As organizations continuously adapt to a remote work and service environment, UnidosUS is hosting a five part webinar series to support UnidosUS Affiliates in selecting the right technology and making important security/privacy considerations.
The sessions are lead by Belinda de la Libertad, Managing Partner at A-Z Techs who brings her years of experience and expertise assisting
organizations like yours to effectively leverage technology to serve clients and organizational needs.
Serving Clients Immediately, Remotely and Simply
Belinda of A-Z Techs kicked off our first webinar with the story of their client, Mariposa Women & Family Center, who had moved to cloud working and phones prior to the pandemic and thought they were ready when stay-at-home orders were in place.
Although the transition to Microsoft 365 and Teams made it easier for staff to work online with colleagues, the case was different when it came to serving clients. Through many trials with programs like Zoom, Teams, Conference lines and others, A-Z Techs found that to get client service levels back to pre COVID-19 levels they needed something that was simple and didn’t require a learning curve.
This is when they discovered and implemented the RingCentral, FREE to non-profits. The service was the right match as it covered key components of effectively serving clients in a remote environment:
•Ensuring staff privacy by placing calls from an assigned number (rather than a personal one)
•Ensuring client engagement with no learning curve, simply answering a call and calling back if they missed a call to leave a secure voicemail
•Keep data secure by having all communications and data in a password controlled app.
•Insight to productivity and volume by knowing quantity and length of calls from the organization and staff.
•Engagement with clients in more than one medium, text clients that respond more to text than call and send mass texts to all clients with important updates.
Low-cost hardware/software for your team
Belinda and Daniel of A-Z Techs shared their expertise on considerations to make when choosing the right software and hardware for your team.
Choose software first, then hardware. Start by choosing the software closest to no cost that meets the needs of your staff, then choose the hardware in your budget that will support your selected software. ALWAYS ask if there is a discount
for your nonprofit status or look on Techsoup.org for the discounts available to you.
Considerations when Choosing Hardware
When choosing between a personal and professional laptop, choose professional for security purposes. Alternatively, you can seek non-profit discounts on professional versions of your operating system to install on personal
level computers.
Where to get donated hardware: partner with a local private college that may upgrade laptops frequently (every 2 years) to receive their used hardware when they upgrade.
Remember to only accept donated items if they are less than 3 years old and are in good condition. Software updates much more quickly than hardware and older computers may not be able to run current programs.
Ask funders about opportunities supporting a transition to remote work as a response to COVID-19.
Collecting Data Remotely from Clients
This webinar focused on methods for collecting, storing and securing data from clients. Beginning with the types of data elements organizations should collect, the webinar explored options for collecting information with a low or moderate
budget including online forms and SMS texts. Important considerations such as language barriers, levels of security for protecting client data were also addressed. The tech series encourages participants questions which brought the
conversation to best practices in analyzing responses to open ended questions, defining factors in choosing the programs you use, and how to store the collected information.
Delivering Video Content to Clients
When delivering video content to clients, look to YouTube and Facebook for easy ways to distribute content.
Facebook makes captioning for translation easy, Belinda does not recommend using the Google automatic translation options as it is not always accurate. For short videos you can use Facebook to caption screen by screen.
Tag your videos with relevant or adjacent topics so that viewers are prompted to see your content. You can choose between public and private videos so that only some audiences you've chosen can view the video or you can allow the public
to see it depending on how you are looking to use the content.
Security and Disaster Response
Have more questions? Are there topics you'd like to see in the future? Let us know by emailing Julia at Jdenamur@unidosus.org
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