You've got a hotline. Now what?

Before anything else, take a 90-second tour. A hotline in Transfur Line is a phone number paired with a dashboard. Calls and SMS messages from the public land in the dashboard's conversation queue. From there, your team responds, assigns work, and tracks outcomes.

On your hotline page you'll see the phone number, current status (active, paused, or shutting down), recent activity, and tabs for IVR settings, operators, and analytics. Get comfortable with where things live — the rest of this checklist will take you to specific tabs.

Your org or agency has three role tiers: Owner, Admin, and Member. Owners and Admins can configure everything — invite people, change settings, manage billing. Members get access to features (tasks, hotline conversations, etc.) via team assignments rather than blanket permissions.

Invite your key Admins now: people you trust to help configure the hotline and invite others. The rest of your staff and volunteers can come in as Members, organized into Teams. Don't worry about getting Teams perfect today — you'll naturally tune them as you see how your hotline traffic flows.

What a caller hears when they ring your number is the first impression of your response. Out of the box you have a default greeting, a simple IVR menu (press 1 for X, press 2 for Y). The defaults work; personalizing them earns trust.

Three things to set: your greeting (a short text-to-speech message), the IVR menu (or skip the menu entirely and forward every call to operators), and the voicemail behavior (when it triggers, what it says). If you have callers who speak more than one language, the Translations page lets you record each prompt in multiple languages and route by selection.

There are two models for handling incoming requests, and most hotlines use both. Operator triage: your own team picks up messages from the dashboard, replies, and tracks each conversation to resolution. This works best when your org has the bandwidth to respond directly. Partner dispatch: when a request needs work your org doesn't do, you assign it to a partner organization or agency that does — they respond and complete the work, you keep visibility.

Most hotlines do operator triage by default and dispatch to partners for specific case types (e.g., "medical emergencies go to the vet partner," "wildlife rescue goes to the wildlife agency"). If you don't have partner orgs lined up yet, that's fine — start operator-only and add partners later. Make a quick decision on which model you're starting with; the next two steps execute on it.

A partner is another organization or agency that you can assign messages and tasks to. The relationship runs both ways — once a partner accepts your invitation, you can dispatch work to them, and they can see the conversations and tasks you assign. Two flavors: accepted partners (they're on Transfur Line and accepted your invite) and shadow partners (they're not on the platform yet — you can still track work directed at them).

For accepted partners, you can grant full access to a hotline — meaning their members see the hotline on their dashboard, can read all its messages and calls, and view associated tasks. Use this for partners who are functionally part of your response team. For partners who only handle specific cases, leave full access off and dispatch case-by-case instead.

Send invitations now. Partner activation can take days as the other side confirms; doing this early means they're ready when you go live.

A Hotline Operator is the person who actually answers calls and messages for this specific hotline. Operator status is granted per-hotline and is independent of org membership — your operators can be Members of your org, Admins, or volunteers. What matters is you've designated them to handle this hotline's traffic.

Two operator roles: OPERATOR can view, respond, and assign requests; MANAGER can do all that plus configure the hotline (settings, IVR, add and remove other operators). You probably want one or two Managers (you and one other trusted person) and as many Operators as it takes to cover your traffic.

You can also assign whole teams as operators — useful if you have a dispatching team and don't want to manage individual operator rosters. Adding or removing a person from the team automatically changes their operator access.

Before you publish the number, walk through the flow as a caller. Use a personal phone — call your hotline, listen to the greeting, navigate the IVR, leave a voicemail. Then send a text. Each interaction should land in the dashboard within a few seconds.

Have an operator pick up the test conversation, reply to your text, and mark it resolved. If you've set up partner dispatch, dispatch the test message to a partner and confirm they receive it. If anything doesn't work, you'll catch it now instead of in front of real callers.

Once the test flow is clean, publish the number wherever your callers will find it (your website, social media, printed materials), and brief your team with the operator onboarding doc. You're live.