanted to think about, okay, how do we continue to offer support and how can our technology be used? And I’m definitely happy to share some examples of how we kind of move through this journey and try to impact global health equity.

The pandemic was so big and there’s so much we learned from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine distribution that it became a major initiative of ours outside of crisis response, and we gave it its own home because we realized that once the pandemic is one, there will be another version of it. And there are still vaccines that much of the world do not have access to or have their own hesitancy around. So we wanted to make sure that that was going to live in its own place.

With regards to humanitarian assistance, while we were going through the exercise of determining the right fit for crisis response this year, obviously the war in Ukraine kicked off right as I stepped into the role of program manager of crisis response. Now thankfully, I stepped into a role that my colleague had been in and built out a wonderful playbook for. So we began to respond the way we always do. We have a whole disaster response playbook. So we think, again, through different lenses of severity and relevance, how do we leverage product, people, and equity to respond in times of crisis. And ultimately, Ukraine became another opportunity for us to see just how much impact we could have with the right partners. So that was both in the non-profit sense and the for-profit sense. Some examples you know, we’re really proud of some partnerships with the IFRC, Norwegian Refugee Council, and others that came out of that.

Some really neat examples were, you know typically when you respond in times of disaster, a nonprofit will get on the ground as quickly as they can to perform a needs assessment, and that needs assessment is to understand how many people are there, what resources they need, take that back to your team to understand what you want to bring to the table, right. How much food, water, cash, you know, where do you need it? And ultimately that wasn’t allowed on the ground in Ukraine where many refugees were coming through, there were some martial law issues, so it needed to be digitized. Throw in safety concerns with just walking up to someone and sharing too much information.

So thinking through the more vulnerable populations that are moving quickly and have been displaced. We think about how we get information to them safely to allow them to make the best decisions for their safety as well. So we turned to WhatsApp, using our technology in partnership with NRC to build a needs assessment tool. And it’s a really neat opportunity if you reach out in your region you can share your location on WhatsApp, that’s what makes it such a cool channel to be tapped on where it’s available. And from that you can share, “I am here, this is my family size, this is what we need.” And then that information is fed back to the organization and the response can either be immediate sharing with you the nearest resources, shelter as a major example, or it can allow teams to follow up with a phone call so that you don’t have to worry about spending any money. Which, this is a concern we think of too when you think of some channels, but they reach out to you, and they share resources and in some instances they share a QR code to gain or give you access to cash. And so cash programming kind of became the next wave of an example in this major crisis as it unfolded in Ukraine, that wow, these are two really impactful use cases that we can help bring function to. So that was really the beginning of our direction, a lot was led by this big event happening this year.

Join the thousands of responders using Beacon worldwide.

Jason: Absolutely. I’m sure you are learning all sorts of stuff from this. Like, you mentioned Ukraine, which isn’t in the EU, but you go right across the border to Poland and now you are in the EU, which changes all the things you need to be aware of in all these different countries.

So how does Twilio handle all the different regulations of all these countries. For all intents and purposes they each have their own set of rules, they’re very hard to follow, especially when you are a company that’s trying to scale across many countries. What does Twilio do about this regulatory environment?

Devin: I’m not always the expert when it comes to these categories, but that’s why we have so many subject matter experts internally at Twilio, you know, compliance is incredibly important to us. We take it very seriously at Twilio to make sure that we are compliant with messaging, and so we have a lot of experts depending on the area in which you’re considering doing business, that our technical team will help you build it, and compliance will absolutely share with you the implications you need to consider with regards to data protection, security, etc.

Jason: I like to say that as a private citizen, I would prefer to live in Europe, but as a business owner, I would prefer to be in the United States. These regulations are necessary, but they are so difficult sometimes to follow, so it’s really great to hear Twilio helps you out along the way.

Can you anticipate other types of crisis and disasters that Twilio is well prepared to respond to if and when they happen?

Devin: Our strategy now is certainly not limited to major wars, that is a unique and nuanced situation that allowed us to consider how we serve crisis from a plethora of angles, handling connectivity. That is of course key to how we work, right? Relationships with local carriers.

Checking my dashboard here, we’ve monitored pretty actively about 18 crisis this year. It could be wildfires which is another role that we play, we’ve just activated an awareness campaign within Twilio for the Horn of Africa drought, which is an interesting one because it doesn’t have a catalyst quite like other disasters do and thus it doesn’t necessarily rise to the attention of media in quite the same way, but it, you know, is climate induced.

Crisis tend to be where we have found an opportunity to respond a little bit more, so with Hurricane Ian with the flooding in Pakistan, that’s another example of a place we’ve activated.

But again, activation may not necessarily mean the express use of Twilio in the moment, it could mean we, via our people, which means we encourage our employees to volunteer through crisis response partners when it’s safe, or it means giving campaigns, so we’ve had a lot of people activations. And then of course we do have a humanitarian assistance grant cohort, so we try and leave some funding for reactive response.

Jason: That all makes a lot of sense. So stepping back a second, when Trek Medics first got involved with Twilio, we do emergency or crisis response, that’s our sector, and when we first got involved we talked with you about flex, which is the cloud-based call center platform that makes it very easy for groups to set up a number that you can call in and then have that handled through dispatchers or agents or whatever label you’d want to give those individuals.

From our perspective there are two sides to emergency communications, there’s how the public calls for help, which we call intake, and then there’s how you coordinate the response to that request for assistance, which is what we call dispatch. So we’ve always been focused on the second part, dispatch, with the assumption that most of the people that we were targeting already had the call intake set up, but as you are aware, that’s not always the case. There are actually a lot of groups that are trying to get set up and they need both sides, they need the call intake, and they need the dispatch, so that’s when we started looking at Flex and got to see a quick demo at a conference in 2019 and I was like, “holy cow, this is the perfect solution for on the fly or even long-term emergency call centers.”

From there we ended up using it in Malawi to set up their first national emergency call center. And I was talking at that conference with one of your product managers and other folks from Twilio and said, “you know, this should be in every 911 Call Center across the United States.” And while they agreed, they said they wouldn’t be getting involved in that anytime soon. Now, I imagine that is because of all the regulatory issues and because of the legacy technologies that these places are using. But now there’s 988 and I’m wondering if Twilio has any involvement there with the rollout of the 988 lines across the country?

Devin: It’s interesting you bring that up and one major reason, as I said, when we were thinking about the direction that we wanted to take crisis response, if we decided to focus on one criteria that we needed to look at our technology’s strengths and weaknesses.

And at the time we were doing that, a major limitation of flex was becoming HIPAA compliant. We had found tremendous success with partners like the Trevor Project or the Child Helpline International or even a partnership with Drug Free Kids where we played the role of an anonymous hotline where you can call in and get the help that you need without ever saying who you are. Flex was an amazing fit with those.

But ultimately becoming HIPAA compliant in the back half of this year changed things. In that moment as 988 began to more formally roll out, we knew we really wanted to play a major role but had to acknowledge the limitations that were there because we can’t of course promise things that don’t exist just yet.

Some of the organizations I previously mentioned are connected to 988, because ultimately 988 is meant to be a call center that learns a little bit about you and connects you with the nearest resource because ultimately, if it’s a mental health emergency, someone being able to come intervene is a possibility that might happen.

So we don’t play as large a role as we once envisioned and dreamed, but Flex is still the choice for the contact center, or you know, kind of the emergency hall line solution that might receive a warm transfer from 988. And that is the role we are playing at this point, but we always hope for more opportunities to be involved in such an amazing resource as it takes off, and hopefully can help the local infrastructures be ready to take on the volume of calls that I think 988 unleashed.

Jason: Absolutely. You know, one of the groups that we’re focused on here in general are these community-based crisis response groups. Of course in the lower income countries it’s more the traditional emergency medical services, ambulance providers, fire departments. But in the higher income countries where they generally speaking have a 911 like infrastructure in place, we get more involved with the community response groups.

So let’s say that there is a community response group or a crisis response group, whichever you’d like to call it. Let’s say they have an idea and need to set up a hotline, they need to set up some way to send rapid communications. They don’t have the technical expertise to do it, but they’ve got an idea of what they want to do. How would you recommend to them getting in touch, how do they interact or engage with Twilio?

Devin: So we have on our website a spot dedicated to supporting people in crisis that is meant to be a contact page, and I promise it isn’t a black hole. Our team is small, but we really encourage folks interested in any sort of crisis response or disaster response, we really want to hear from you.

So there are two ways to do it. If you want to just be able to sign right in and figure this out on your own, we can be that tool for that particular cohort, which is someone a little more tech savvy and developer heavy.

If you are not that though, reach out because we have a couple of avenues to ensure that folks get the support they need. You know we work closely with a partner network and as my role within crisis response and humanitarian assistance, I’m always on the lookout for systems integrators and those tech partners who will help you implement the technology and in times of crisis or in the name of crisis, we’ll do so at more of a pro bono style.

You can also always reach out to me personally, on LinkedIn, or via email.

We actually have a whole line of grants as well that we call digital innovation grants. A type of grant that is open to more organizations than just crisis, but the idea is we know we need technology, we really want to get there, but we need a little help financially and otherwise to make it happen. And those grants aren’t Twilio specific, we really remain agnostic when it comes to a grant like that.

So all that to say, twilio.com/crisisresponse is a place that you can reach out and we can certainly help make sure that you’ve got the technology you need. It might be as basic as SMS or chatbot, a phone call, whatever it needs to be we’ve got connectivity in a whole lot of places, and we are not above finding another partner to fill a gap if need be.

Jason: It’s interesting you say that because that is exactly what happened with us in Malawi was Twilio didn’t have local phone numbers, so we were able to work with Twilio and local telecom providers to link them up and the whole bring your own carrier model really worked well for us for that project.

Beacon Grayscale Lantern Logotype IMG

Join the thousands of responders using Beacon worldwide.

Beacon Mobile App

Let’s say that an organization has this whole idea on what they need to manage their communications, but they don’t have developers, but it sounds like they may be able to find some through your partner network, but their big concern is cost. With a small organization cost is always going to be a big concern. How does Twilio manage that?

Devin: We do this in a couple ways. Most important is the model we use is called a consumption model, meaning you only pay for what you use, so that comes down to the number of texts that you send, number of voice minutes, etc., so you don’t have to commit to being charged for more than what you actually use.

And for nonprofits and especially those in crisis response, that’s a really helpful model because of the really spiky nature of what they are doing.

On top of that, we offer discounts to nonprofits, a standard 25% discount across the board in every product across our product set. Sometimes it’s a little more. But more importantly, the team is dedicated to making it work financially, so then on top of that we’ve always offer a $500 credit – which is the equivalent of about 80,000 US text messages – so oftentimes most nonprofits will sign up for the $500 credit and that is all they will ever need for quite a while before they need anything else.

Of course it all depends on where, what channel, do you want SMS or voice, what country your phone number is going to be based in, and if we need to pull in another carrier to make it happen. A lot of factors influence the price.

But that’s essentially the model that we have found a lot of success with. Not having to commit to a monthly rate, because let’s be real, the first time you pilot something you have no idea what you’ll be doing, and even if you did you don’t want to commit to ever having to spend a certain amount of money regardless of use.

Jason: Fantastic, that makes a lot of sense.

Devin: And I’ll add one more thought. We also have a product credit fund. So if something happens and you need a little financial bridge, if you’ve come up with an innovative idea and you’re dying to get started if you just had a little help to demonstrate your success, or if what you’re doing is so successful that with a little help you could scale beyond to another country or another level, whatever that may look like. We do off product credit as a one-time bump of thank you for the great work that you do. We’re so proud of just being able to be a part of it. So that’s something you can always ask your Twilio.org specialist about to see if you fall under one of those three categories and if we can lend a supportive hand on a temporary basis.

Jason: That’s great to know. Like you said, especially when you’re talking about disaster response, it’s big spikes, right? There’s huge activity and then you won’t hear anything for a while. We see this with hurricane response groups, search and rescue teams and whatnot. In August, September, October, November they are on call and can be hugely busy, and then you don’t hear anything from them for the rest of the year. But then when they come back to you the next you they expect the solution to be ready and the resiliency to be there so that can get up and running again without any problems.

So if you could just share with us, you’ve mentioned Norwegian Refugee Council, International Federation of the Red Cross, Red Crescent, IRC, these are massive global non-governmental organizations with storied histories and huge reach. Can you think of any maybe smaller organizations that you’ve been working with recently on a more local level that have benefited from Twilio?

Devin: Yes, I know those are some big names and it’s tough to ignore the big guys that can get in the door quickly in some of the senses.

One partnership, and this might still be a big name, one partnership that we’ve just taken to a new level with this humanitarian assistance focus whose work, at least with Twilio, is still growing and started a little bit smaller was World Central Kitchen. They leveraged Twilio in a really cool text to order way, which is a smaller subset of the incredible work that they do, not just when they helicopter in and build a kitchen out of nowhere and serve thousands of meals overnight. But, in some of the smaller disasters that you can think of, like the Highland Park shooting being an example, they actually go on the ground in much smaller use cases to provide meals to those who are in need. And that is a text to order service for pickup and you get to order meals and it’s just one less thing you must think about when the only thing you can think about is how you’re going to get through the next day. So even though they’re a huge brand, I love the little bit more grassroots approach to using Twilio that they take.

And we’re excited to see how that might be able to scale to more of a disaster level, but that is one of my favorite stories.

Jason: On that note, we’ve been talking about non-private organizations, non-governmental organizations, but I’m wondering about, you know, especially in this day and age in the United States, crisis response is on the tip of every city manager’s tongue, right? And municipalities are getting much more involved in this diversification of their crisis response systems. Can you think of any examples offhand of when you’ve been working with municipalities whether they’re sending out mass messages to everybody in town or they’re working with local groups, do you have any examples like that offhand?

Devin: Yes, so we actually have two different use cases of Flex that came up on more of a city basis. One in response to Covid and not being able to offer their services live anymore, that was actually 311 in the city of Pittsburgh. They were able to stand up Flex to allow all of their workers to continue to meet their needs for the community while at home, which is a little bit more unique.

And then another example is actually Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council. I love this story. They stood up Flex overnight as a means to track the logistics of vaccine deployment for Covid as well. So, you know, that system might be used a little bit differently now because they use it with the National Guard volunteers in Texas but ultimately it allowed for a quick and easy way to go across both text messaging and phone to check in and understand where all the vaccines were deployed to what pharmacies, local doctor’s offices, etc. to make sure that they all got to where they needed to go. So a bit more logistics on that one, but I love the way our technology kind of filled that quick role overnight, which I believe you’ve seen some of those use cases on your technology too, right? Especially Shine more recently as we enter hurricane season.

Jason: You’re exactly right. There is a group in Florida, a group associated with the IAFF that has been providing mental health counseling services to firefighters and EMS, other first responders who were directly affected by Hurricane Ian. And I mean, this is something that gets overlooked all the time, but when hurricanes hit the first responders are affected.

You know one of the classic examples was what happened in New Orleans after Katrina, where in the media you hear that the New Orleans Police Department basically laid down their arms and gave the city over to bandits, when what really happened was New Orleans police department needed to go home and take care of their families because their houses were flooded too.

And so there are real pressures on these groups and one of the groups that we’ve been supporting is providing mental health services to those first responders who are affected by these hurricanes. So that’s been really invigorating to see because like you said, it happened overnight. One night they signed up for the account and the next morning they are actively using our software to do it.

But to more of your point about municipalities, you know we’ve seen in Litchfield County, Connecticut, the Litchfield County Opioid Task Force, they have been using Twilio that when somebody calls their health hotline the calls get forwarded to any number of different people that are on call and will receive those calls on their personal phones, depending on the schedule set out. And that schedule was set through Twilio as well. So we’ve got a great guy, named Darrell, who’s a real expert Twilio user, and set up the scheduling you know, all the different people that are on call, and what happens is when they’re overdose spike alerts are sent out, then they use our software Beacon to dispatch community responders, volunteers to go out to hot spots and distribute harm reduction supplies to try and prevent more fatal overdoses.

So when there’s bad stuff going around or stuff that’s been laced with fentanyl and there’s a big spike in overdoses, they’ll get calls through Twilio and then they’ll use our Beacon dispatch to get their volunteers out onto the streets and try and prevent more overdoses from happening. And it’s amazing the tools that you have to make all this possible, you know, the end-to-end communications really transforming their operations at the local level.

And I’ll add, affordably. It never ceases to amaze me the ideas that people come up with about how they can respond at the local level, and it usually comes down to we’ve got everything in place, but it’s the communications that we can’t do. And they’re always very scared of the costs, and when we introduce them to your software and our software you can feel the burden being lifted off their shoulders.

Devin: Absolutely. And I do love, through times of crisis and our product credit fund, we’ve seen one, two man shows who have a little bit of development skill bring something incredibly powerful to life.

There were a few examples that I can think of where we simply helped a host quickly spin up locally in Ukraine and Poland to simply match people, refugees in need of housing with folks offering housing nearby. It’s just so neat to see that yes, we have incredible organizations who thankfully take the time to do this, and we can make this affordable. But how powerful to also watch one person change the world with a little help from technology.

Jason: That’s a really important point. We see time and time again, these small grassroots organizations, five people are responding to hundreds all by themselves. And it really doesn’t take an army to make a difference.

And to your point, I personally can’t write a line of code to save my life, but I have been able to get into Twilio and figured out some call forwarding solutions for people with no skills whatsoever. So a little trial and error can get you a long way.

Devin: And that reminds me, you know I want to mention that we have a code exchange at Twilio and a whole section called Code Exchange for Good. Those are essentially what we’ve tried to do is when we figure out that the technology is being used by a whole lot of people in a way that’s pretty impactful, we like to try and kind of build that template up and share it, so it becomes low code.

I can’t say no code, but it sure does become a little bit easier. That includes everything from virtual classrooms to vaccine hesitancy bots to virtual medical visits, connecting volunteers, rapid response broadcasting. Some of this stuff is already there and is template it out so you don’t have to start from scratch.

So it’s really worth exploring, and again that’s our Code Exchange for Good at Twilio, so definitely worth checking out as a place to start.

Jason: And I noticed too, actually on this whole call forwarding thing, the way I did it was there are tutorial videos in studio where they’re like, “what do you want to do?” And then they show you how to do it and if you can follow the instructions, you can get a lot done.

So we love the low code, but we are certainly rooting for no code.

Devin: I’ll mention we just participated in a really cool partnership with Monday.com. Another really great technology that compliments Twilio nicely in their solutions, but they also really just want to see tech access broadened across nonprofits. They created a platform called Digital Lift, which is a whole lot of different tech companies that provide videos step by step as to how to leverage their tools.

And Twilio put on there in partnership with Text It. And Text It is essentially a platform that does require zero code. So you get to use Twilio under the hood and benefit from our phenomenal discounts for nonprofits and social enterprises, but you don’t have to code and Digital Lift on Monday.com has a ton more resources across different technologies.

Jason: That’s excellent, we’ll definitely check that out and I’m sure some of our listeners will as well. Devin, thank you so much for your time, it’s really been a pleasure. Love what you are doing and Twilio has been very good to us over the years and hopefully we can help more organizations get involved because the services you guys have got are second to none. So thank you so much, and we will definitely be in contact more in the future!

Devin: Thank you. Keep sharing your wonderful stories with us. We love the work that you guys do all over the world and we’re lucky to be a part of it.

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Amazon Music
Beacon Logotype

Beacon emergency dispatch is a cloud-based, do-it-yourself platform for emergency services that alerts, coordinates and tracks prehospital personnel using any mobile phone, with or without internet.

Scroll to Top