Ask Us Anything: Live Demo of Mobile Tech for Workforce Development

Max Schelkopf and Casey Loewenthal from Engage by Cell demonstrated mobile tech solutions for workforce development professionals. You’ll see how workforce boards, state agencies, and youth programs are using mobile web apps, mass text messaging, and on-demand training tools. Transcript below.

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[00:02] Max Schelkopf: Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Welcome, Hi, Casey! How are you?

[00:08] Casey Loewenthal: Hello, Max! I'm great excited for another webinar day.

[00:13] Max Schelkopf: Another webinar day. Welcome as people come in. We'll give it a we're a minute early, we'll give it at least another minute or 2. Let everybody join. But happy. What is today? Today's Wednesday. I've been off for 4 days, .

[00:32] Casey Loewenthal: Throws me too.

[00:35] Max Schelkopf: As everybody trickles in. Thank you for joining Casey and myself today. If you want to throw in the chat window there where you're joining from, and maybe what organization you're with. I'll start it off. There we go, and again we'll give it another minute or 2 right, Katrina. Pleasure to see you. Alright, we'll give it another 30 seconds. There's a couple more people trickling in Matt with Equus, my friend from Green River, Kentucky. Glad you joined Lake County, Illinois. It's a nice county. I'm in Peoria County, believe Lake County is north of Chicago. if I remember correctly, has, Evanston, maybe Forest in it all right. Well, we'll give it another 30 seconds. Here, there's a couple more people trickling in. Then we'll get started.

[02:09] Casey Loewenthal: During the presentation today everybody is muted, but if you have questions, feel free to throw them into the chat, we will try and attack them at the time that they come in. If they're relevant, or we'll push it to a more appropriate time. But we will make sure that we touch on all questions you guys have, please, the title says, ask us anything.

[02:33] Max Schelkopf: Yep. and Anna is from our team is also joining us from behind the scenes. She'll be active in that chat window as well, but it's too past. Let's go ahead and get started. We're talking about my favorite topic today, Casey workforce development and how our platforms help it out. And we're gonna do a little bit of a demo. I'll introduce myself. My name is Max Shelkoff. I am one of the senior mobile solution consultants here at engage by cell. I spend probably 90% of my time in the workforce development world. I'm very familiar with kind of the common goals across workforce development and all the 10,000 acronyms, the most important one being we owe. Typically right. But I'll let Casey introduce himself.

[03:27] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, thanks, Max. I am a customer success manager here at engage myself. I am typically introduced after you sign up with our services and help with the onboarding process. Long term usage renewals, new features, upgrades, all that kind of good stuff and it's great to join you guys today, I see some familiar faces that I've worked with before, and some new ones that hopefully work together down the line.

[03:55] Max Schelkopf: Fantastic. All right. Next slide. Pretty, please, Anna. Little bit about engaged by cell. I do want to touch on, I believe. in case he probably knows this better than I do. But I think we're roughly around 70 ish workforce development boards or organizations utilize our platforms now, and that is nationwide. We're from East Coast all the way to the west, and everywhere in between a couple of statewide dol initiatives as well. that's exciting point being is we're I mentioned, extremely well versed in all things workforce development. And that's why we're happy to jump on today and discuss some of the super common use cases and do a little demo but a little bit about engaged by cell outside of workforce development. We've got hundreds. It's quite a few customers at this point. But after the 19 plus years we've been in business, we've grown quite a bit, Casey. How long have you been with the company. Now you've been around for.

[04:56] Casey Loewenthal: Almost 8 years.

[04:58] Max Schelkopf: 8 years. Yeah. Casey has been involved in a lot of the growth and a lot of the kind of exploration involved with us learning about workforce development, too, and all the changes that's come with it. But cloud based solutions. absolutely human customer support, which is Casey and his team a hundred percent of the way. And the 2 main tools we'll talk about. But a little bit of data points on them is the text messaging platform and the mobile web apps. And there's some examples on the right side. There is some of our clients that we work with next slide. Casey, you're a hair older than me, but not much right, and.

[05:41] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah.

[05:41] Max Schelkopf: I don't know about you, but when I started my professional career, see, 12 years ago, or something that now, I was diligently coached to never text a customer, never text anybody in any kind of business capacity. And you and I have both seen that kind of change in progress I mean, I don't know about on the customer service side, but from kind of the the sales perspective that I lead in the presentations that I give. I would say. 3 quarters of the people that are interested in our platform. Say, if you need to get a hold of me, text me right.

[06:25] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, yeah. Those 1st 2 points on that list are have flipped from previous years. I mean, there's texting has been around for 20 plus years. But really, in the last 5 has it become the primary means of communication socially accepted? Everyone has the phone in their pocket, people check their phones during meetings they read text, whether they act upon it or not, but they are are reading them faster than they're checking a voicemail. That's a guarantee.

[06:57] Max Schelkopf: Of course, and I always pick on myself first, st and I'll do it right now. But to kind of hit home the point of nobody's checking email they once were. And if you're doing kind of blanketing outreach, and you're getting a 20% open rate, you're knocking it out of the park, right? And kind of the main data point that we preach. And we've seen consistently time and time again, isn't texting has a 95% engagement rate. And this is where I encourage everybody on the call to take out their phone. I don't know if you can see it, but my personal gmail account. There, I've got 31,407 unread emails. And I've got 0 unread texts right? that's gonna be commonplace for most people right now, occasionally, Casey, who's a sports fanatic, gets in a bad text chat or text group, and you have 40 unread text messages because.

[07:53] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah.

[07:54] Max Schelkopf: Oh, yeah, your teams. But those are kind of the main data points. The emails aren't as effective as they once were. And people. Every single person on their cell phone has caller Id. they're vetting out phone calls. And then lovely Covid really kind of broke the apprehension to QR codes right? I mean, during Covid and the pandemic. If you wanted to read a menu if you wanted to really access a lot of things right. QR. Codes really became kind of widely accepted. And I'll say, my 83 year old, grandma. Very QR. Code friendly. there's no excuses anymore. Right? and then the last little piece is Casey touched on there. You know every single person has one of these in their pockets. Right? And if you're not starting to utilize those in your outreach and programs. it's gonna be tougher every single day, because they just become more and more incorporated in those processes and our communication channels. Right? we're going to touch on a little bit about the challenges here. Next slide, pretty, please. There we go. there are 4 challenges up here, but I kind of to put them in 2 big buckets right. and then I think more. 2 of them are kind of the challenge. And then 2 of them are results. And the challenges here engagement as we kind of hammered home here, you know, people aren't answering phone calls. They're not checking their email. How are you supposed to get a hold of these people and many, many of you have those specific metrics that you have to contact and have to reach out to every single person in your caseload or your program once a week, once a month, whatever it might be, and really bridging that communication gap with utilizing the texting and the mobile resources. It's gonna help you overcome that challenge right? And then the second challenge is, I'm sure everybody on this call can relate to is resource, accessibility. Casey. How many resources does the average workforce development have? Is it? 1050, a hundred, a thousand.

[10:07] Casey Loewenthal: 100 plus easy. Yeah. And then, and where it is navigating to it, making it accessible, I think, is the most important part.

[10:17] Max Schelkopf: Exactly with the the kind of information accessibility, the resource accessibility that's really tackled and overcome by the mobile web app which we'll dive into our our solutions here in a second. But it's all about helping people get placed into the programs quicker and more efficiently right. And with the staffing and operational efficiency that's becoming more and more relative every single day, with all the funding questions up in the air constantly right? And  it can really automate some of these processes for you and make some of that outreach, not only more effective but more efficient, which we'll go into in in a much more streamlined and efficient process for the end user, which is what matters most right if they can kind of overcome that hurdle of potentially not having access to a desktop computer or not having viable transportation to get to the career center or the job center, or they can't get in touch with people if they can take care of some of those steps in that process is using their cell phones, then that's a win right? And then, of course. all of these things accumulate into a better result. In the end. People are getting placed into jobs faster, more efficiently. And you're gonna have all this wonderful data to back up your results. And it's not only about what results. You know, we placed 99 out of a hundred jobs, or we placed 105 out of those 100 we killed it. But these tools help you kind of tell that story of how that happened as well. Right? you're gonna have all of those communications that took place through the platforms. And you're gonna have the data backing up, hey? We had 5,000 people go through the mobile web app last year. And it's it's showing the results. Right? what are these tools? the 1st one kind of a broken record. But the texting. But really what we've done is developed a text messaging platform that tries to go a couple additional layers deeper. Right? As Casey mentioned, texting isn't a new technology. It's been around for 20 years, and I can remember back in the day having to wait to wait till after 5 Pm. Or whatever it was to text my friends, right? Because it was free. this is a tech that's been around for a while. But again, what we've tried to do is is Peel back a couple additional layers of engagement capabilities from the standpoint of clicking a couple of buttons, 1,000 text messages go out saying, Hey, job fair next Friday, click here to register that kind of stuff down to the one on one conversation. And those long format conversations that need to happen through the case management process can be facilitated. And then also mass inbound capabilities. creating call to actions to encourage people to start to participate. I'm sure we've all seen one of these before on a billboard or on the side of a truck, or walking into an office building. Are you looking for a new career text jobs to Xyz phone number, right? And what that'll help you do is encourage people to participate in that call to action. It'll help you build that database because it captures those people's phone numbers instantly when they text in and it will automatically send them a text message directing them to maybe an intake form or the link to your job board or scheduling an appointment at the job center all those different things. And then the second tool we're going to cover today is the mobile web app platform. for those of you who aren't familiar with the mobile web app platform which I see a lot of our current users are on this call, which I'm excited to see, and they could probably tell you all about it. But I'll do my best here. the mobile web app differs from a native application, which is just the It terminology for all those hard downloaded apps that we all have on our phones, right? And the main difference here is mobile web apps are entirely web based or URL driven. And we do that because data suggests in a lot of client feedback. It's getting really difficult to get people to hard download apps to their phone right? if Casey is in my caseload, and I need to get Casey to hard download an app. I'm gonna have to catch Casey on the phone. Ask Casey, do you have a droid. Do you have an apple product? Okay, Casey, go to the app store. That's the wrong one. Just make sure you keep it up to date. And then Casey's gonna tell me, I don't want this on my phone, right? kind of going into that theory of if you give someone a reason not to do it. They're probably not gonna do it right. what are the mobile web apps? They look, feel, and act is functional as possible, and as close as possible to a hard downloaded app experience. Only again, we kind of break that hard download barrier by making it all web based. and all kinds of amazing different tools. Polls, surveys, videos, quizzes. We'll go into that more detail when I share my screen here in a little bit. One of those powerful tools inside of the mobile web app is document uploading streamlining it as much as possible for the end users. those program participants can click a link in a text or pull up that mobile web, app, snap, a photo of their resume, and you have it instantly right. And that goes for any kind of document exchange that you're trying to conduct. Auto calling we've seen this kind of come into the theory of hit them with all you got right. if you have a tool and you have a method, and there's another communication channel, you might as well use it right, especially with some of the older demographics or more rural areas. You can set it up that you know again a couple of clicks of a button. Every single person in the Caseload can receive a phone call. And it's just a a voice recording. maybe telling them a piece of information. Maybe it's hey? That Job Fair is next Thursday, or it can have a call to action in it. You know, you need to get into your portal and do. Xyz, whatever it might be. But again. really automating that outreach process for those folks who are responsible for doing all of it. Because I don't know about you, Casey, but when you need to sit down and call a hundred clients. it's not a great time he loves all of you, but.

[16:57] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, why not? Why not automate it? Especially when when there's something doesn't necessarily need to be a hundred percent personal. It's more about getting the message across as being the vital point rather than, Hey, we're trying to have a conversation with you. We're just trying to let you know about a job fair, or a cancellation, or something that really takes bandwidth from your team to accomplish regardless of the message. yeah, just another awesome tool that can kind of help automate some process.

[17:29] Max Schelkopf: Love it alright, .

[17:32] Casey Loewenthal: If you have a couple of questions, I think this is a decent pause right here. 1st off, go ahead. If you guys want to scan this QR code. We're gonna demo a few messages. while I answer some questions, it gives you a moment to text in just open up the camera on your phone or a QR code. Reader, if you have an older device and text in Demo space webinar to 5, 6, 5, 1, 2. If you scan the QR code, it's gonna automate that process, and you simply just send the text and you should get a response back immediately. we had one question about languages within the platform. we have a lot of organizations that do Spanish and English outside of that when it comes to text messaging, you would just send it out as a Spanish or English. Excuse me message and a lot of users devices that they use will convert that message to other languages. Or they have their own special keyboards on it. But in terms of our platform it's just English or translations that you guys do for Spanish in terms of the mobile web app, we actually have a Google translate integration. you can have the content translated outside of content on uploaded documents or within images can actually translate into up to a hundred 20 languages, making some pretty robust list. you can also shrink that down to a smaller subset based on common languages that you guys use. And that's for the mobile web app. We had another question about Correct me if I'm wrong. It seems you want to have certain users just have access to reporting in order to document what's been done . You could have as many users. On the platform. We don't charge per user. you can have people that just access reports, people that just handle conversations. Administrators that have access to everything general users that just have minimal access to certain areas of the platform. But yes, you could have different users in there and then. The benefit of our platform is is that Max kind of mentioned that there is a paper trail of every activity done by every employee within the system. If you need to see interactions by one employee to one user and every conversation and every message that's been sent in our platform. It's a couple of different clicks if they're using their own personal cell phone that might not even be data that you can even retrieve. yes, that is one positive with our platform is is the amount of information that you can get on the fly, that kind of mirrors. What is needed within workforce development. And that's over the years. Something that we've kind of enhanced, based on conversations with all of you is what's really needed. What are key points that are helpful to you guys. And we've we've tried to build those in. And we're always taking suggestions on other new things that you guys are are working with, or could be a good fit.

[20:32] Max Schelkopf: Absolutely alright. Keep the questions coming. I love it. Now, Casey did say, if everybody wants to try this out one more time you can scan that QR code and it'll populate demo space webinar to the phone number 5, 6, 5, 1, 2. And if you hit, send on that text, or if you would to just type it out, it is demo space webinar to 5, 6, 5, 1, 2, and we'll give that 10 seconds here, and then I'll share my screen. All right, Anna, you wanna stop sharing and let me take over. Thank you. All right. Can we all see my screen perfect. Okay. Now to start, I just want everybody to be aware that all of our platforms are entirely web based. to access the back end this, you would just have a unique login to you, and you would go to engage by cell.com, and there's a little login portal, and once you log in, you would land on this page here bunch of different tabs across the top. Here these are really just for the different tools. How you navigate in between the different services we provide the ones we're gonna focus on today is this text messaging tab this mobile web tab and then reporting. I'll probably jump over to Real quickly, just to show you some of the different capabilities. But, as I mentioned earlier, when I was explaining the text messaging platform. There's kind of 3 main capabilities that we've built in here one being the mass inbound capabilities. creating that call to action which we all just participated in right. we all texted webinar or demo space webinar to 5, 6, 5, 1, 2, and what this does really kind of serves 3 purposes. one gives you that call to action to put in all of your marketing materials, put in your email signatures. Put it your events. You're hosting all over the place is the point, right? Because you're trying to encourage people to participate and start to get informed about the services that you're offering right? one call to action 2 States. Why, someone's texting in. again, in this case, we said, thanks for texting in oftentimes with our workforce development clients which I'll make a little example of here in a second. It will say something Thank you for texting workforce development. ABC, we'll keep you up to date on all career education, training, opportunities. Right? call to action. State why someone's texting in. And then, 3rd and arguably, most importantly, we click this little. See subscribers button. There's everybody who's texting in right? we'll jump back over to this, manage inbound texting. with the secondary keywords. these are super powerful tool for creating additional call to actions. Most common use case here is to create one that says jobs or career, or something along those lines. I'll create one. Together. We'll create one together. We'll call it jobs. And we'll say. Please click here to view all the amazing career opportunities local to you. And I am going to grab this link real quick. And this is the link to the job board to one of our clients, and we have this little short URL tool here, you can copy and paste any URL you have in here. Hit, submit, and our system will shorten it into a little buy, sell bitly, because obviously, sometimes Urls are not super text message friendly, and then we'll attach a new list to it, and we'll call it webinar job seekers. And now we've created a whole new call to action. The if you want to text the word jobs or scan that QR code. It will populate that text for you, and if you hit, send. you'll get that text that we just created together. let's talk about use cases real quickly, while everybody's scanning that in creating additional call to actions for each program you offer. youth, adult services apprenticeships. Xyz, all the different programs you're offering can have this little call to action that will organically start to build this database for you while it's simultaneously providing them with resources to learn more about it. Right? And with the kind of career orientated platforms or programs. many of our customers will create additional call to actions for maybe career paths. if you have a really exciting employer partnership with a company who's hiring a ton of welders, and then you have an employer partnership with a local hospital that's looking to hire a ton of cnas or whatever it is. You can break down those keywords and those call to actions by each individual career opportunity that you have and provide them with a text automatically back, maybe to the link to where they can apply click to apply things that. But what it's doing also by creating these little secondary keywords and attaching those lists to it. It's creating different little buckets of people subscribers. hey, we know everybody who's texted in the word jobs is on this list. now we really need to cater our outreach to those people knowing that they're job seekers, right? you can kind of fine tune your outreach by building these separate little lists and creating these different call to actions. that's the inbound. Again, from a mass communication standpoint in a nutshell here on this outbound, simple text. this is where you can send your mass communications out  super common use case is if we're hosting a job fair and we want to get people signed up and registered and get the word out about this job fair couple of steps. This little title box here is strictly for internal organization purposes. as long as you put a title in that box when you pull the reporting and look back at the text messages you sent out. You don't have to go through and read every single text. You can just add a glance. Say, Hey, that was for the job. Fair push, right? And this box is where you can actually create that text itself. we can say Job fair next Friday, from noon to 5 Pm. Hiring on the spots. Please bring a resume. and we'll do a little hypothetical call to action click here to register. And again, just before I'm gonna use this link as a hypothetical here. But we've included that little link preview of it here on the right side, and you can personalize these messages as well. if you wanted to address everybody by their 1st name, you could add a personalization token in there. And we are integrated with chat gpt. if you want some help kind of crafting and writing these text messages, it's definitely there for you to use. Step 2 is, choose where this text is going, a little dropdown bar will pull up all your different lists. again, you might have this broken down by youth programs or people in the Caseload right now, or people who attended your job fairs in the past, etc. I'm just gonna choose the list that we're all on right now and then step 3 is, when do you want it to go out? several different options here. This is where some of that automation comes in. Right? if you have an outline of your events, Calendar, and you want to sit down for 5 min and create a bunch of these texts and kind of set it and forget it. You can do that by selecting which day and time you want it to go out. or if you want it, to be daily or weekly, kind of leading up to something, and you want to get a little more aggressive with it. But you can definitely schedule those to sit to go out in the future. I'm gonna hit unscheduled for now.

[29:10] Casey Loewenthal: Max. Change the list, Max, change the list. I think the webinar. Oh, you're.

[29:15] Max Schelkopf: There you go!

[29:16] Casey Loewenthal: Yep.

[29:17] Max Schelkopf: There we go, all right. and you can save this notification if you want. But I'm gonna hit, send. and all of us who texted in earlier, just got our text about the job. Fair. Good catch, Casey. Thank you. All right. scheduled text messages. Just you're aware, if you did have some Pre. Can to go out in the future. You can go in and edit those change who's receiving them when they're going out can also send picture messages. if you were having a job fair with a flyer that you wanted to push out, you can absolutely do that as well. and I'll push out a good stock image of the Us. Postal service there for you. and we can say hiring 10 mail carriers. and just before you would select which list or list you want that to go to. and I'll hit. Send the one thing to keep in mind about picture messages. If it is a time relevant situation. I just got my text but it can take several minutes for those to go out and be received just based on cell signal and things of that kind of nature, because it's a larger file, right? manage lists and manage subscribers. You can have as many different lists as you want. again, if you want to go in and rename them, see how many people are in those lists. See if there's pre scheduled text messages or sequences or workflows attached to them can delete them, assign them time zones. If that's relevant you can manage all of that. And then more importantly, and utilize more day to day. Is this manage subscribers. this is where all of our contacts are living for this webinar right now. And obviously all of you are probably working with a lot of people already right now. if you wanted to migrate folks into your lists, it's very easy upload subscribers. It's just an Excel file column, A, B and C 1st name, last name phone number. Choose which list you want them to go on, and they're in the system pretty quick and simple far the last little bit here. I'm gonna ask Casey to help me out. Casey, if you wouldn't mind, and I'll do it with you as a little pretend. But Casey and I are, gonna demonstrate the one on one conversation here. if Casey and I scan that QR code. We will start to populate ourselves into the one on one portal. And I'm gonna say, I need help with my resume. we're role playing as a case manager right now. And you'll see there's 2 text messages that have come into this portal. what this looks  they can have this call to action right where people can jump in and trigger these one on one conversations. But, more importantly, with automating some of this Caseload follow up. if I'm a case manager and I want to automate a text to go out every single Friday to every single person my Caseload. I can set that up I just demonstrated with the job. Fair reminder, right? But that message could say, Hey, Casey, I hope the job search is going well. Don't forget. You can always text me if I need help. And if Casey were to respond to that text, it would trigger this one on one conversation to occur, and I can see hey, Max texted in and said, I need help with my resume, and I can say no problem. Would you to send it over or schedule an appointment if I can spell today. And to the end user, it looks just a normal text message conversation, and then I'm done with Max waiting for his response. I can jump over and help Casey. When is the next job fair? The next I can say, Hi, Casey. the next job fair is on Friday. and as you can see, I can help a lot of people really quickly jump in between those conversations. and all of these transcribed case notes are saved indefinitely, and they can easily be extracted as a report. If you want to see just all the individual messages between you and that individual. You can always copy and paste them straight into whatever system. Crm, potentially that you're using. The 1st questions we get asked about this. if you notice Casey and I's phone numbers are there and not our names. If that person's name is attached to that phone number under the manage subscribers part. It will populate their names there and then. Secondly, do I have to stare at this screen all day long right and hit refresh. How am I gonna know if people are in this system super simple under this alert emails and alert phones, you can put your email and or your phone number in there, and you will start to receive alerts telling you and put your business hours in there if you'd saying, Hello, operator, you have messages in the queue that need to be answered, and it will include this little short URL here that will actually redirect you to a mobile version of this. And if we pretend that this is my phone for a second. even if you're on the go. You can click that link, jump in there and respond to that individual as needed pretty simple, quick recap. Oh, we got some questions in here.

[35:19] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah, Max, there's a question about uploading a list in excel of subscribers. Just hop over to. Yeah. first, st you go to manage lists and you create your list or add to an existing list. Then you go to manage subscribers on the next page and click upload subscribers in the middle. and your file needs to be in a specific format column. A is a 1st name column B is a last name column C is a phone number column A and B are optional. If you don't have names, just leave it blank. The phone number has to be in column C, and there cannot be any headers at the top. There could also not be any hidden columns, sometimes with excel, you hide columns that'll make it  that the columns do not fall under the A B or C requirement, make sure that that is the case, and if you are still having issues with uploading it. You can reach out to me directly, and we can hop on the phone and get those uploaded for you.

[36:37] Max Schelkopf: Absolutely. And another way. this happens sometimes. Right? if you have one individual who walks into the job center, the career center and you don't wanna have to create a whole spreadsheet to upload that one individual, and you didn't get them to scan the QR code and opt themselves in. You can add one individual to time. 1st name, last, name cell phone number. Choose which list or lists you want them to go on hit, submit, and it will populate them in there as well. I know sometimes, yeah, if it's 1 or 2 people you don't wanna have to go and create an entire spreadsheet for them. Do we have other questions in here creating lists? Perfect? Yeah, we'll get you taken care of. Heidi. Okay, that is the texting in a nutshell. There. The next little piece is the mobile web app. I'm going to pull up QR. Code. and if everybody wants to scan this QR code. It will populate on your phone. And this is a little demo workforce development example with a lot of the common use cases. And while we're doing that, I kind of want to cover the the 3 main advantages with the mobile web app. one breaking that hard download barrier we discussed earlier. Right? it's much, much more accessible for the end user. Again, the barrier to entry just scan a QR code or being that it's entirely web based. It's all URL or link driven. as we just saw, you can push out a text with a little clickable link in it. They click that link. Boom up pops the mobile web app second, big advantage here Casey and myself are not software engineers, not even close. And Casey and I build these all the time. that tells you that there is 0. It required in kind of the content creation. Here it's all done via drag and drop, which I'll show you. And then 3. The the big advantage here is, it's really quick, right? if you want to create content right now. Odds are, you probably have a web developer of some kind that's in charge of managing your website or the social media person whomever that person might be. But you have a job fair in 4 days, and you want to create a little blurb about it, create a registration form and text it out to a thousand people. You can do that in 5 min or less, and I'll show you that here in a second. no hard download required. No, it required. And it's really, really quick for creating content and distributing it. Okay, what you're looking at here is the the main screen for the mobile web app, just texting. We've got some different tabs here on the left side. The main 2 that we'll cover is the navigation and the build your pages and on here we've got on the navigation page. This is where you manage the home screen in the order of these different icons, you can create new icons and move them around and change kind of where they appear on the screen. And that's done just dragging and dropping. if I wanted to move this little job openings lower down, I would just click it, drag it down, and if I refresh my page. and if you refresh your page on your phone. There it is. it moved around. And you can create additional pages in here as well. Run through some use cases here really quickly. upcoming job fairs, super important, super common all the community resources. those are going to be the things helping people with those transportation issues all those kinds of barriers that they might face, linking out your job boards and job openings. Xyz. A lot of the different use cases within these mobile web apps. Build your pages. This is where you can create content. text image poll, survey, form, video, linking out your socials. File types, Pdf, word, Doc, etc. I'll create a little if we're hosting a job fair. And I want to create a blurb and text it out real quick with the registration. I'm gonna grab this text, icon drag it into the builder window job fair next Friday hit save live in real time. There it is. And I want a little image of the job fair. I'm hosting. I'll grab my flyer. I'm just gonna do the post office again. And now we've got our little flyer. And then I want to have people register for it. I'm gonna say, Job, fair registration form. And we want some identifiers out of these people. we're gonna go full name. And you want their phone number. And you want their email. I'm gonna hit, save and boom live in real time there's our little job fair. And then we're gonna grab this link and we're gonna go over to texting and push it out to our entire database. And you'll see people just start to fly in right? And I'm gonna show you how easy it is. let's say, you were not done with building that out, you don't want it to be live. You can turn any content on and off as needed, and you can also delete it as needed as well. and these can look and feel a lot of different ways. Just you can see there's Circle icons, bar navigation square stacked is becoming more and more popular. It's pretty modern option combinations of the 2 Circle and Bar nav. a lot of different options and branding capabilities inside of these have I talked enough, Casey.

[42:47] Casey Loewenthal: I know you're doing a good job. Couple of things I will kind of reiterate on. Some of this is. we are not recreating your website. This is meant to be a bridge to your resources. something that you guys can create on the fly. Max has been doing this for years. he made that page pretty quickly. But after training, you guys can do those pages in a few minutes. 15 min. Spend a Friday afternoon, get things set up for the month, schedule out some messages for upcoming job fairs and go back to some of your other tasks. We can link to active calendars that you guys have. You don't need to manage a calendar on our system and a calendar on yours. You can upload presentations that you build in other resources and put them in hours. Buttons can link to pages that you guys already manage on your website or job postings on other business websites. But you don't necessarily need to build everything on our system. Just take them to the mobile web, app, have kind of digestible categories where they can. Things tend to be where you would think they'd be. which is a lot easier than a government website or a workforce website where you guys have 100 plus documents, you have legal stuff that's a little bit more tiresome or or difficult for people to kind of weed through. You can do it by multiple languages. yeah, use our system as kind of a bridge to get to those other resources.

[44:16] Max Schelkopf: Exactly. Anna, do you want to pull the slides back up and we'll discuss some of the kind of use cases real quick, and then Casey can tell you about what happens after you sign up really? Cause that's where he specializes in. But real quickly, just some of the kind of across departmental use cases. Right? what usually happens with our customers is one department will see it fall in love with it, and then the folks over that run the youth program will be, hey, we need this, too. just wanted to kind of put out and show you some of the different departments that use it. It's not just we owe a title, one stuff. It's across the board with reentry programs, youth services, especially with the youth. The only way to get a hold of them is text them. And if you're not using some version of a mobile web app or some mobile device functionality, then you're falling behind with them right? It's the only way they operate apprenticeships. Humongous push for right now, coming down from the White House lots and lots of apprenticeship programs are going to start springing up here.  definitely use case we see all the time. And then obviously, adult education, right? all of the kind of skill up and training that's required through these processes. We work with those folks every single day as well.  next slide Anna and Casey, I signed up for engagement. What happens.

[45:51] Casey Loewenthal: 1st step. You go through a a small form to get a phone number allocated to your business through the phone carriers. They do a small vetting to make sure you're legitimate, that you're not gonna spam. No worries. We've yet to have someone not good through that vetting process. It takes about a week or 2 based on kind of the information you guys have. Once that's set up. Then we do training. another colleague of mine, Fred typically, does the training Max myself as well as Fred can, can all do the trainings and help you guys out and we teach you how to do everything that you saw Max do today. We've built a platform that is managed by you all, you don't have to send us what you want done. You can do it yourself. We kind of teach you to fish rather than give you the fish. we get you up and running, how to build, content, how to update pages, how to send out text messages. And then comes the marketing piece. this is crucial. This service will not run itself. It can automate processes, but things have to be initiated by you guys, and how to do that is with a level of marketing. It's through adding the QR code on your website to get people to opt in building a barrier of entry to a job fair as the means you opt into this messaging platform, you can come to the job fair that opens up doors down the line of endless amounts of communication that you can do other resources. And that is kind of the best way to go about it is, people are not going to stumble upon this. They're not going to accidentally opt into lists. You need to give them that QR code. You need to tell them about the keyword. Your staff needs to know how to talk to their their caseload about how to opt into messaging. and that's all part of the training, and we can help out with the marketing pieces as well, and then it's it's building a text campaign. If that's the service that you're gonna do, I always recommend start out at the least, have one message every month. Set to go out and then fill in the blanks from there. Because once you start texting, if you take a 2, 3 month break. You're basically starting out fresh. That's a new phone number to everybody. That's a sort of untrustworthy that they started texting me about jobs. And then they stopped. And then, 3 months later, there's a new job. Was there no more jobs in between that? building some sort of cadence? Whether it's the second Tuesday of every month at 1130, and they can expect it, but then, once from there, you can kind of ramp it up. I think once a month is low, I would say once a week is where you should really be at, if not more, but at the very least start out with some sort of 12 month campaign, and then fill in the blanks from there.

[48:48] Max Schelkopf: Absolutely. And this this goes along with what Casey and his team specialize in, and and what I assist with as well is this, you know the whole game plan from start to finish, as the slide says, right? it's it's, how do you market it? How do you get them enrolled. And then what do you do with it? And then, ultimately, you know, the goal is to get those job verifications, the end result. And these are all things that we can coach you through. I. Casey says it on every call, and I love it. It's you know. This might be new to you, but we do it every day, right? we're here to help you, and we're here to assist in any way we can. I think Anna's got some some marketing examples on how some of our clients have gotten it launched out here. again, it's it's marketing one on one right. It's it's getting as much exposure to the the platform and the call to actions as possible. all of your different marketing materials that you're putting out make sure you include that QR code. Make sure you include the QR code to the mobile web app, make sure you include the kind of manual call to action as well. The text, Xyz to the phone number, and then, next slide. There's some great examples of some real world putting it on the business card, putting it on the pop up banners at the actual job centers themselves. That bulletin board in the middle. That's 1 of the examples where they created one of those QR code call to actions for every single job opportunity or program that they're offering. you can create all those different little buckets putting it on the website, putting it on the socials. Right? It's it's it's anywhere and everywhere. And this, Casey mentioned, is something that we're happy to help you with. Happy to help you brainstorm with. It's what we love doing. It's how we learn as well, because workforce development is constantly changing, too. Right?  it's it's these conversations that we have every day with our customers that help us stay at the cutting edge of things as well, and understand what you all need. we can help and build it right? But last slide, I wanna be respectful. Casey, you wanna talk about analytics for a second. Please.

[51:01] Casey Loewenthal: Yeah. we've mentioned reporting a little bit. We really have. Reports broken down by every service. And we'd to think that there is a metric that you guys need in every report that we have, or every report has, some version of a metric that you guys would need. We could build custom reports. there's something that you don't have. But you can get general statistics about how many page views you have going to your mobile site, how many users in general which page is most popular time of day that they're accessing it. If you build any of the elements that Max spoke about of surveys, polls, forms, all of those are tied to their own specific report that can be filtered by date range email to yourself, downloaded. To an excel or Pdf. within texting. There's how many messages you guys send out. you can really monitor it. If you have a text chat, conversation tool, you can see each operator how many messages they're sending out average per day. At 1 point Max showed, adding a link into a message. kind of a cool feature, too, that you can see is, how many clicks are you getting in that message? with email, open rates, you kind of get some metrics in terms of they opened it. They clicked around text messaging tells you if it was delivered. It doesn't tell you if it's been opened. Max kind of did an example. We don't sit there with 50 unread text messages we do 3,000 unread emails. But if you want to know if they took an action that clicked the link within it and tell you that. you can see. I sent out 50 messages. 45 people clicked it. 5 did not. And you can also pull reports of both sides of that story. you can pull the 5 people that didn't click the link, create a sub list. From that. You can pull the 45 people who did create a sub list from that. And at this point you're engaging with them as 2 completely different users as one's engaged in your information, and one is not at that point. You can use your marketing hat and try and target them in a different way. we do have graphs. We have charts. And we can walk through any reports on a separate call. If you guys want.

[53:21] Max Schelkopf: we did have one question come in about the pricing structure. Typically, one time setup fee. And then we have an annual platform hosting 99 out of a hundred times we do operate in one year, contracts and then there are some optional. Add ons, such as appointment, booking and the mobile web app, and then the auto calling each kind of little capability typically can be broken down to fit any budget right? And the text message bundles are really the main dynamic piece of pricing and they can be scaled to fit anybody's needs. I know Casey and I. We definitely have customers who are small but fierce. One man, one woman, shows, and they get a lot done with the platforms. And then we have organizations that have hundreds of users. Right? it is very scalable in that sense. don't be scared that something isn't going to be affordable because it's too small of an organization or too small of a use case. We can typically figure out what you need best and create something around that to make sure you have the tools you need in an affordable cost. And anybody on the webinar we are offering a 30 day money back guarantee. if it's something you're interested in, please feel free to reach out to Casey and I and all of the ongoing training and support is included. And I think that's very, very important. We don't have a 1 800 phone number, you know. When you need help, you reach out to Casey, Fred, myself. Other sales reps, other internal customer support team members. We're all here to help. Right? Just wanted to make sure. That's a huge difference. We don't. As Casey mentioned, we don't just turn it on and say, good luck. We train you how to use the platforms. We brainstorm with you. We go over a game plan to make sure it's it's successful as possible. And then next slide, I believe, has Casey and I's contact information. if that is something that you're interested in learning more about. Or if you have follow up questions, or if you want to learn about pricing, please feel free to reach out to Casey or myself at any time. We're an open book, happy to jump on a call, and if you do want a more kind of in depth. Demo, where you want to discuss specific use case. Happy to schedule one and learn more about what your ideas are on, how to use the platforms and see if we can help. but I know we went a little bit over. But thank you very, very much for taking the time to join Casey and I today and learn about what we, what we do and what the tools are anything you want to add, Casey.

[56:09] Casey Loewenthal: No, I mean, basically just what this platform is on day one is not what it's gonna be on day 3, 65. And I think that if you know that going into it, we we try and give you little wins along the way your lists are gonna grow. The work gets out, people stay on lists as long as the content is relevant. if you have 50 people in the 1st 3 months, that's 50 more people that you're gonna text, it'll grow it absolutely will and then you made a good point that we work with organizations of all sizes. if you think that this isn't for you because you have 3 people on your team? I couldn't disagree more, because if anything, it's gonna automate some processes for you. You can sit there on a Friday afternoon when everyone's gone home, spend an hour and schedule out the messages for the next year. Don't sign in for a couple of weeks. All those messages are gonna go out all that contents there. spending a little bit of time saves you a ton of time down the line gives you reporting. When your boss asks you how many messages have you sent? It takes you 10 seconds to tell them, rather than going through your phone and counting that kind of stuff.  yeah, just give it an opportunity. And we'll show you if that it can work specifically for your use case.

[57:28] Max Schelkopf: Perfect, and this was recorded, and we will distribute it out to everybody. But thank you again for taking the time to to learn what Casey and I talked about and listening to us for an hour. I appreciate it very much and have a great resident week, everyone, and we'll get this recording out, probably by the end of the day tomorrow at the latest, I bet. thank you, and have a great week. Everybody.

[57:53] Casey Loewenthal: Thanks. Everybody. Thanks. Max.

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