Organization:

Anti-Cruelty Society

Market:

Chicago, Illinois

Application:

Staff Mobility, Capital Budget Relief

Story:

The Anti-Cruelty Society, Chicago’s largest and oldest, open-admission humane society, received a grant from Humana Chicago Benefits, enabling them to upgrade their animal intake and tracking process. Great news if they had the infrastructure to support it. Unfortunately their 1933 office building, with a poor data infrastructure, presented a challenge. The renovation needed to implement traditional technology was going to cost up to $55,000. Mobile Internet access was the only affordable solution on which to deploy their new, and much needed intake/tracking system.

With CLEAR from Mobile Citizen, The Anti-Cruelty Society not only saved the organization thousands of dollars in unnecessary implementation and renovation costs, but added productivity worth more than $100,000 annually . Their six veterinarians, who are paid $50/hour, gained more than 1.5 hours of productive time each day due to the efficiency of real-time, mobile access to data and resources.

The benefits didn’t stop there. More than 30 veterinary assistants enjoy increased productivity because of this shared access. The Society’s Field service investigators, who are called upon to pick up unwanted animals and investigate complaints of cruelty, neglect and abuse, also benefit from access to mobile Internet, particularly in emergency situations. www.anticruelty.org

Organization:

Ronald McDonald House

Market:

Las Vegas, Nevada

Application:

Affordable (and healthy) telecommuting policies

Story:

Believing that every child deserves a safe and supportive place to grow, Ronald McDonald House Charities® (RMHC®) of Greater Las Vegas creates and supports programs that directly improve the health, education and well-being of children in their community. And they do that thanks to a very dedicated and an increasingly mobile staff. Families and children staying at the Ronald McDonald House can be extremely susceptible to illness, and as a result they have a very strict health policy for staff -- stay home if you’re sick to help prevent transmission and protect the families in the House. CLEAR from Mobile Citizen gives them the ability to have a ‘mobile office’ and necessary Internet access ensuring staffers have the same access to applications as they had in the office and enabling them to work productively off-site. In addition to benefitting from ongoing productivity of their staff, RMHC of Greater Las Vegas will be able to extend mobile broadband benefits to their families so they can connect with loved ones back home, whether they are at the House or in a hospital caring for their child.

Organization:

Healthy Schools Campaign

Market:

Chicago, Illinois

Application:

Business Continuity, Maximizing Digital Communications

Story:

The Healthy Schools Campaign (HSC) knows that healthy children make better learners. That is why they advocate for policies and programs that allow students, faculty and staff to learn and work in a healthy environment. For HSC, having reliable Internet access is mission critical.

For basic Internet access, they had 1 DSL line for years and it was vulnerable to outages. Even the shortest amount of downtime disrupted their business and resulted in decreased productivity and lost opportunities. So they set out to find a reliable back up. Adding a 2nd line was cost prohibitive so affordable and reliable mobile broadband with CLEAR from Mobile Citizen, saved them more than $5,000 on service. In addition to cost savings, the service provided the redundancy HSC needed for its Internet access for employees accessing cloud computing databases such as Google email, and their CRM databases:
Salesforce.com,databank.com and events.org . The service also doubled reliability for inbound communications allowing employees access to HSC’s internal server.

Having 4G service also meant increased capacity or bandwidth. For an organization dependent on communicating news and best practices to its constituents, being able to make daily website changes -- including uploading and downloading of graphics and large files -- was important. Having the fastest Internet service available allows HSC to take full advantage of today’s latest digital mediums like video. www.healthyschoolscampaign.org

Organization:

Heart of Hope

Market:

Portland, Oregon

Application:

Powerful fundraising tool

Story:

• When Heart of Hope Ministries International needed mobile Internet capabilities to boost marketing and fundraising activities, they came to Mobile Citizen.
• Mobile broadband made Skype, an application allowing for phone calls over the Internet, possible, connecting fundraiser attendees with beneficiaries of their program – Romanian orphans, widows and families in desperate need of social services.
• Heart of Hope also uses mobile broadband in its outreach efforts with potential volunteers. With CLEAR service from Mobile Citizen, Heart of Hope staff can make a more personal connection with volunteers by having access to the organization's website, program information and success stories while meeting outside the office.

Organization:

Philadelphia Fight

Market:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Application:

Grant Optimization, Business Continuity and Productivity

Story:

What is three months of productivity worth when it means getting and optimizing a grant? Philadelphia FIGHT, an AIDS service organization, signed up for CLEAR from Mobile Citizen and found out. The organization was awarded a grant for a new prison program providing counseling services to inmates, but it had to be utilized in a certain timeframe. This new program required FIGHT open a new location where it was going to take three months to get traditional Internet service, a time frame that put the grant funding at risk. High-speed mobile Internet access got them in business in just days and erased any questions of not being able to accept the grant.

Although basic Internet access was the initial reason, FIGHT discovered multiple ways to use CLEAR from Mobile Citizen to enable mobility and increase productivity in fulfilling its mission:

• Mobile staffers and program directors working in remote locations remained connected to headquarters.
• Employees who often presented at AIDS-related summits had easy Internet access on-site, not to mention smooth downloading capabilities for files needed for their presentations.
• Clinic staff were happy to hear that mobile Internet would insure that basic clinic services would continue in a disaster if power or landline service was lost.