A small organisation with no support desk

In a charity, a club or a community organisation the enquiries arrive constantly and belong to nobody. Connect gives that traffic a consistent answer, keeps what was said on the person rather than in a volunteer's inbox, and puts anything requiring a decision into one shared queue. What it must not absorb is the judgement — money, welfare and membership decisions stay with people.

Status: Available What this means
Audience: both
Channels: emailphonewhatsapp
In the app: #/needs-you, #/knowledge, #/memory
Last verified: 2026-09-10
Product version: 6.3.2

Why the record matters more here than anywhere#

Small organisations lose institutional memory at the speed volunteers change. The person who knew that a particular supporter always writes in March, or that a family asked not to be telephoned, leaves and the knowledge goes with them. Connect keeps it structurally: Memory holds durable facts at four tiers — workspace, channel, endpoint, contact — and anybody with access can read what is held and forget any of it.

A preference is a memory, not a note in a thread. 'Prefers email, works nights' written at the contact tier applies to every future conversation, including one held by somebody who joined last week.
A block is a directive. A connect_memory row tagged block:<channel> holds across channels and across future conversations, which is the right shape for 'do not ring this person again' when the reason must not be forgotten.
A commitment is a follow-up with a reason. The reason is what makes it usable by whoever is on duty when it comes due — and in this kind of organisation, that is almost never the person who made it.
Everything decided is in the decision log, including refusals. When a trustee asks who agreed to something, the answer is a record rather than a recollection.

One shared queue instead of a rota#

Needs You is ranked rather than chronological and drains by itself as each cause clears. For an organisation without a support desk that is the whole operating model: whoever has an hour opens the queue, works what is at the top, and the queue does not need reassigning when they stop. Voice line health escalates into the same place, so a phone line that has quietly stopped answering appears as an item rather than as a mystery.

Autonomy decides how much of the traffic reaches that queue at all. The usual shape is autonomous on the routine channels and ask_before_send on the ones where a wrong answer matters, with the narrowest scope winning — so one contact can be held for a person without changing anything else. The runtime control turns Connect off entirely when a committee wants it off, and turns it back on without reconfiguring anything.

The decisions to keep#

Money: Connect does not process payments for a workspace, and safe_sales refuses any amount, term or commitment Knowledge does not support. A published membership fee is a fact; a hardship arrangement is a decision with a person's name on it.
Anyone in difficulty: A caller in distress should not be talking to software. The realtime path has a 3.3 s median reply floor on the best measured call, there is no completed human transfer on the live carrier, and a budget refusal can decline a call. Route welfare contact to people and say so in your wording.
Membership and eligibility: Whether somebody qualifies for something is a judgement with an appeal behind it. Connect can quote your published criteria and must not apply them to a named individual.
Removing a contact restriction: Clearing a do-not-contact entry is a person's decision, recorded against them. The Assistant cannot clear one at all.
Anything about a child or a vulnerable adult: Not enquiry traffic. Scope those contacts and endpoints so a person always sees them first.

Where the money goes#

Written channels are the affordable ones and voice is the line item that surprises people. Audio tokens cost four times the model's text input rate and roughly 2.7× on output, a live session is re-billed for its whole context every turn, and a call that reports no tokens is still charged from its duration. An organisation running on donations should put its phone line on defined hours, answer in writing where it can, and set a budget that refuses rather than one it hopes not to reach.

The other saving is Knowledge. Every question answered from a published source is a question that does not become a call, and the same document that answers a supporter answers the next twenty.

Questions#

We have volunteers who come and go. Does each one need setting up?

Each person needs their own access, because approvals and decisions are recorded against a named person and a shared login would destroy that. What they do not need is a handover briefing: the relationship history, the memory and the open follow-ups with their reasons are already on the record they open.

Can Connect take a donation over the phone?

No. Connect does not process payments for a workspace, and it will not state an amount or a term that Knowledge does not support. The workable pattern is that it answers the question, records the intent as a follow-up, and sends your own payment link in writing where that is appropriate.

Can we switch it off between campaigns?

Yes. There is a runtime control that stops Connect acting, and channels can be set to off individually. Nothing is lost by doing it — records, memory, follow-ups and history stay exactly as they were, and turning it back on does not require reconfiguring what you set up.