The Romanian Red Cross (RRC) is assisted by UiPath in digitizing and automating the reporting of donations collected by the organization for the benefit of Ukrainian refugees in Romania. The RRC, a member of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, is a volunteer-led, humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief, and education inside Romania.
The war in Ukraine has created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. The RRC’s heightened reporting needs immediately strained their staff and digital infrastructure, which is designed to sustain an annual, centralized reporting cycle. As a result, the RRC’s Bucharest headquarters struggled to obtain reliable data fast from its 47 regional centers collecting donations in support of Ukrainian refugees in Romania.
This hampered the RRC’s external reporting capabilities, such as regularly sharing an overview of the donations collected with the Romanian Department for Emergency Situations (DSU), an agency coordinating emergency responses, as part of the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs.
At the height of the humanitarian crisis, the RRC leveraged the UiPath Business Automation Platform for good, building closer connections with both the individuals it helps and the volunteers that are critical to its operations. The project – initiated as a mission-critical response to the deepening humanitarian crisis – has enabled the RRC to become more agile and efficient and has empowered its leadership with real-time access to vital data, including how funds donated are being used in their response.
“As the humanitarian crisis deepened, the Romanian Red Cross joined in the first line of response in supporting Ukrainian refugees in Romania,” said RRC Director Ioan-Silviu Lefter. “We needed to provide insight to the Romanian authorities on the donations and help we were providing to Ukrainian refugees. At the outset, we were faced with a lot of manual reporting, which impacted data accuracy and availability. The UiPath Business Automation Platform allowed us to focus on what matters most: providing vital support for millions of refugees.”
From pencil to paper to using software robots
To move from manual reporting to an automated and streamlined process, the RRC was supported by a team of UiPath citizen developers to map, streamline, and ready the reporting process for automation.
The first software robot deployed at RRC was tasked with generating reporting templates for each of the 47 regional RRC centers at regular intervals, while ensuring that they correspond to the global reporting needs of the RRC. A second software robot was trained to collect reports from each regional center and centralize the data in one master report. The software robots have significantly reduced the amount of manual input and have allowed RRC to dedicate attention to supporting those affected by the humanitarian crisis.
Automation delivers faster direct aid
After deploying UiPath, RRC staff was able to source reliable data at speed, supporting the organization’s internal and external reporting needs, enabling decision-making processes, and enhancing its fundraising capabilities. The RRC reported the following business outcomes:
- Increased data accuracy and reliability: Automation has helped eliminate human error and provided staff throughout the RRC’s regional centers with a streamlined and standard template for reporting.
- Significantly reduced time spent on reporting: Time spent by the project manager centralizing data for external reporting to DSU dropped from 8-12 hours to 30 minutes per report.
- Fast access to consolidated data to support decision-making: Availability of consolidated data supported RRC’s leadership’s decision-making process and fostered collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), currently on a mission to Romania.
- Enhanced transparency and credibility: Access to reliable and recent centralized data, which could be shared with potential donors in real time, boosted the RRC’s fundraising efforts to the benefit of Ukrainian refugees.
- Better measurement and visibility over volunteers’ time: The automated reporting process became a framework for the RRC to quantify the time spent by volunteers on tasks.
“Thanks to our partnership with UiPath, we were able to provide standardized reporting across our regional centers and provide more up-to-date information to key stakeholders. Our staff was empowered to dedicate more time to vital work in helping refugees than using pen and paper to track donations,” continued Lefter.
“The unjust war in Ukraine impacted millions of lives and plunged us all into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. We strongly believe in the power of automation to support organizations facing crises, helping to relieve their staff and empowering them to carry out their mission,” said Daniel Dines, UiPath Co-Founder and Co-CEO.
