How LifeTeachUs scaled support for 20,000 volunteers and hundreds of partner schools with Chatbase

At a glance

LifeTeachUs is a German nonprofit social startup in the education sector. The platform brings qualified volunteers into schools as "LifeTeachers" to share practical life knowledge, career insights, and personal experiences with students. Today the platform works with hundreds of partner schools and over 20,000 registered LifeTeachers across Germany. The model combines self-service with high-touch support. Schools and LifeTeachers can onboard and manage their own requests, but education and volunteer work involve trust, context, and operational and legal questions that often need explaining.

Small team, growing reach, and the same questions answered hundreds of times

Before Chatbase, support happened manually across emails, WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, and calls. The same questions, from how a school onboards to how someone becomes a LifeTeacher, were answered by the team over and over again. Response times were stretched. Support depended entirely on team availability. As reach and visibility grew, the operational drag grew with it. The team explored building parts of the system in-house and looked at traditional chatbot tools. Most were too rigid, too technical to maintain, or produced answers that did not reflect LifeTeachUs's tone or the complexity of the work. As a nonprofit startup, they needed something lean, scalable, and affordable.

An AI agent trained on internal knowledge, live in days

Today, the LifeTeachUs AI agent acts as the support and onboarding layer for schools, LifeTeachers, and partners. A strong existing documentation culture made training fast. The team loaded the agent with website content, onboarding information, FAQs, internal support documentation, partnership materials, and operational workflows. Three things made Chatbase the right fit: it was fast to implement, intuitive to manage, and produced natural answers from the start. Multilingual capabilities and the ability to train directly on internal materials sealed it.

• Answers recurring questions about the platform, onboarding, and volunteer process
• Supports onboarding flows for schools and LifeTeachers
• Helps users find the right information across documentation and FAQs
• Serves as first-line support and information system around the clock

Users treat it like a real support contact

Repetitive requests are handled instantly. Users get answers faster, including outside normal working hours. Internally, the team saves hours every week and can focus on strategy, partnerships, and product instead of repeating the same support conversations. The indirect impact matters too. In a nonprofit context where trust and clarity are everything, immediate and reliable support reduces friction for schools and volunteers joining the platform. The biggest surprise has been engagement quality. Users do not treat the agent like a typical bot. They interact with it naturally, often treating it like an actual support contact.

What's next

LifeTeachUs plans to deepen the agent's role across the platform. As more schools and LifeTeachers come on board, the team wants the agent to handle more of the onboarding and contextual support directly, freeing the human team to focus on building partnerships, growing the mission, and supporting the harder cases that need real conversation.