“Good Bitches Baking” · New Zealand
20 inductions a week. Zero support tickets in 6 months.
How New Zealand's nationwide baking charity simplified volunteer onboarding and gave their team time back.
About
A volunteer network that runs on goodwill and good processes
“Good Bitches Baking” is a New Zealand charity with 32 chapters across the country. Volunteer bakers donate home-baked goods to organisations supporting people who need a lift: hospitals, refuges, community groups, and more.
With around 30 new people registering to volunteer every week, getting them through the onboarding process quickly is critical. Lose them at induction, and you lose a baker permanently.
The challenge
A clunky induction was costing them volunteers before they even started
Before NextStep, “Good Bitches Baking” used a platform that required volunteers to set up a login, navigate a confusing multi-step flow, and figure out how to move between pages. Many simply gave up.
- Around 3-4 hours per week across the team was spent tracking induction progress, chasing volunteers, and answering login and navigation queries
- Help desk volunteers fielded 2-3 support queries every week: login failures, lost links, navigation confusion
- Volunteers abandoning the process entirely, resulting in permanent drop-off
- The previous platform didn't work reliably on mobile, making it even harder to complete
“People were just getting sick of it and not following through. We'd lose those volunteers completely.”
Sara Mitchell, Volunteer Manager, “Good Bitches Baking”The solution
An induction that works for everyone, including volunteers in their 80s
“Good Bitches Baking” launched NextStep for their volunteer induction on Halloween 2025. No passwords. No confusing navigation. Just a clean, link-based process that volunteers could complete on any device.
Automated reminders meant the team no longer had to personally track down every individual who hadn't completed the induction. The process also has acknowledgements built in at the end, so staff know volunteers have actually read what they needed to.
Results
Not a single person has asked for help
In nearly six months of use, the “Good Bitches Baking” team hasn't received a single support query about how to use NextStep. That's a big shift from the 5-6 weekly questions they fielded about their previous platform.
“I planned to write a user guide in case volunteers got stuck. I'm so glad I didn't bother - nobody has needed it, not once.”
Sara Mitchell, Volunteer Manager, “Good Bitches Baking”It wasn't just the person running inductions who noticed. Help desk volunteers, who had previously spent an hour or two each week answering induction-related emails, no longer receive those queries at all.
Worth noting too: “Good Bitches Baking”'s volunteer base spans teenagers and retirees, people on smartphones and people on desktops.
“Our volunteers range from 14-year-olds to people in their 80s. All of them are just using it. That's what we needed.”
Sara Mitchell, Volunteer Manager, “Good Bitches Baking”Volunteers are also completing the induction at a higher rate. With automated reminders running in the background, fewer people fall through the cracks between registering and actually getting inducted.
When a new content manager joined the team, she went into NextStep and made edits to the induction content without any training. She found it intuitive enough to update, save, and move on with no guidance needed.
What's next
From volunteer induction to wider process management
Because of how well the induction has worked, “Good Bitches Baking” is planning to use NextStep in more places across the organisation. This includes:
- Role-specific onboarding flows for chapter committee members, replacing repetitive training sessions with self-paced modules
- Multi-party onboarding checklists that hand off between team members at each step, so nothing gets missed when bringing on a new committee member
- Annual health and safety re-inductions, sent automatically on the anniversary of a volunteer's original sign-up date
“It's not just an induction tool for us anymore. Wherever we have a process that needs to be followed in order, NextStep makes sense.”
Sara Mitchell, Volunteer Manager, “Good Bitches Baking”“Good Bitches Baking”
A New Zealand charity connecting volunteer bakers with community organisations. 32 chapters nationwide. Hundreds of volunteers onboarded every year.
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