How Step Up For Mental Health’s Helpline Volunteers Leverage Spekit To Support Families In Need

The Challenge

Step Up For Mental Health® is a peer-to-peer advocacy group that provides support, assistance, and education to individuals dealing with mental health disorders, their families, and the public. The non-profit supplies grants, support groups, and resource education with the goal of making life easier for all families dealing with mental health issues.

Adrienne McCue, the President and Executive Director behind Step Up For Mental Health, embarked on her journey to establish the non-profit after witnessing the personal struggles faced by her family members battling mental health issues. The pandemic-induced job loss further exacerbated the mental health crisis, inspiring Adrienne to take action. Since its inception in 2016, the non-profit has experienced remarkable growth, earning the trust and support of renowned organizations like the Red Cross and insurance companies, who now refer individuals in need to Step Up For Mental Health for resources. 

To support the expanding helpline, Adrienne found herself dedicating countless hours to training volunteers, leaving her with little time to focus on other crucial tasks required to scale the nonprofit. Her background in tech led her to embark on a quest to discover a tool that could equip the growing helpline team with accurate and up-to-date information. This reliable source of knowledge needed to be user-friendly and easily adaptable as new volunteers join the team on a regular basis.

The Solution

I think small to large nonprofits benefit from Spekit especially when training or needing to get key information out to a massive group of community partners. Spekit will put available information right at helpline volunteers’ fingertips. There are so many things that change and, with Spekit, you can go in and edit resources to easily help your team and the nonprofit.

Adrienne McCue, President & Executive Director at Step Up For Mental Health

Adrienne has leveraged Spekit to curate and structure bite-sized training materials, document tool processes for the non-profit’s tech stack (including Salesforce, SmartSuite, Workplace, and Asana), and compile external resources and information related to FAQs, mental health terminology, and networks of other non-profits.

Helpline volunteers, or Peer Support Facilitators, can effortlessly search for the information they need using Spekit’s Google Chrome extension, without interrupting their workflow or leaving their current tab. Once they find the necessary information, Peer Support Facilitators can easily copy and paste pre-written answers to frequently asked questions, making it quick and easy to respond to families in need.

Adrienne values the fact that if she comes across new information or encounters a flagged topic, both she and the volunteers have the seamless ability to create a Spek and share those updates with the entire team with Spotlights.

The Results

Spekit has helped our nonprofit be better at supporting families in need. It has revolutionized how we support families.

Adrienne McCue, President & Executive Director of Step Up For Mental Health

Since integrating Spekit, Adrienne has seen a 33% decrease in onboarding time and reclaimed a significant amount of bandwidth in her daily schedule. Instead of hosting repetitive training sessions, she can now effortlessly share a series of onboarding Speks with new volunteers. 

And with the inclusion of high-stakes and time-sensitive inquiries, she can trust that the helpline team has reliable resources to guarantee accurate and timely responses for everyone.

To learn more about Step Up For Mental Health’s cause, or to donate to help support mental health-related issues, visit www.stepupformentalhealth.org/

Spekit definitely allows my role to be maximized as a Peer Support Facilitator and saves time from filtering through Google searches!

 Areeba Munir, Peer Support Facilitator at Step Up For Mental Health