February 7, 2008 | Read Time: 8 minutes
Two years ago, David Wilcox, director of international ministries at the Association of Christian Schools International, in Colorado Springs, struggled with the high cost of making telephone calls to the United States while traveling overseas. Then he started using Skype, an Internet-based communications system that enables him to route his calls through his laptop computer, and he immediately saw huge savings.
A typical cellphone bill for one of his trips to Asia used to total more than $400. Now it is never more than $50. “For people working overseas, the cost of calling has become almost irrational,” Mr. Wilcox says.
Like Mr. Wilcox, other charity leaders that have tried Web-based phone services to save money have discovered that many of their calls are completely free to people who use the same Internet calling software. Mr. Wilcox now speaks regularly with most of his international contacts at no cost. And when he is in China, calling someone in the United States who uses a telephone or cellphone, for example, Mr. Wilcox pays about 2 cents a minute, because Skype and other services, like AOL’s AIM Call Out, allow computer users to connect to telephones.
Before he began using Skype, he says, he could not afford to speak regularly with many of his overseas contacts and was limited to e-mail messages. Those relationships have been strengthened with consistent conversations. “Frankly, it has helped me do a better job,” says Mr. Wilcox.
Text Messages
Web-based communication systems can perform other functions too: People with broadband Internet connections can send text messages, exchange files, and communicate by video through programs that allow free, unlimited communication with others with the same or similar software. Some of the better-known services are Apple’s iChat, Microsoft’s Messenger, and AOL’s Instant Messenger.
But the systems do have some drawbacks: If a nonprofit leader is visiting a region without broadband or if Internet service is unstable, Web-enabled communications won’t work. And at heavier traffic times on the Internet, video communications can be affected, with images freezing or breaking up. What’s more, a person has to be at or near a computer and connected to the Internet, and that is not always practical given the work nonprofit employees do.
Nevertheless, the systems have made a big difference to many charity officials. In November, Mr. Wilcox used Internet communications to hold a seminar in Malaysia featuring guest speakers in Seattle and Australia. Using the system’s video capabilities, he was able to project the speakers onto a large screen so the Malaysian audience could see them. Each speaker in turn was able to see the audience, make a presentation, and answer questions in real time without ever setting foot on a plane. The video communication was completely free.
Terry Axelrod, a Seattle fund-raising consultant, was one of the guest speakers. Making her presentation using the Internet communication system, she says, saved her time and money since she didn’t have to travel. “It was fantastic that I didn’t have to go there for an hourlong presentation,” she says. Her only cost was the $39 she had to invest in a Web camera. Ms. Axelrod says she was so impressed with the experience that she now uses a Web-based system for all of her international communications and recommends it to her clients.
Some large nonprofit organizations have found Web communication savings to be so great that they have replaced their entire phone systems with “voice over Internet Protocol” or VoIP systems. The systems, using customized internal hardware and software, allow staff members and volunteers in different offices to communicate over the Internet using regular handsets.
Cross-Cultural Solutions, with headquarters in New Rochelle, N.Y., and offices in Australia, Britain, and Canada, operates an international volunteer program in 12 countries with a staff of 250 people and a volunteer force of 4,000.
With its VoIP system, volunteers and staff members in all of its offices can talk to one another free. The system also reduces the cost of calls made from the charity’s offices to outside lines. While calls are cheaper, installation of such systems can be expensive. Volodymyr Zharyy, Cross-Cultural’s technology director, estimates that setting up a VoIP system and purchasing the necessary hardware and software can cost $20,000 to $50,000, depending on the size.
What’s more, the systems don’t always function in every location. In the case of Cross-Cultural Solutions, staff members and volunteers use the system if they are in the office, but when they are traveling to the programs the charity oversees, the organization depends on another Internet-communications system, Pingo, which allows users to make calls to and from regular phones or mobile phones.
Pingo, and services like it, route calls over the Internet, and the user is charged a small fee that varies according to location. Mr. Zharyy estimates that Pingo saves 40 percent on calls made with a standard phone and is about 90 percent cheaper for mobile phone calls.
An internal customized system like the one at Cross-Cultural Solutions, with its dedicated hardware, can make sense if a nonprofit organization has multiple offices, requires lots of interaction among employees, volunteers, and other constituents, and is likely to grow, says Kevin Lo, an analyst at TechSoup, a San Francisco group that provides charities with technology assistance, donated computers, and other products.
In the right situation, Mr. Lo says, such systems can save large sums of money and are easy to expand. However, he cautions that some technical expertise is needed to maintain them. “Very often nonprofits think they can save money,” he says. “But it takes active management.” And, he adds, with a VoIP system, if the Internet connection is lost, the telephones go down as well.
Serious technical support is essential for a large VoIP system, says Jennifer Brandon, executive director of Community Voice Mail. The Seattle charity provides free, 24-hour voice mail to homeless people and others in trouble. After more than 10 years of using traditional phone systems in several cities, the organization began moving toward a centralized VoIP system two years ago.
With the VoIP system, Community Voice Mail is able to issue local phone numbers with voice-mail features to its clients. Calls are routed over the Internet to a central location in Seattle, and clients pay nothing for the service.
Cisco Systems has donated $2.5-million, equipment, and technical support for much of the VoIP transition. However, the organization discovered that it needed its own staff members to keep the system running. It now has three employees who monitor the system and perform upgrades and other maintenance tasks.
Ms. Brandon says the new system is transforming the charity’s work, enabling it to bypass problems with an outmoded phone system and serve more people than in the past — and at a much reduced cost. “We expect to essentially explode domestically,” she says.
Community Voice Mail currently can set up 50,000 voice mailboxes and expects to reach 75,000 by the end of this year, and it has hired a telecommunications company that can provide phone numbers for more than 90 percent of the country. Ms. Brandon says the technology change may soon enable the charity to offer its services to people outside the United States.
Lobbying Congress
Community Voice Mail isn’t the only charity using the Web-based technology for something more than saving on its phone bill. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International tried a VoIP voice-messaging system called Vontoo last year in an effort to recruit people to lobby Congress for more research dollars for Type 1 diabetes, the childhood form of the disease.
Mike Kondratick, director of grass-roots advocacy at the organization, says this type of campaign would normally have been run through a traditional phone bank, but he decided to experiment with a Web-based service.
The charity uploaded a recorded message and the numbers to be called to a computer system run by Vontoo. The calls were dialed via the Web as well, which made it easy for the charity to monitor how many people were answering and listening to the call.
Those who accepted the call heard a recording from the actress Mary McCormack, best known for her role on The West Wing. At the end of the 30-second message, listeners were urged to hit a single key on their telephone to be transferred to a toll-free number the organization had set up as part of the campaign. Supporters were then told to punch in their ZIP code and were immediately transferred to the office of their representative in the House of Representatives, at which point they could urge lawmakers to approve spending on diabetes research. “For the user, it was a seamless experience,” Mr. Kondratick says.
He says he anticipated that fewer than 10 percent of people who received the calls would respond, but was “pleasantly surprised” that 17 percent were patched through to the toll-free number, and 1,217 calls to Congress were made. “That rivals the response rate we get from the live phone bank,” says Mr. Kondratick.
And at a much cheaper price: The Web-based calling campaign cost $4,000, compared with a traditional phone bank, which Mr. Kondratick estimates would have cost the charity more than $10,000 for the same results.
