Sexmatters: significant time savings thanks to Clevergig

About Sexmatters

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Sexmatters foundation offers workshops and training on gender, sexuality, consent, and social safety as central themes to both young people and adults. With the aim of breaking stereotypes, the company has a young and diverse team of professionals who are inspired to educate others. Peggy tells us more about it.

What do you do at Sexmatters and where did the initiative come from?

Peggy speaking:

Sexmatters started in 2013 as a volunteer initiative, and I joined as a volunteer. In 2020, it became my job, which I still enjoy doing very much. I handle planning and scheduling at Sexmatters. I also deal with financial administration and am responsible for our activities in education. I send the team to workshops, ensure the right materials are available, and conduct intake and evaluation meetings with schools.

The founders, Eva and Maaike, worked extensively on gender and sexuality during their Cultural Anthropology studies. During their graduation project in Argentina and Brazil, they felt they wanted to educate people about ideas concerning gender and sexuality. They quickly noticed that this subject was not extensively discussed in the Netherlands either, and that’s how the idea was born. They wanted to engage in discussions with young people about gender, sexuality, desires, and boundaries. These are themes that young people are very concerned about, yet were hardly ever discussed in schools or youth work. We wanted to break that silence. Many people feel that 'gender and sexuality' doesn't concern them, especially if they are heterosexual or cisgender, for example. However, the ideas you have about your clothing, your choice of study, work, or the role you take on in a love relationship - all of these are deeply rooted in those gender expectations. That's why we found it important to have that conversation. Our workshop leaders are between 20 and 30 years old. For students, that feels like someone who can talk to them at their level. We always try to have a very mixed pool to convey different perspectives to the students.

We also provide training on social safety, which we offer to adults, such as at entertainment venues, student associations, and companies. These include both training for managers and team training, all aimed at creating a socially safe environment.

What do you consider important for your employees? What is significant from your clients’ perspective?

For us, it's important to have colleagues who work from different perspectives and who enjoy being in front of a group. We believe it's important to have people with a beautiful personal story that they can bring to the table. Additionally, workshop leaders who come from an educational background can convey more substantive knowledge. Furthermore, we have an onboarding and guidance program. Everyone gets a buddy and attends various training sessions. You can shadow your buddy and slowly start giving workshops and training sessions yourself. Through that training program and various meetings, we try to get a good idea if the person is the right fit for the classroom.

There are several aspects of training and workshops that you organise, which requires a certain planning to get the right person in the right place. How was it before Clevergig, and what has changed now?

We used Excel and WhatsApp for everything. We had an availability spreadsheet where all the names were listed, and you could mark a day green or red or just put in your time. People could update this monthly, and based on this, an Excel roster was created. As the organisation grew, we encountered several problems. The roster became very unclear. People couldn't find themselves, which was inconvenient. Often, when people filled in their availability, they also wanted to add details, but that wasn’t possible in the Excel form. They would then message or email me, and I had to call people multiple times to finalise everything. It was very time-consuming.

We couldn't continue like this, so I started looking online, and that's how we found Clevergig. It was quite a big leap for us: from a free program to Clevergig. But it turned out so well that we wanted to continue. The biggest advantage is that it saves me a lot of time in scheduling and it's much easier. We have many services that recur often, and I can easily copy them in clevergig. I really appreciate being able to see exactly which colleagues are available at the time of a service, so I can immediately check if it's feasible at all. Because we have a large pool of employees, freelancers, volunteers, and interns, it often happens that someone is sick or wants to shift. That used to be a hassle, but now it's very easy. I can instantly see if that option is still available, and the other scheduled person receives a notification. It has brought us tremendous time savings. We are in a huge growth process, and Clevergig is the first thing we have changed. There's definitely a lot more that needs to be done in changing our organisational structure.

How was it for you during the last period when everything had to close?

It was a tough period and it lasted longer than we had initially foreseen. We wanted to keep as many people working as possible because our team is the basis of what we do. We made all the manuals digital so that digital training sessions and workshops could be offered. At some point, it reached the limits of what we could do as an organisation. Digital training sessions went quite well, but workshops with students really couldn’t be conducted online. There was very little motivation, and creating a safe environment to talk about these themes also didn't work well online. It was also a challenge from a planning perspective because things were constantly being canceled or rescheduled.

Have you built a plan to possibly handle things faster and smarter next time?

We don't have a concrete plan. We now know very well that if we face these kinds of difficulties again, we will offer our training sessions digitally. For the workshops at schools, we'll only offer teaching materials. The software still remains valuable, just as it is now. We can also schedule online services or training in this way. I find it very convenient to be able to include the information that people need in the service itself. We still send a briefing along, but I can put a lot of the essential information directly into the service. Clevergig remains necessary to guide us through this.

Final question, what were you looking for when you were looking for software? What were the criteria?

For me, it was important to have an app where employees could see their availability and roster without having to log in via a computer, as many of them are on the go when they want to quickly check something. That was a top requirement for us. The other requirement was that I would have many rights to build schedules the way I want. I noticed that a lot of software I saw was molded into a certain format. For example, you had to keep sending the new contractors or new activities, and then they would be built into the software. But because we work so flexibly, I need to be able to enter everything myself. That's just very easy with Clevergig. Also, the overview to see how many activities there are this week and how many people are still available was important to me. What also appealed to me a lot about Clevergig was the design; it looks very organised.

Would you recommend Clevergig to other people?

Yes, I would definitely recommend it. I find it very pleasant to work with.

We're glad to hear that! Thank you for the interesting conversation and for your time, Peggy. We are delighted to hear about your growth and how Clevergig helps you save time and work more efficiently. Sexmatters is doing very important work. We are happy to hear that Clevergig can assist in this regard. We hope you find more functionalities to help organise the company's growth, interested students, and engaged training participants. Thank you for trusting us!