WizeHive

SUCCESS STORY BACKGROUND

Since 1963, the Saul and Dayee G. Haas Foundation has been committed to improving the quality of life among needy secondary students in communities throughout the state of Washington. By supporting local schools, they encourage students to stay in school, return to school or get involved within their learning community. Over 16,268 students in 685 schools received coats, hats, shoes, eyeglasses, college application fees, dental support, etc. via the Haas Foundation during the 2008-2009 school year.

The Haas Foundation employs two full time staff, three part time staff and 70 to 90 volunteers located in five countries and 11 states. As their efforts have grown, they realized the need to improve communication with teams that worked both in the office and remotely. They wanted to reduce the frustration level of their staff/volunteers which resulted from digging through hundreds of e-mails to understand project requirements. They also wanted to create a more efficient system by which new team members were trained and brought up to speed on current project requirements. They dreamt of "a file cabinet in the sky" and simple means by which everyone could access it.

THE WIZEHIVE SOLUTION

After evaluating several options, they selected WizeHive and quickly recognized its powerful benefits for collaboration and project management. Before WizeHive, new developers spent hours searching through e-mails to identify project requirements, timelines and deliverables. After implementing WizeHive, new team members could easily be up and running within a day. The executive director realized the potential of WizeHive, and the organization quickly began using WizeHive for more if its projects.

THE RESULTS

As executive director, Bonnie Hilory reviews 31 workspaces regularly to gauge the productivity of various teams. She also has selected specific workspace updates to be sent to her iPhone, which allows her to monitor communication as needed. No longer do users say "I didn't get the e-mail." The ability to archive and search through emails within WizeHive encourages improved communication with the team, and responding to conversations without having to log in provides a huge timesaver.

Bonnie shared: "Managing change is a real need. As contractors, staff and volunteers turn over, WizeHive helps the agency save money and significantly improve the bottom line." Instead of spending hours searching for documents, they now spend two minutes adding the new person into the appropriate workspace and showing them how to retrieve all the information they need. "In the year we've been working with WizeHive, we've improved our communication across the Foundation, created a more efficient system for training new staff and actually saved money - it's been a fantastic experience."