How Rainbow Railroad handles 5x volumes in 5 languages with no drop in quality

Rainbow Railroad is an international nonprofit organization that helps LGBTQI+ people around the world who face persecution for their sexual orientation, gender identity and sex characteristics. They work with a network of partners on the ground to help with the assistance and offer several programs to meet each client’s unique circumstances and needs. Since its inception in 2006 as a volunteer-run organization, Rainbow Railroad has helped more than 13,000 people find safety through several assistance programs including relocation, cash assistance and crisis response.

Challenge

As an organization enabling LGBTQI+ people to get to safety, Rainbow Railroad’s biggest priority is security, confidentiality and data privacy. However, without a comprehensive translation solution to help them handle requests, support clients, communicate with partners and even translate crucial documents, they had to resort to using free translation tools, which posed many security risks for the team and their clients. Not only that, working with several disparate tools left agents spending much of their working hours switching between Google, CRM and other windows, all of which took valuable time and effort that could be used to solve high-impact problems.

Rainbow Railroad expanded their website in five languages (versus just English), and this also led to an increase in request volumes — which also meant growth in the diversity of countries from which these requests came and languages spoken. Since 2021, the volume of requests from potential clients has gone up by five times. In 2023 alone, Rainbow Railroad received over 15,000 requests for help from people whose lives were in danger.

Rainbow Railroad has always been a lean team, and there were not many who could speak a variety of languages. Hiring interpreters and translators turned out to be too expensive. With just an English-only team and one Spanish speaker on their roster, they needed a more secure, streamlined, efficient and cost-effective way so they could help more people.

Solution

The Rainbow Railroad team evaluated several solutions like hiring translators, looking at machine translation engines, and making Google Translate a big part of their workflow. However, Language I/O was the first solution to check all their boxes — and the most important one was security.

From the get-go, Language I/O earned their trust with easy setup, simple onboarding and top-notch security measures. They were able to get attention and hands-on support from the Language I/O customer success team, even when they had issues that weren’t pertaining to their translation workflows. When they had feedback for Language I/O or a request for a feature that would make their work easier, it was readily accepted and immediately implemented. Not only that, the pricing model was always affordable, consistent and transparent, even when renewing contracts — no unpleasant surprises.

With their team only able to fully cover English and Spanish, they brought on Language I/O to support five more languages: Farsi, Pashto, Russian and two versions of Arabic. Out of these, Pashto seemed to be the hardest for other translation engines to get right, but Language I/O was able to accurately translate it. Language I/O also took the major burden of managing translations or the need to hire professional translators off their plate, and with Language I/O directly integrated into Salesforce, their process was way more streamlined and efficient. They also found it easy to translate large documents using the MT portal, and the ability to compare translation vendors in the portal was helpful as well. During the occasions they used an email solution outside of the CRM, Language I/O’s browser extension came in handy and reduced the time to translate.

Language I/O was the only translation solution that ticked all our boxes. With the right balance of cost, security, accuracy (especially in Pashto), and efficiency, Language I/O stood out as the best fit for our team. The easy setup, simple and straightforward onboarding, and prompt and thoughtful customer service have won us over.

Monique Sereneo, Director of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning