The problem
Coordinating hundreds of volunteers across six countries over email made onboarding slow and difficult to manage.
Global Dental Relief runs clinics to bring free dental care to children around the world. Every clinic has its own visa requirements, accommodations, clinical protocols, and local partner logistics. Each volunteer also needs different information depending on their role and destination. A dentist traveling to Kenya may need to provide a current license, agree to the public health model, and review clinic procedures. A general volunteer traveling to Guatemala follows a different set of requirements. Staff had to tailor every volunteer's onboarding by hand.
With three staff members managing between 350 and 400 volunteers across 25 clinics each year, the administrative burden added up quickly.
"Before Moxo, our staff worked mostly via email and phone to collect information from our volunteers... The amount of email traffic and phone call traffic that it takes to onboard eight clinics just for one staff is immense," said Victoria Kilway, Director of Operations.
The long lead time created another problem.
"A lot of our volunteers are signing up for these projects 12, sometimes even 18 months in advance. So when it comes time to pack, when it comes time to visit your travel doctor, when it comes time to apply for your visa, that information that was sent 12 months ago is lost, so our project coordinators are tapping into the same person with the same information, sometimes two or three different times throughout that 18-month period," said Kilway.
The organization needed a system that could give each volunteer the right information at the right time, without requiring staff to rebuild the process or chase follow-ups over email.
The solution
Moxo replaced manual email coordination with automated workflows tailored to each volunteer's role and destination.
Global Dental Relief connected Moxo with Salesforce, replacing manually assembled packets and email follow-up with one onboarding system. Now onboarding begins as soon as a volunteer registers.
"When a volunteer signs up for one of our service projects, their information is sent to Salesforce, our CRM, which triggers a flow in Moxo to create a workflow that's specific to their volunteer type and service project," explained Kilway.
Each volunteer type and destination gets its own workflow, so staff no longer assemble onboarding plans from scratch.
Each workflow is structured around the volunteer's departure date. Four months before the clinic, one defined set of actions becomes available. Three months out, the next set appears. Volunteers are guided through document submission, clinical briefings, packing information, health considerations, and invoice payment in one place.
"With Moxo, we're able to house all that information in one place, and then use automation to, when a volunteer signs up, we know they'll be getting connected with the workflow that they need," said Leah Wilkey, Outreach Manager and Project Coordinator.
Instead of receiving one long packet months before they need it, volunteers see timely, clearly defined actions. They can work ahead or come back later without losing their place. Staff can see what's been completed without searching through email threads or resending instructions. Whether a volunteer finishes everything months in advance or works through the final steps closer to departure, the process stays clear for both volunteers and staff.
The result
Staff time to set up each volunteer's onboarding fell from as much as 30 minutes to under a minute, while the full preparation cycle shrank from six months to a few weeks.
That's roughly a 97% reduction in onboarding setup time and an 80% reduction in the broader preparation cycle. Kilway pointed to one measure of the communication this eliminated:
"There were 309 tasks completed in Moxo, which means that saved our staff 309 emails that we would have had to answer, to craft, to send," said Kilway.
For a small nonprofit, that time goes back into clinic preparation and patient care.
"The time of our staff is very important to us and really critical to our successful operations, and having a platform like Moxo save our staff internally so much time really allows us to allocate that resource differently. We can provide better care to our kids in the clinic," said Kilway.
Volunteers also know exactly what to do and when. That structure matters most for first-time participants, some of whom have never traveled internationally or worked in a public health setting.
"Moxo allows us to give our volunteers that reassurance that we've thought of everything. We've got them covered and we're alongside with them in this experience," said Gsygleski.
