Keep community support requests from getting lost
Make ownership and honest response promises work with a limited weekly support budget.
Business operations, support and community teams or organizers.
Your approach: Use a checklist, responsibility table, work estimate or written workflow. Existing tools and manual processes are valid choices.
The problem
Plan how a fictional community garden handles membership, opening-hours and shared-equipment questions. Requests arrive through email, phone and in person, and people currently repeat their story when volunteers change. Design a workable process and explain how it behaves when demand exceeds capacity.
- The team receives about 90 requests each week. A fully handled request currently takes 12 minutes on average.
- Two coordinators together can spend 12 hours/week; volunteers can record a request but cannot promise a resolution.
- Many opening-hours questions repeat, but missing equipment and membership-record corrections need individual follow-up. No emergency or regulated advice is in scope.
Work within these constraints
Declare the coordinator-hours your plan requires and show how they fit the available time.
Required target: ≤ 12 staff-hours/week
Acknowledge requests without promising immediate resolution or treating acknowledgement as closure.
A request must retain its owner or next responsible role, agreed next step and status across handoffs.
Record only the contact and context needed for follow-up; keep personal membership details off public lists.
What to deliver
Intake and handoff
Show a common path for the three channels, initial sorting, ownership, escalation and closure.
Capacity and demand choices
Calculate the initial workload gap. Explain specific changes that could reduce work or limit the promise, with assumptions.
Two request stories
Walk through a repeated opening-hours question and an unresolved missing-equipment question over a shift change.
Quality and adjustment
Choose measures for waiting, unresolved work and helpful outcomes; define an intervention and a check against premature closure.