Customer Story
A 400% response uplift helps Rona Scrubs move faster for healthcare workers
Overview
Challenge: Manage fast-growing scrub orders across a national volunteer network and confirm sizing, addresses and delivery details more quickly after email proved too slow and unreliable.
Solution: Use SMS to confirm order details, speed up responses from healthcare workers, and give the team a faster, easier way to manage communication at scale.
Results: A 50% response rate in 10–15 minutes, a 400% uplift over email, and faster order coordination across regions.
“[SMS] was a much clearer and quicker cut-through and that has played a big part in our ability to make a difference on the numbers.“
Rona Scrubs was created quickly in response to a serious gap during COVID-19: many Australian healthcare workers needed access to scrubs, but supply delays and out-of-pocket costs made that difficult. What began as a grassroots effort soon expanded into a national volunteer network, with fabric donors, distributors and makers all moving at speed to get scrubs to frontline workers. But as orders grew, so did the operational complexity. The team had built a local distribution model using regional volunteer coordinators, yet confirming sizing, delivery addresses and order details across so many areas was becoming harder to manage.
When email could not keep up with demand
As Rona Scrubs refined its sizing process, distributors needed a reliable way to confirm details with healthcare workers before orders were fulfilled. Accuracy mattered because returns were expensive, and any delay in confirmation risked holding up volunteers who were ready to move on to the next order. The team initially used email, but the channel quickly showed its limits. Some distributors did not want to set up separate email accounts, personal addresses were more likely to be filtered or marked as spam, and hospitals and clinics often treated unknown emails the same way. Even when messages did get through, responses were slow, sometimes taking days or longer.
Rona Scrubs needed a faster, simpler channel that matched the pace of its volunteer operation. After speaking with MessageMedia at the time, the team was able to get text messaging ready with just 1–2 calls. Using Sinch Engage (formerly MessageMedia), they could send texts to confirm sizes, quantities and addresses much more efficiently than through email alone. For a fast-moving nonprofit trying to coordinate deliveries across the country, that speed was critical.
Faster responses and smoother coordination with SMS
The impact was immediate. In one region, Rona Scrubs saw a 50% response rate in just 10–15 minutes when using SMS to confirm sizing and orders. That represented a 400% increase in response rate compared with email, where the same recipients had previously been contacted multiple times with little or no reply. The faster response speed helped unblock backed-up orders and made it easier for volunteers to keep fulfilment moving.
The platform also improved day-to-day coordination. Annabelle Parsons said the bulk send portal made it possible to cover an entire area such as Ballarat and send 100 messages in 20 minutes. Compared with manually texting people one by one, the portal gave the team a much easier way to track who had responded and reply from one place. That visibility also helped Rona Scrubs identify where demand was stalling and where scrub supply could be redistributed from one region to another. For Rona Scrubs, SMS did not just speed up responses — it gave the team a more workable way to manage communication at scale while supporting healthcare workers under pressure.
