Non-Profit Tech Blog

Today was one of those rare but glorious days in the life of this IT director where there was a direct connection between the mission of the non-profit org and IT itself. I was tasked with creating an application that would allow homeless clients to call a special hotline that would in turn connect the clients with roaming support staff. These clients need help because they have been denied shelter and are basically on the streets for the duration. Turnaround time was ASAP. You know what this means… It’s a job for the magic IVR!

Unfortunately, my org doesn’t have enough people to man such a hotline 24 hours a day so we divided the workload between our org and another non-profit organization. By using a database to store pre-arranged schedules, we’re able to dynamically redirect the transferred call from the client with a VXML-based script and an ASP VBscript backend. It’s remarkably simple to transfer a call from our org to another one. Take a look at the following code (it was taken from here):

That’s the basic code for a VXML transfer. It’s ridiculously easy to insert dynamically generated phone numbers in that VXML stream. With any luck, our super-quick beta will be out by end of tomorrow, I normally don’t like to release this quickly but it’s either my adherence to programming “standards” or very unhappy homeless people out on the streets. On the other hand, I did have enough time to create a history table that would keep track of how many calls were made through the app.

Updated 3/17/2006
Plum’s Andy Kuan took a look at the blog and remarked that the code I posted was Voxeo’s code (a Plum competitor) but it still worked in the Plum IVR.

Confessions

1. I’m really, really tired. It wasn’t the VXML that tired me out. It was the fact that I hadn’t done SQL programming in a long while. Every time I go back into SQL programming, my brain melts by trying to move from the typical procedural programming paradigm to doing everything inline via a single call.
2. I also had to relearn VBscripts date and time functions in order to hack something together that could iterate through different people’s schedules and come up with the right person who for a particular time in the call schedule.
3. Still programming in VBscript, yes I know, I know – one of these days I’m going to rebuild our internal web server with IIS 6.0 sexiness and .NET etc.