yourtown empowers young people in need with better support through AI-powered capabilities

yourtown has been at the forefront of tackling societal challenges affecting young people across Australia since 1961, and has led the way in meeting young people where they are through its Kids Helpline service, established 34 years ago. Every 90 seconds, a young person contacts Kids Helpline, which provides free professional counseling support 24/7 to children and young people aged 5-25. Kids Helpline receives more than 6,000 contacts every week on issues such as emotional wellbeing, mental health, bullying, relationships, sexual abuse, homelessness, suicidal thoughts, and drug and alcohol abuse.

Despite providing millions of responses, outdated and fragmented customer relationship management (CRM) systems, manual processes, and siloed data were limiting the organization’s ability to deliver on its vision to positively impact the lives of young people and their families and offer holistic critical youth services. yourtown turned to Microsoft’s AI-powered business application capabilities from Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Customer Service, and Customer Insights – Journeys to provide a seamless experience for children, young people and donors, helping counselors save up to 10 minutes per call and handle more calls from young people in need of support while also supporting advocacy and funding efforts with deeper analytical insights into service usage and social outcomes.

Overcoming the challenges of legacy systems

yourtown, a leading Australian nonprofit organization, provides a range of services for children and young people, including Kids Helpline, Parentline, domestic and family violence support, mental health support, and employment. yourtown also conducts charitable lotteries (Art Unions), a significant fundraising initiative that supports its services.

In 2020, yourtown conducted an evaluation of the Kids Helpline service and found that the organization’s technology environment limited the assistance and quality of services it provided. The organization’s systems, built on custom code, were fragmented across platforms for voice calls, chat, and CRM, with no unified way to document conversation history. Like many nonprofits, yourtown found that this setup hindered understanding in addressing young people’s challenges, limiting holistic and personalized support. The legacy infrastructure required excessive maintenance, and the on-premises phone system had limited lines and frequent outages that affected the availability of the nation’s only children’s critical 24/7 support helpline.

It also didn’t accommodate the digital needs of young people. “The cohort of young people that interact with our services are between the ages of 5 and 25, so they're generally much more in the digital native space,” says Helen Vahdat, CIO of yourtown. “young people we have spoken to preferenced meeting them where they are, through social and other digital platforms in which they live and operate. The challenge was that integrating our systems would have required a significant amount of re-engineering.”

yourtown relied heavily on manual processes to work around its outdated systems, inadequate infrastructure, and applications that were poorly integrated and not adapted to the organization’s evolving requirements. “A lot of the back-end applications were older, which made innovation difficult,” says Tom Clark, Head of Technology and Security at yourtown. For example, for each campaign, the marketing team had to manually build email templates, insert images, extract recipient lists, and merge data, which was both time consuming and frustrating for fundraising staff. The organization’s technology challenges also denied supporters and donors to its fundraising lotteries a personalized and impactful experience, limiting their engagement and financial support.

It was time for a change. “We identified that a full omnichannel approach would be more appropriate for us in terms of support, maintenance, and capabilities,” says Vahdat, and so yourtown embarked on a digital transformation journey to modernize its technology environment to accelerate its mission.

Modernizing technology with AI-powered business application capabilities via Dynamics 365

After a thorough assessment of available digital solutions, yourtown chose the Microsoft platform based on Dynamics 365 to address its challenges and align its digital services with contemporary practices and expectations. yourtown saw the benefit of Dynamics 365, which offers native synergies among the broader Microsoft platform, requiring less effort to build and maintain integrations. And as a nonprofit, yourtown needed to consider efficiency from the perspective of the total cost of ownership of licensing, maintenance, and ongoing support. For nonprofits like yourtown, Dynamics 365 combines robust advanced AI innovation, digital business functionality, and cost effectiveness.

In 2023, yourtown started its migration from its legacy PHP-based system and siloed platforms to Dynamics 365, consolidating data and processes into a single integrated AI-driven customer engagement solution to accelerate its mission to serve more young people more effectively and meet them where they are. The transformation started with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys for managing lottery marketing campaigns. More recently, yourtown added Dynamics 365 Customer Service and migrated three of its four call centers to Dynamics 365 Contact Center with voice to deliver frictionless experiences across channels and reduce operational costs.

The organization uses Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Service for AI-powered case summaries and Azure Communication Services direct routing to connect the new solution to its existing telecommunications provider.

Meeting young people where they are with personalized, more effective service

Dynamics 365 supports voice calls for yourtown, and it will support social media platform interactions in the future. Ultimately, the organization will be able to meet young people where they are, improving accessibility and engagement. And with all interactions in one system, yourtown has a holistic view of its constituents and can provide more personalized support and more effective case management.

Kids Helpline counsellors are more efficient and productive because Dynamics 365 reduces manual administrative work. AI-generated case summaries save counselors approximately 10 minutes per call, helping them handle more calls and reducing wait times for callers. “If counselors are saving time on case notes and documentation, that means they can answer more calls, which means more young people’s lives are changed, and in some instances saved,” says Tony FitzGerald, Virtual Services Manager at yourtown. Vahdat adds, “Dynamics 365 Contact Center allows counselors to be on a call with a young person while a supervisor makes a call out of the product to emergency services.” With its new capabilities, yourtown can also undertake advocacy with the goal of creating change beyond those who come to Kids Helpline, while also promoting awareness and gaining the ability to develop additional and new resources.

yourtown also has a more reliable service for young people calling Kids Helpline. “We receive crisis-based calls from young people in the very late hours of the evening or early hours of the morning, so the availability of these technologies is absolutely critical,” says Vahdat. “With Dynamics 365 Contact Center, we can offer a stable, 24/7 service, which is a significant improvement to what we had before.”

Operating more efficiently

With enhanced reporting capabilities in Dynamics 365, yourtown has both real-time and historical analytics and insights into service usage and outcomes to support its advocacy and funding efforts. The organization uses Microsoft Fabric, a cloud-based analytics platform, to help employees access and analyze data. “We were already using Azure Synapse, and Microsoft Fabric overlays tools that enhance our capabilities by simplifying data analysis for our employees,” Clark explains. “Immediately, we were running reports in seconds that had previously timed out.”

Dynamics 365 also gives Art Union customers a better experience during lottery events. “Art Union is our primary fundraising stream, and we have ten lottery draws each year for a luxury home,” says Vahdat. “We were able to completely reinvigorate our lottery system on the Dynamics 365 platform, and we can now offer a complete omnichannel experience for our Art Union customers.”

Increasing self-funding capability

Managing its marketing campaigns in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys is allowing yourtown to scale its fundraising efforts and reduce time per acquisition in an agile, modern manner. Dynamics 365 also helps the organization send up to 500,000 electronic direct mails at speed and deliver personalized experiences to donors at mass scale, improving engagement.

Looking ahead

yourtown plans to further enhance its services, starting with migrating the currently custom code web chat platform to Dynamics 365. It wants to add self-service capabilities with a chatbot that can handle common scenarios from end to end and provide a more tailored web chat experience so that young people can access resources and support more easily.

The organization is also planning to use autonomous agents to create additional efficiencies. For Kids Helpline, autonomous agents may be able to enhance the wait experience for children and young people by gathering information from callers to assist in personalizing their experience and possibly directing callers to online resources while they are waiting to connect to a counsellor. yourtown is also hoping to use autonomous agents to manage inbound calls for people buying art union tickets. “This would help us free up more staff time for working on outbound marketing calls to drive revenue,” says Clark. He estimates autonomous agents could reduce call abandonment rates during campaigns from 20-30 percent to under five percent.

Additionally, yourtown plans to integrate social media channels and AI features into its overall omnichannel strategy, providing additional avenues for young people to seek help. “We’re hoping to implement more chat, voice, and AI to improve the wait experience for young people,” Clark says. “Dynamics 365 will give us the ability to add these features.”