Prolog Total outsourced service support

At 7.0 on the Richter scale, the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 killed more than 230,000 people and devastated most of the capital, Port-au-Prince. Yet thanks to the efforts of aid agencies like CAFOD and Oxfam and the generosity of their supporters, countless lives have been saved because of spontaneous funding for necessities such as food, shelter and sanitation.

In all, CAFOD raised total of £4.75 million, and worked round the clock with their partners Caritas to deliver lifesaving assistance to the most vulnerable and worst affected areas. Oxfam has also been in the thick of the relief effort. Three months to the day since the Haiti earthquake, huge challenges remain, says Oxfam Great Britain CEO, Barbara Stocking, yet thanks to extraordinarily determined people doing amazing, innovative work, there is genuine hope for the future.

In an information age, when news is a 24/7 commodity, disaster happens very quickly, and charities are equally swift to respond. Within hours of the first shocking pictures of the January 2010 earthquake that devastated the island of Haiti, two of the world's leading not for profit organisation were penning letters of appeal to their supporters across the UK, both knowing that Prolog's multi-channel customer contact centres were swinging into action behind them.

For some at Prolog, it was deja vu, a re-run of October 2008 and the Congo appeal by CAFOD, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development. Then, the call had come on the morning of October 31 asking for agents to be trained and lines fully operational within 24 hours. This time it was not only CAFOD who picked up the telephone to Prolog:

"Our back office team was briefed by Oxfam on January 14, just two days after the Earthquake struck," said Contact Centre Manager Louise Hemming. "The following day we were asked by CAFOD to be ready with another team of agents and live help lines... and, yes, we had just 24 hours to do it in!

Public reaction to both appeals was immediate, and at the height of the campaign, Prolog's back office staff working at facilities in the East Midlands and in East Anglia were processing more than 7,000 donations a day. By early February, the money flowing into Prolog had exceeded £1million.

"We were handling 96 per cent of transactions within 24 hours at our recently commissioned Financial Processing Centre, and the remainder within 48 hours, well within Oxfam's targets, giving us a 100 per cent SLA score," added Hemming, "We were also able to help the client by improving significantly on their short-term volume forecasts."

Oxfam's campaign peaked between January 19 and February 8, and during that period alone Prolog handled 22,486 responses with just 48 file rejections, an accuracy under pressure of 99.8 per cent. On the busiest day almost 4400 responses were handled for Oxfam alone, and £208,000 was banked, one-fifth of the £1,052,656 the campaign generated.

Paul Mullins, Head of Supporter Relations at Oxfam, flashed back an email: "I had to respond to those numbers", he wrote. "What a fantastic day's work, another major achievement in processing - well done!"

Visiting Prolog on January 27, CAFOD also praised its outsourced services provider for responding rapidly and professionally in support of their emergency appeal. In all CAFOD's first appeal raised almost £900,000.

By the end of the two short campaigns Prolog had processed over 52,600 applications and banked a total of £1.9 million on behalf the two charity clients.

"The lessons we learned in 2008 stood us in good stead," said Prolog Commercial Director Ian Dignum. "The Congo appeal enabled us to demonstrate our ability to respond rapidly and effectively to emergency campaigns.

"Our response to Haiti was no less immediate, but this time we were able to reap the additional advantages of substantial new investment in a purpose designed financial processing centre equipped with the latest mail opening and scanning technology. We have shown that when disaster strikes we are ready to support our third sector clients in getting crucial funding where it is needed quickly and effectively."