Bancroft
This Leading Nonprofit Serving People with Developmental Disabilities Is Using RingCentral to Improve People’s Live
We’re an organization of dedicated, hardworking employees, so of course we want the best technology solutions we can find. But as a nonprofit, we also need to be cost-conscious. Every dollar we save in operating expenses is a dollar we can put toward improving people’s lives. With RingCentral, we managed to fulfill both of those goals.
Fina Nash
SVP of Business Operations & Innovation
One of the top service providers for people with developmental disabilities
In 1883, when school teacher Margaret Bancroft founded the organization that bears her name today, children with developmental disabilities were not provided an education in the US. Margaret devoted her life to changing that—starting by founding one of the country’s first private schools for such children. And she didn’t stop there.
Margaret expanded her organization to offer a wide range of innovative programs for people of all ages with developmental disabilities—helping them improve their unique skills, work proudly in their communities, and enjoy the greatest level of independence possible.
Today, Bancroft has become a leading nonprofit service provider in the Northeastern United States for children and adults with autism and other developmental disabilities, and people of all ages who need neurological rehabilitation. The organization’s dedicated staff of 3,000, working at nearly 300 treatment and residential facilities across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, positively impacts thousands of people’s lives every year.
An internal assessment made it clear: it was time for cloud communications
For years, Bancroft’s staff used a legacy, on-prem telephony system for their business communications. Fina Nash, Senior Vice President of Business Operations & Innovation, explains that as this system’s contract neared its renewal date, her team took the opportunity to assess the organization’s communications needs going forward.
“We found that our various service departments each had very different telephony needs and that our legacy system wasn’t addressing a lot of those needs. Our admissions department, for example, needed more sophisticated capabilities for their contact center agents. Also, many of our employees who spend time moving between locations wanted access to their Bancroft numbers on the road, so they wouldn’t need to give out their personal numbers.”
Fina’s team began researching cloud-based unified communications solutions, and their search led them straight to RingCentral.
RingCentral hit all the requirements on our list: ease of use and administration, great reporting and analytics, and a unified platform for phone, messaging, and video conferencing. Also—and this one was big for us—RingCentral offered easy integrations with many apps, especially Salesforce, which is central to a lot of our key workflows.
Fina Nash
SVP of Business Operations & Innovation
INDUSTRY
Nonprofit
HQ
Cherry Hill, NJ
YEAR FOUNDED
1883
EMPLOYEES
2,700
Improving everyday workflows with RingEX and Contact Center
As Fina explains, Bancroft’s teams are finding numerous ways to streamline workflows and improve efficiencies with their suite of RingCentral cloud solutions.
“We’re finding a lot of people using the RingCentral mobile app on their own phones, so they can take and make work calls anywhere without having to share their personal numbers. That’s making their lives easier and at the same time allowing them to be more responsive to coworkers and our external partners.”
Employees are also finding several ways that the built-in RingCentral Video adds value to their operations, Fina explains. “Whenever we conduct virtual training sessions or host meetings that we need to record, we use RingCentral Video. Our previous online meeting solution didn’t offer that capability, but now we’re able to easily create and share those useful content assets.”
Additionally, she notes, having easy access to a video conferencing solution—even on their mobile phones—is helping cut down significantly on employees’ travel time. “Before COVID, we just didn’t do virtual meetings,” says Fina. “Our staff would often travel an hour to have in-person meetings. With RingCentral Video, those employees can easily have those meetings by video conference—which means less time traveling and more time being productive.”
As Fina also points out, several support departments across Bancroft are leveraging RingCentral Contact Center to improve their operations.
Our admissions department, our marketing department, and our IT team all use RingCentral Contact’s call queues, skills-based routing, the analytics engine, and the Salesforce integration to help those teams deliver a better experience to both our internal and external customers.
Fina Nash
SVP of Business Operations & Innovation
Creating even more value through RingCentral integrations
Benjamin Baez, Director of Business Systems & Integrations for Bancroft, explains that he and his team are finding ways to extend the value of their new cloud communications platform—in the RingCentral App Gallery.
“Our employees spend a lot of time in Google applications, so giving the Google Chrome Extension for RingCentral is great because it gives them key telecom capabilities right in their browser or their other Google apps.”
The ability to make RingCentral more effective through integrations has been very helpful. For example, we’ve improved our support and marketing operations with the Salesforce integration, enhanced security with the OneLogin integration… and we’re using RingCentral APIs to build a custom integration with BetterCloud to automatically provision and deactivate users, which will save IT lots of time.
Benjamin Baez
Director of Business Systems & Integrations
Enjoying all these telecom improvements while also saving money
Finally, Fina notes, replacing Bancroft’s legacy phone system with RingCentral is also helping the organization cut telecom costs in several ways.
“A lot of our employees who had desktop phones chose to get rid of them when we showed them that they could get the same phone capabilities—and many more, in fact—from anywhere using the RingCentral softphone, the web app, and the mobile. As our staff sheds their physical phones, that’s saving us money on hardware and maintenance.”
Additionally, she notes, many employees are turning in their company-issued mobile phones—another money saver. “Now that everyone has added the RingCentral mobile app to their own phones, nobody needs to carry two devices anymore. That’s saving us money as well. And given the type of work we do, we have much more important uses for that money than spending it on smartphones.”
We have thousands of employees, hundreds of locations, and a wide range of communication use-cases across our organization. But RingCentral is so flexible, we need only this one unified cloud solution to meet all our teams’ specific needs.
Fina Nash
SVP of Business Operations & Innovation