Case Study: How a Nonprofit Automated Volunteer Coordination and Saved 8 Hours Per Week

Stichting Hondenzorg en Welzijn (HZW) — a Dutch animal welfare nonprofit — matches volunteers with dogs that need temporary foster care. Dogs from shelters waiting for a permanent home, or dogs whose owners temporarily can't care for them due to illness or hospitalisation.

Important work. But behind the scenes, it was a logistical nightmare.

The situation: before automation

HZW works with 85 volunteers spread across the province of North Holland. Coordinator Marleen managed everything manually.

The daily work:

• Receiving intake requests from shelters and owners via email
• Searching an Excel spreadsheet for volunteers living nearby
• Calling or messaging volunteers to check availability
• Sending confirmations to all parties involved
• Coordinating pick-up and drop-off times

The pain points:

• Address matching took an average of 25 minutes per request. Marleen had to compare postcodes, estimate distances, and check availability
• 3-4 phone calls per match to find someone willing and able
• An average of 2 hours per day on pure coordination — on top of her other responsibilities
• Volunteers in rural areas were rarely contacted because searching took too long
• Requests were occasionally missed because the inbox was overflowing

By the numbers: 10 hours per week on coordination work. With 15-20 requests per week.

The solution: what we built

We built two things for HZW.

1. Automatic address matching tool

A custom tool that automatically matches incoming requests with the nearest available volunteers.

How it works:

• Requests come in via an online form (instead of loose emails)
• The system calculates the distance between the dog's location and all volunteers
• Filters by availability (volunteers set their own availability windows)
• Generates a top-3 match list, sorted by distance and availability
• Marleen only needs to confirm

Technical detail: The tool runs on Supabase with a PostGIS extension for geographic calculations. Volunteer data is stored with coordinates. Matching takes less than 2 seconds.

Result: From 25 minutes per match to 2 minutes (including Marleen's confirmation).

2. Automated communication workflows

All communication around a match now happens automatically.

The workflow:

1. Marleen confirms a match in the system
2. The volunteer receives an automatic WhatsApp message: "Hi [name], there's a Labrador in [city] that needs foster care from [date] to [date]. Can you help? Reply YES or NO"
3. On YES: automatic confirmation sent to volunteer, shelter/owner, and Marleen — including address details, pick-up time, and contact info
4. On NO: the system automatically contacts the next volunteer from the top-3
5. 24 hours before pick-up: automatic reminder
6. After completion: automatic feedback request to the volunteer

Technical detail: Built with GoHighLevel for communication workflows and the WhatsApp Business API for messaging. n8n serves as middleware between the matching tool and GoHighLevel.

The results: 3 months later

Time saved:

• From 10 hours per week to 2 hours per week on coordination
• 8 hours per week saved — that's a full working day

Reach:

• 40% more volunteers are now actively deployed
• Especially volunteers in rural areas who were previously overlooked
• Average volunteer response time: 14 minutes (was: 4-6 hours)

Quality:

• 0 missed requests since launch (was: 2-3 per month)
• Volunteers are more satisfied due to clear, consistent communication
• Less confusion about dates, times, and addresses

What Marleen says:

"I did this work with love, but it had become unmanageable. Now I can focus on what truly matters: connecting with the volunteers and the dogs. The system handles the logistics."

What it cost

Transparency matters, so here are the numbers:

• One-time: Custom address matching tool + communication workflows: EUR 4,200
• Monthly: GoHighLevel + WhatsApp Business API + hosting: EUR 180/month
• ROI timeline: The nonprofit values a volunteer hour at EUR 15 (social impact value). 8 hours saved per week = EUR 120/week = EUR 520/month. Full return on investment within 2 months.

For a nonprofit with a limited budget, this is a significant investment. But the 8 hours per week Marleen gets back are invaluable for an organisation that runs on volunteers.

What you can learn from this

You don't need to be an animal welfare nonprofit to apply these principles. The pattern is universal:

1. Manual matching work (client to provider, order to employee, question to expert) consumes a disproportionate amount of time
2. Communication around coordination is repetitive and error-prone
3. Automating the match + communication saves 60-80% of coordination time

This applies to home care organisations, staffing agencies, real estate offices, catering companies — any organisation that needs to match people to locations or tasks.

Curious whether this could work for your organisation? Explore our services or read our full case studies.