How SMS helps deliver urgent medical supplies
A BulkSMS.com Case Study

Shropshire Staffordshire Cheshire Blood Bikes (SSCBB) are a UK-based urgent volunteer service providing transportation of blood and other urgent medical supplies to NHS hospitals across Shropshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire. Due to the time-critical nature of this job, SMS has been brought on board to make sure supplies get to the right place at the right time.

How do they do it?

According to Jeremy Cartwright, Chair of SSCBB, they use a volunteer management system called Three Rings to manage their volunteer and member roster. “Three Rings provides an API to a few SMS providers, and we chose to use BulkSMS”.

Now they can coordinate and communicate with volunteers via SMS directly from the Three Rings dashboard, making it easy to manage everything from one place. “When we need to contact a group of members in a hurry, we select the appropriate group and send the message. If someone is available to help, they call the duty controller or sign up to do the delivery on the Three Rings platform themselves”, says Jeremy.

Why SMS?

SSCBB chose SMS because it cuts through the noise. “We also use social media tools but for urgent or important messages, we use SMS”, says Jeremy. He goes on to say that the problem with social media tools is they are chat-based and important messages tend to get lost in all the chat. Also, some members use different applications or none at all. “SMS is available on everyone’s phone and gets a response in just a few minutes.”

To compare our different solutions, click here or take a look at how some of our other clients are innovating with SMS.