Truth be Told - Google Suite
How eGuide streamlined mailbox management, file management, collaboration, and reduced cost by implementing a market-leading solution and best practices development.
Overview:
Email management, file storage, and collaboration are essential activities for every organization and can become time-consuming and have a severe impact on productivity, employee, and constituent experience. With our continued partnership with Truth Be Told, we have been able to advise, advocate, and help maintain a clear understanding of systems and their impact on the organization.
Approach:
Analyze Current Systems:
During our time working as Truth Be Told we have experienced first hand the challenges than outdated and isolated systems, growing from a team of 2 to a team of 4 during the Covid-19 Pandemic, the need for systems that embraced
Originally, Truth Be Told was utilizing an unreliable white labeled email service provided by a third-party provider and storing files both on DropBox and local devices. Users trying to access files simultaneously and multiple versions of the same file were impacting productivity and employee experience. In addition to collaboration,, sharing files with board members, volunteers and facilitators required many additional steps and made it difficult for all interest groups to access files.
By combining our observations with employee feedback from the client we were able to determine the key performance indicators that the new systems would need to address:
Reliable email communication.
File Sharing
Collaboration
Integrations between platforms
Cost-effectiveness
Develop a Migration and Implementation Plan:
Leveraging our technical expertise and learnings from previous implementations, eGuide was able to identify Google Suite for Nonprofits as the ideal solution for Truth Be Told. Google Suite offered the reliability, flexibility, and security of a cloud solution while being cost-effective by leveraging the nonprofit special pricing model.
eGuide developed a comprehensive implementation plan that covered file clean up, migration, and deployment of Google services such as Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Gmail. Providing the client with a clear understanding of how the new solutions would address previous challenges, a detailed timeline, and constant updates along the process allowed us to conduct a full migration in approximately 2 weeks with minimal disruption to the team’s work routine.
User Training and Best Practices:
At eGuide we firmly believe that systems are only as powerful as their users, we focused on user training and adoption while helping the organization develop best practices and improve processes within the new suite of applications.
Completing a platform tour and being able to draw parallels between the old and new systems was very important in helping users understand how the systems worked and established how efficiencies could be created by drawing on the collaborative capabilities of G Suite.
Most of Truth Be Told users were already familiar with Google Apps for consumers, making this a natural adoption and quick transition.
Conclusion:
After 2 months since Truth Be Told has been completely working with their technology tools, they have been able to see a tremendous improvement in the reliability of their email communications, the ease of collaborating with teammates, volunteers, and board members. On the financial side, the organization went from paying for multiple different platforms to taking advantage of the free Google Suite for nonprofits program. And on the technical side, we have seen a drastic reduction in the number of incoming support tickets related to email service issues and file storage.
