How Surf Life Saving saves over 180 monthly hours with Connecteam

Surf Life Saving is a non-profit community cause that aims to protect the community on and around the beaches of New Zealand through lifeguarding, surveillance, and water safety education services. 

Like other nonprofits, Surf Life Saving faces challenges, such as dependence on funding and managing large numbers of seasonal volunteers.

Pia Harpour, Community Education Manager, highlights the difficulty of managing too many moving parts with too few resources. This led her to find Connecteam, a solution that could solve all her challenges without requiring a huge budget.

Key Takeaways:

The Challenge:

Surf Life Saving is a nonprofit on a mission to protect its community in and around the beaches of New Zealand.

Before using Connecteam, the main challenges Surf Life Saving faced included:

• Uncertainty regarding volunteer availability
• A complex and time-consuming manual scheduling process that requires a lot of back-and-forths
• Handling excessive manual paperwork
• Poor communication through different channels
• An inconsistent training and onboarding process for new volunteers

The Solution:

Connecteam provides Surf Life Saving with the following solutions:

• A digital scheduling tool that is easy to use and allows you to quickly share schedules with your team
• An in-app work chat with filters and groups to replace emails, social media, and phone calls
• A robust mobile knowledge base for health & safety protocols, tutorials, and educational materials 
• Digital timesheets that are directly exportable for payroll
• Fully accessible mobile training and onboarding programs

The Outcome:

With Connecteam, Surf Life Saving was able to: 

• Optimize the entire employee management processes with one platform
• Save valuable time, including 160 monthly hours on volunteer scheduling and 5 weekly hours on distributing educational materials
• Enhance its scheduling process by instantly seeing who’s available for a shift
• Streamline its payroll process with an in-app time clock and accurate, exportable digital timesheets
• Instantly distribute digital safety and hazard workflows, in turn reducing accidents
• Enhance internal communication

It was all super daunting and hard until I stumbled upon Connecteam. I don’t think you understand the impact it had on my job: I honestly don’t think I would have made it through the season without it!