Blog Summary:
1. The Friendship Center in Helena, Montana, has been supporting victims of domestic and sexual violence
since the 1970s.
2. Executive Director Gina Boesdorfer shares the Center’s history, current challenges, and rural outreach efforts.
3. Funding uncertainty has shifted priorities from expansion to sustainability.
4. Izzy’s helpline, case management, reporting, chat, and text features have improved efficiency and service delivery.
5. Strong customer service and adaptability have built a lasting partnership between Izzy and The Friendship Center.
Reading Time: (8 Minutes)
From Local Roots to Statewide Impact
At Izzy, we want to support you in supporting your communities. We also believe that communicating our successes, and those of our clients, is of value to others. That’s why we want to share the stories of folks who’re using the platform — to show how we can help, and to hear from our clients about who they are and how their work supports the communities they live in.
Back in March, we sat down with Gina Boesdorfer, Executive Director of The Friendship Center in Helena, Montana, to learn more about the Center’s history, its aspirations and challenges, and how Izzy has helped them achieve their goals.
The Friendship Center began in the 1970s, originally to support women experiencing homelessness. Once the Violence Against Women Act was passed in the mid-1990s, the Center shifted its mission to work with all victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. “We don't discriminate,” Gina said. “We serve men, we serve women, we serve families.” The people the Center serves are of diverse backgrounds. For all victims of domestic or sexual violence, Gina told us, The Friendship Center is here to help.
Though Gina has been at The Friendship Center for nine and a half years, she has been working and volunteering in sexual assault support services since her teens. “I started volunteering with my mom,” she said. “She volunteered at a local program, and so I volunteered.” When Gina went to college, she volunteered at a local domestic and sexual assault program, helped on their crisis line, and eventually held an office assistant position and worked as a staff member after graduation.
Originally, Gina’s post-graduation career goals lay outside of the sector. “My original goal was to get licensed to do therapy specializing in trauma,” she said, “but I missed working at a community-based organization. I missed the direct impact that you have with people in that moment.”
So, Gina started job searching and eventually found The Friendship Center. At the time, she and her husband were living just outside of Denver. For both of them, the move seemed ideal. “My husband works for the Forest Service” she said, “and there're three national forests. So, we thought, ‘let's just move to Montana.’”
That was nearly ten years ago now, and Gina says she’s happy to have taken the job. “The Friendship Center has been incredible,” she said. “The reputation of this agency was apparent from day one, and it has been a wonderful place to work.”
Facing Funding Challenges Head-On
Though a wonderful workplace, The Friendship Center currently faces a serious challenge. “Sustainability is huge right now,” Gina said. Stable for the last 20-30 years, the grants and other funding the Center receives have been pulled for administrative review. “We don't know what the outcome will be,” she said, “and so right now, our goal is finding a way to maintain the stability of our services over the next few years.” This challenge, Gina told us, is having a widespread impact on the Center’s operations. “We've had to really pause a lot of our work” she said, “until we can figure out what's happening with our funding.”
Until recently, The Friendship Center’s funding had been more stable, and Gina and her team were able to focus on other priorities. “Prior to about six months ago,” she said, “I would have said our goal is to figure out how to expand.” The Center serves three counties, two of which are considered very rural. In practice, this means that the Center sees most of its clients from its home-base suburban county. For the two rural counties, outreach becomes a challenge. “We are trying to find ways to provide robust services in our other county service areas,” she said. “There's a lot of square footage.”
Within these two rural counties, community services are limited, transportation can be unreliable, and access to The Friendship Center can be a challenge. “If your kids are going to school an hour from us,” Gina said, “and your job is an hour from us, moving into our shelter is not always the best option.” Faced with this limitation, Gina and her team are trying to figure out how to better serve their community. “We're looking at changing our crisis line,” she said, “to be able to use a different on-call model, and to pilot test how to have staff living and working in those other counties, but who don't necessarily have a physical office space.”
Partnering with Izzy for Lasting Change
Amidst these challenges, Izzy has helped to ease the strain. “It's been a wonderful partnership,” Gina said. “Izzy's customer service and willingness to figure out what we need make the system work.” The Friendship Center has been using Izzy for a few years now, and when they need to make changes, our ticket process makes things simple. “Everyone is willing to help,” Gina said, “and it's been a wonderful partnership in that way. That's something that is priceless, honestly.”
Our first contact with The Friendship Center was a cold call to their office. At the time, Apricot, the software the Center had been using, wasn’t working out, and they had begun to demo other platforms. Reporting inaccuracy had been a major problem, and attempts to resolve software issues were costly and could take days. “They would charge us $200 an hour for any level of customer support,” Gina said, “and so we were looking to find a different system.” After trying out several other platforms, Gina heard from Izzy. Initially, we introduced our helpline software, but the Center had another primary need. “If you can't do reports,” Gina had said, “I don't want to waste your time.” To that, we said “we think we can!”
The Friendship Center set up a meeting with Eric and Toby and told us what they needed. “You didn't have any of the reports pre-built,” Gina said, “but the helpline software was really intriguing to us, and Toby was confident that you would be able to build all of our reports, and that this was a field that you were interested in expanding into.” So, expand we did, building The Friendship Center's required reports using our Case Management reporting feature. “It’s been great,” Gina said. “I used to spend a whole month doing reports. Now, we spend maybe a week doing them.”
Streamlining Helpline, Chat, and Outreach
The Friendship Center uses our Helpline feature as well. “COVID had happened,” Gina told us, “and we'd had to shift people to work from home. So, a lot of the features, like how you can roll calls and have things transferred in numbers, were really appealing.”
Having their helpline and reporting systems on the same platform has saved The Friendship Center plenty of time. “It used to take us 15 minutes to enter data for a five-minute phone call,” Gina said. Now, the process is faster, easier, and more accurate. “The automatic tracking of crisis line calls was huge. Before Izzy, we reported about 1,000 to 1,300 calls per year. Now, we report about 3,000 calls per year. Our accuracy is significantly improved.”
Recently, the Friendship Center has started using Izzy’s chat and text feature. “We started last fall,” Gina said, “and by the end of the year, we had a couple hundred people connecting with us. It’s certainly the way of the future.” With younger generations, picking up a phone or walking into an office is no longer the preferred way to connect. Having chat and text built into the software, Gina told us, is very helpful. “Otherwise,” she said, “you go back to having a cell phone number. It’s just more cumbersome, and so that flexibility has been huge.”
Interestingly, switching to Izzy has changed The Friendship Center itself. “You want software to work for how you operate,” Gina said, “but a software's features can change how you operate. We’re now at a place where we are realizing we can do a lot more within Izzy than what we have utilized it for.”
Overall, Gina told us, Izzy’s customer service has been the best part of making the switch. “Between all the agencies and people we have to work with” she said, “the customer service at Izzy is far and beyond anything we have anywhere else.” Even when the staff at The Friendship Center have issues with the software, Gina told us, Izzy is always focussed on problem solving and improvement. “We know that if we open a helpline ticket,” she said, “it's going to be addressed quickly. There's good communication around it, and that is really refreshing.”
For Gina and The Friendship Center, it was a leap of faith to switch to Izzy, but our initial conversations and our willingness to grow and adapt built trust and rapport. “You went above and beyond,” Gina said, “so that we could feel confident that this product was going to work for us. I just can't say enough how important that was, and how much we still value it now that we've been a customer for three years.”
Thanks, Gina!
By Will Bolton
Gina Boesdorfer has led The Friendship Center in Helena, Montana, since 2015, bringing over 20 years of experience in domestic and sexual violence advocacy. She began as a teen volunteer with her mother and remains committed to expanding rural outreach and ensuring compassionate support for all survivors.