Make-A-Wish

My name is Jeff Beck. I'm the director of Technology at Make-a-Wish America and we grant wishes to children with life-threatening illnesses to enrich the human experience with hope, strength, and joy. We grant on average one wish every 37 minutes. Last year we granted over 14,200 wishes. Everything that we do here at Make-a-Wish is really about the wish kid. And so it's really important for us to communicate with all the people that are involved in the wish process, whether that's the wish family, the volunteers, all of the people here planning and orchestrating the whole wish process, as well as contacting and working with our generous donor community.

Make-A-Wish Foundation of America started here in Arizona 30 years ago and it's gone from this grassroot family started organization with one chapter, to now we've got 62 chapters here in the US. Those 120 locations vary in size from maybe two employees up to upwards of 100 employees. So that ability to collaborate is really important.

We've been with the Mitel solution since we moved into this building about 8 years ago. It wasn't as robust for our chapters that were on it. We wanted to make sure that our smallest chapter location was able to do the same communications and collaborations suite as our largest most enterprise ready chapters work. When we had the opportunity to improve our solution, we went with MiCloud and MiCollab. It allowed us to implement a solution that was very stable, very easy to support, and very cost-effective. By going to the MiCloud solution has decreased the cost of start-up. So as we bring chapters into the phone system, they get the
MiCollab software and I think that's been the biggest hit. So what we've been able to do is onboard these locations at our own pace, actually go out and deploy the technology solution, train it, bring employees on, get those cost savings and keep our existing investment intact. Now when they're calling somebody at National, they're not just calling and hoping somebody answers. They can look at the software, see if they're available, see if they're in a meeting. If not they can  send an instant message or they can simply leave a voicemail but they've got much more control and understand the availability now.

It's got a voicemail, it's got twinning to their cell phones, and all of these things that are just blowing them away that they never thought that'd have because of the limitations of their budgets. Our experience with Mitel has been great. They're a great partner. They've helped us solve many of the technical challenges that we come across as we've gone through the solution in this learning process. It's been very rewarding to be partnered with Mitel. They've come in with very competitive pricing, better solution, and ease-of-use, maintenance. All of these things that just make my life easier. The Mitel solution really allows us to collaborate much more effectively than we have in the past. Really, we're not doing technology for technologysake. It has to be something that really benefits our key goal of delivering wishes.