Goodwill's Strategies for Effective Workforce Training and Communication

Goodwill of Colorado and Goodwill Central Texas joined Engage by Cell to share insights on utilizing text messaging and web apps to revamp communications. Find the transcript and time stamps below.

[00:00:00] Dave Asheim: I am lucky to have two great panelists. These folks are very experienced veterans, as you'll hear in a second, and have been using these tools for a while and use them in very interesting ways. So, Christina and Kelly, welcome. Christina, maybe just give us a, give us a quick bio on yourself. 

[00:00:30] Christina Lee Thorsen: Hi, everyone. I'm Christina Thorsen. So our base, our main city is Austin, Texas. And I'm for internal communication. So I focus on team member communication and mission communication. Excellent. 

[00:00:46] Dave Asheim: And Kelly, you're in it from a different part of the world. 

[00:00:49] Kelly Booker: Yes, sir. Hello everybody. I'm Kelly Booker from Colorado. I work for Goodwill of Colorado and I am the GPS navigator, where I find resources throughout the whole state for the employees and the general public.

[00:01:03] Dave Asheim: Is that a common title, Kelly, or is that indicative of just a goodwill thing? GPS Navigator. I like that. 

[00:01:09] Kelly Booker: Well, it was a brainchild that was started from the the president of Goodwill of Colorado. And so she wanted, her employees to have resources at their fingertips, and so she created this position specifically for that.

[00:01:24] Dave Asheim: Excellent. Okay. That's great. So the way this is going to go is we're going to spend about 20 to 25 minutes with my guests. And as I said, we're making a copy of this so you'll have a recording of it. My name is Dave and I started Engage by Cell about 17 years or so ago. 4, 000 or so clients. You see some screenshots of different aspects of all the different services. We have, we started out in the museum world and then moved into the nonprofit and association world, and then started going to ATD and [00:02:00] SHRM conferences and then workforce conferences. And so many of our clients now come from kind of the adult ed and the workforce and exactly what Goodwill Industries is all known about as the typical client for us.

Two different mobile technologies we use. We are a big proponent of using text messaging. Christina is excited about using texting so for internal communication, she's going to be the text message advocate here in a few minutes. These can be used for internal or external. It's just a better way to communicate with people that are not reading their email.

So that's kind of half of our company. And the other half is a service we built to make. Content is available to folks without having to download an app. So we are somewhat [00:03:00] anti-app because we found the pickup rate is not so great with apps. So we've built a platform, and in particular, Kelly's got a pretty interesting app that he has developed using our mobile tools, and Christina as well, and so they will show you how they use these drag and drop tools to create a portal where you can store content.

What I think is powerful is when you combine the text messaging, “Hey, don't forget to register, to sign up for our job fair, our open enrollment”, whatever it happens to be, you can include a little link to the page that Christina wants you to look at. Whether that's a form or a video or a picture or a PDF it's just like a tap somebody on the shoulder and then the person clicks the link and they go right under that page.

So it's kind of a one-two punch of marketing. I mentioned the types of clients we work with. You can see some logos here. We have many clients on the call today. So welcome friends. Thanks. And we'll dive right in. The ways that Goodwill uses our tools are broken into three main pieces.

Job seekers, and we are using as an example, which I'll show you in just a second, the North Central Texas mobile site. So on the job seeker side, that's one side. On the community side, Kelly's going to talk about that in, in more detail, how he's using this for kind of outreach. And then Christina has a mobile site like you see here for onboarding and for new member orientation, but also she's going to highlight the text messaging aspect.

All right, so we have a little homework assignment everybody, so everybody is on the call. Do me a favor, take out your phone. Kelly and Christina just did this before we started the webinar. Open up your camera and hold it up to the QR code and scan it and click it. The little pop-up. And it will open up text messaging.

And in the message it will say, Demo, go ahead and hit send. And in the little chat window, let me know if that worked for you. And Kelly and Christina, you can pop up the chat window too, because that's where we're going to see the, the questions. So, all of you should be joining our list. I've got a, I've got a thumbs up.

I love the little animations, that's great. Serena, excellent. so much. Hayden Hayden, put your, put your phone number in the chat and Anna will diagnose and add you manually. You're using your phone. Is there a workaround? Yes. We're going to show you how you can access this in just a second.

All right. So Anna's going to send that. Rosetta, you might be able to, on your phone, on some phones, you might be able to text in while you're listening to this. Give that a try. If not, put your email address in the chat and Anna will send you the link. Alright, so those of you who got the link, then you're going to land on a mobile site that looks like this.

You can tap it and see all of their programs and go back to the main page and the job center locations. And what this has become for thousands of job seekers is a great way that everything I need to know, some virtual learning, where the job fairs are, career coaches, all of that can be right on this mobile platform.

And of course, it doesn't have to be just for the workforce or job seekers. You can use this tool however you want to use this. But it becomes this great mobile friendly way that anywhere I am, I can access all the most important things about Goodwill North Central Texas. And all I've got to do is just bookmark that icon on my phone.

All right, Anna. So let's move to the next one. And we're going to start with Kelly. Kelly, tell us a little bit about Goodwill of Colorado. Where are you? What are all of your regions and tell? I think a lot of people don't even know what Goodwill's mission is in life, Kelly. I think some people would be surprised by that. So tell us about what you do there and about Goodwill of Colorado. 

[00:07:44] Kelly Booker: Okay. Well I consider myself a grassroots individual. I was born and raised in Colorado. So being from here, I mean, and, and I'm in my fifties as well. So I've been around the block a few times and I know the resources.

Goodwill is such a grassroots company. They actually started, I think it was 1910, but they started and it was all off of donations and helping out people of a community. So with that mission still in mind, that is the reason why my job is what it is. I assist anybody who needs help with resources from transportation to like job assistance to rental assistance and everything in between.

I try to focus on things that are Free or extremely cheap or close to free just because of the demographics in the region that I work in I'm actually in the front range of Colorado. So I'm from, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Castle Rock, Colorado, but I go from Castle Rock, Colorado to the Wyoming border.

Which I think is probably about, well, the whole state of Colorado is like 60-something counties. And I am I go to about 27 stores and I speak to thousands of people a month. So in a nutshell, that's what I [00:09:00] do. Hopefully that wasn't too much info. 

[00:09:02] Dave Asheim: No, that was, that was great. And so much of what Goodwill does with all the donations is turn that into training. And ways to help people get jobs, and stay employed. And it's just, it's just an unbelievable mission. I think some people think, Oh, I'm just going to drop off my, my, my clothes at a Goodwill. And I don't know what happens to it, but you're training the employees in the store. The money that is generated then goes back into massive training facilities. They are free basically to people all over the country. It's just a phenomenal organization.

[00:09:40] Kelly Booker: And the free training goes from I.T. training to linen and training to work in like high capacity laundry facilities everything. I mean, from CDL, we train for everything. 

[00:09:54] Dave Asheim: Yeah. So if you ever have a chance to take a tour of one of their training facilities, you just cannot believe that Goodwill is really one of the country's largest training organizations, believe it or not, all of you folks that are not familiar with Goodwill Kelly, you use these tools in such an interesting way. Maybe we could stop screen sharing and you can show on the screen, just to kind of take us on a tour. How did you, how did you and Goodwill get started with this?

[00:10:24] Dave Asheim: And how has it helped your audience? Basically? 

[00:10:29] Kelly Booker: Well did you want me to go ahead, 

[00:10:31] Dave Asheim: That'd be great. Yeah.

[00:10:37] Kelly Booker: All right, here we go. Can everybody see this? All right, this is this is my front page for my project. It's called Project GPS. Goodwill Path to Success. That's what GPS stands for. So basically I shoot this information to everyone regardless if you're a goodwill employee or not because the information I put on there is pertaining to everyone.

[00:11:00] Dave Asheim: Kelly, Anna just sent a text to those who signed up. If you click it, you're you can see and follow along on your mobile phone. 

[00:11:09] Kelly Booker: Yes, sir. Thank you. So the region that I do is a GPS North Metro. And once you click on a page, it goes by every county that I deal with. And my friends, since I can go to like Jefferson County, Colorado, which is where it is, well, let's see, let's see, check out Boulder, which is where CU is.

So let's check out Boulder. Okay. So under Boulder, I have a lot of information, whether it has to do with housing services a lot of stuff that has to do with mental health domestic violence whatever, I mean, I'll try to cover every single situation. As a matter of fact, I actually welcome new information or new hardships, I guess you can say, or more wrinkles and things because I like to do The research and find out information for everyone. So I try to put everything on there. It doesn't matter what it pertains to and that's for each county and for then I kind of go into things like emergency rental assistance because I try to keep everything grassroots, like I said, so I mean, and in today's day and age, there are so many people who, if you don't have if you don't know anybody who has rental problems and they can pay, I mean, most people do know an individual who's having issues like that.

So, I mean, I put things on there that have to do with statewide information, community-based projects that have to do with rental assistance, deposit assistance, affordable housing, the whole shebang also deal with things that has to do with self-care. So I, I, I put things on there like awareness days.

Like I said, I try to cover everything. So awareness days I put on there, every type of holiday I put on there, free and low cost things to do in a general metro area from music to landmarks, to tours et cetera. Right. So let me see. 

[00:12:57] Dave Asheim: Also Kelly, how are people [00:13:00] accessing this Kelly? What's the, what's the mode of getting the word out that this amazing kind of like portal of community services is even available?

[00:13:10] Kelly Booker: Well,  I visit Goodwill stores and my job is just to push the information out to the stores and also explain to the individuals, the employees at the stores that this information is for everybody and please tell everybody. I tell them the more people that they can tell the better. I don't know if I could share this another screen of it's actually a flyer that I put out that actually has the QR code and things of that sort, just so everybody can know. And on the flyer has a QR code that I got to do is point your phone at it. Smartphone. It goes directly to the website. My website is where I vet all the information. I update all the information. Everything on there is ever-changing. I put things on there every single day. I take things off of there every single day. I don't know if you want me to explain a little bit more about what we do as far as the Goodwill and the programs that we have available for Goodwill.

[00:14:25] Dave Asheim: Yeah. Good idea. 

[00:14:29] Kelly Booker: Like, for instance, we have the Excel Center, which from what I understand, I think Christina has that in Texas, and we just, we're going to be launching ours is going to be brand new in September. The Excel Center is basically a school for anyone who wants to get their diploma. Not your GED, your diploma. It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what dialect you are from. It doesn't matter how old you are. Well, I mean, I think they catered to 18 above. And so basically I put things on there like that for education purposes. Also, bank works. I put information on there like that because we do train for banking. We train from the bottom to the top and we actually walk you, usher you into a job. The last graduation I was at had probably about 10 to 15 different banks there. So it was pretty cool. The success rate is very high. And as I said, they they train you from the bottom to the top. Information technology is another one that I, we push here pretty hard I. T. training A plus certification all these, all of these classes are free for anybody in the Denver Metro Front Range and like I said, I push these mainly because of, of the fact that Google has so much, so many types of training That no one really knows about.

There's a lot of money involved in it and really no one knows about it. As far as HVAC and heat pump, the same thing. We train for that. All of this is free from the bottom to the top. And we usher you into interviews and jobs as well, especially with union jobs. We, we try to get you into union jobs which [00:16:00] is mortgage paying wages and things of that sort.

We also let me see about this one right here, Google employees only. This is something that we have specifically for Google employees only like for instance, the English is a second language class is a class that we offer for Google employees. It doesn't matter if you're full time or part time. We train you.

We want everybody to at least learn because of the fact that we have a large demographic of people from everywhere. We train for everything and it doesn't matter your dialect. They have it in class and they have it online as well. Goodwill employee mental health resources are something that we push heavily.

It doesn't matter if you have lost a puppy, or if you lost another loved one. We stress the fact that you're you can go see a therapist four times a year for free. All of this is exclusively for Google employees. One more thing I'm going to touch on is The 403B, we push this instead of the 401, we push investing [00:17:00] in yourself and not gambling on the stock market.

I try to make everything user friendly. So on the website, I have tons of icons on there. I try to make everything look pretty and things. I got some help from you guys, so I appreciate that. And so yeah, there you go in a nutshell. If you have any questions, let me know. 

[00:17:20] Dave Asheim: So Kelly, if you didn't have this mobile tool, but you have tons of programs and PDFs and flyers. How in the world would you be able to get this information into people's hands? 

[00:17:38] Kelly Booker: Well, honestly, before the website, we used to have everything on the flyer and then made everything. So on the user friendly, a lot of people just didn't want to even read the paperwork, a lot of people just kind of tossed it away, and a lot of people didn't really want to sit there and deal with just pushing the numbers and things like that. So that's why we came up with the QR code. To make it very easy, especially because of the demographics that work at Goodwill. A lot of people really want to just point their phone at it and it shoots them directly to the site.

The thing about it is the, the traffic that I get off of it is pretty tremendous. Like for instance, I average probably about four, four to 600 hits on this particular page a month. And it can actually on the report, I can actually break it down to see exactly what county is logging into or checking out the website more and which ones are not so that I could go back to those counties, and push our programs.

But I could tell you right now that this beats paperwork, hands down is very easy if a person forgets the information. Like I said, I have a flyer up. So if anybody forgets any information, they just go to the flyer, point their phone at the flyer, and it goes directly to the website. It eliminates a lot of questions.

Because I used to get tons of the same questions in email and on text, and like I said, I try to put everything right there so I could streamline it and make it resourceful at your fingertips, so if, if, hopefully, I'm at the point now where I'm looking for curveballs because I think I've put everything on there, so when somebody, I'm happy when somebody sends me something that I've never heard before because it's just another entry I could put on the website.

And it makes everything more complete because a lot of times, a lot of the answers are, a lot of the questions are answered once you go onto the website. 

[00:19:28] Dave Asheim: No pushback on people not wanting to scan a QR code. That's commonplace. 

[00:19:34] Kelly Booker: No, never. haven't had that one. The only problem that I've had was I don't know. It's probably like maybe one or two, or three people whose phones weren't smart enough to do it. But then if that's the case and I just use my phone to text the website to them and then they could just pull it up on their text message. 

[00:19:52] Dave Asheim: Before we move to Christina, questions for Kelly, and of course we'll be able to come at the end, we'll, we'll come back to Kelly, but anything specific about how Kelly is using this mobile tool to kind of collect and store this living, breathing, three ring binder, I guess. Alright, so if not, Kelly, you can stop sharing. And then Anna, you can show the slide of Christina's location in Texas. And we'll have Christina explain a little bit about, tell us about your Texas operation. How many people work there? How big is your area? What's your area, Christina? 

[00:20:34] Christina Lee Thorsen: So we're Goodwill Central, Texas. Our region, there are I remember perfectly. I think we have 15 Goodwill GIs like Goodwill in Texas, and I don't mean store, but 15 different Goodwills. Texas is pretty big. So we're Central Texas. We're mainly based in Austin. We have 35 retail stores, about 2000 team members with over 100 employees. Two outlets. And we also have e commerce operations. So as Kelly mentioned, we also have our Excel center high school. We have community schools and we also have schools in the justice system as well. And then we also have our career at career and technical academy. So that's kind of similar to Kelly, you know, our training for electrician courses, medical assistance.

Yeah. So we have quite a, you know, quite wide range of what we do. And as you mentioned, the Goodwill problem, you know, no one knows what we do, except that, you know, we were thrift, but all the thrift and everything we sell goes to support our mission. For us here, we each have our own very specialized mission.

They're all very similar. Ours here in central Texas, Texas is transfer transforming lives through the power of education at work. Love it. Yeah. So we use the system quite a bit with the web mobile web, and then also the text messaging as well. 

[00:21:52] Dave Asheim: Well, let's have Anna stop sharing this screen and then we'll have you tell us a little bit about how you use this for onboarding and then for text messaging. Sure. 

[00:22:06] Christina Lee Thorsen: So I will go into our mobile web first. Do you see my screen with the team member orientation? Well, so this is actually the, we are less graphic based. We're more tech space here. And we decided to use this because as you know we have a lot of frontline team members.

They don't really check their emails or. Even know their passwords or how to get in, even though they have emails. And especially with onboarding, we needed a space where our team, our new team members could get in even before they arrived on the first day. So the mobile web is just an excellent platform, as you mentioned.

You know, I've worked in the tech space before and communications, community building, and it's like, we have so many apps and we didn't want to be another organization with just another platform. You know, you have to log in and you have to download and this site is really great. So we send a link to this out to our team members before their first day and we give them information about the orientation and what to expect, where to show up. Our recruitment team, our talent acquisition team will manage all those that they have to send this link to. Yeah. And they'll send it through text message and then they actually engage back and forth on text messages. Love that. Love that. So it's one mass text message, but then inbound outbound text messaging individually.

So, yeah. So what to bring because I-9 requirements. So this information is very clear. We need all up-to-date and I-9 requirements before our team members can start. It's a must have. So, you know, we try to get this information and out to them and as many ways as possible. Yep. Right.

[00:23:47] Dave Asheim: That's handy. 

[00:23:50] Christina Lee Thorsen: Yeah, so this was just been really useful. So, and then as part of, you know, new hires benefits is another really important area. So you know, they have to sign up for [00:24:00] medical benefits within the first 30 days, right? So, again, this might be a place before, you know so our benefits team will send a reminder text message about like before their first 30 days is up.

And so with information, remember to sign up. So again, maybe individuals that have never logged into email or knew they even had a Goodwill email. So we give them all the information about benefits here, along with our benefits guide. Like, they can download. So we use this quite a bit for documents as well that are public to a certain extent that we can send out to our employees.

[00:24:37] Dave Asheim: Like a little mini HR benefits portal without having to log into my intranet. It's just right there on my phone. I can just tap it. 

[00:24:45] Christina Lee Thorsen: Exactly. So we offer free mental health counseling. These are really bonuses. You know, a lot of our team members, they don't realize that they have these services available to them.

So it's really important just even to take a glance. It's part of that onboarding experience as well, that they know that we have even, you know, we talk about orientation, but, you know, it's so much is happening on those first days. So it's just nice to have this at their fingertips. 

[00:25:12] Dave Asheim: Tell me about any pushback, Christina, from new employees not wanting to participate? I'm just curious what you found. 

[00:25:21] Christina Lee Thorsen: We, not really, because we really send this out, our first text message is really, Hey, here's the information. So it's not like a mass advertising message. It's really, Hey we're expecting you next week. We're expecting you tomorrow. Here's the information. And then I mentioned to you in our previous call, one of our calls as well, that this is just so quick for us. This was something that we could do without having to go through the marketing and its team, you know, the editing of all of this is just so quick and so easy that it really just, you know, our HR team, they were handling this, you know, on the communication front, what they want it to write what they want to put on here.

So we talked about the SMS. I'll just show you this quickly, but yes, you know, sign up for SMS alerts, text GCT to this number, right? And that's the that's more of the mass announcement aspect. And then just one last thing. So on that list, we'll send out our weekly newsletter as well through that, where we upload onto our.

So then you can view the newsletter and again, it's just on your phone, on a computer, just because, you know, our team members are not checking emails. So that's why our newsletters so heavy as well. We're not doing a lot of jump links to, you know, unless everything is really on here. 

Yeah, so that's really our site in a nutshell. There's not much to it, but it's it's our part that's not on SharePoint without getting, having to log in. Those who are not able to yet, you know, [00:27:00] they're just joining Goodwill. 

[00:27:02] Dave Asheim: Yep. Then you are a pretty big user of texting and you have some great examples to show everybody. 

[00:27:10] Christina Lee Thorsen: I do. 

[00:27:12] Dave Asheim: Let's see how that looks.

[00:27:13] Christina Lee Thorsen: Okay, so, oops, give me just a minute. 

[00:27:18] Dave Asheim: we have some questions from Kevin. We'll get to your questions, Kevin, in a minute. So we'll have Christina show texting, and then we'll answer your questions. So keep the questions coming in, everybody. We're not avoiding the question if we're going to get to them.

[00:27:31] Christina Lee Thorsen: Okay. So you see my Engage by Cell screen. 

[00:27:34] Dave Asheim: Yes. 

[00:27:35] Christina Lee Thorsen: So we talked about the keywords earlier. And so if you text GCT to our number, you'll get an automatic response that says, welcome to our goodwill group. text messaging service. And add this number. And so then from that moment on, every time we have mass communication, we push it out this way.

The newsletter in Texas and Austin, it's now with the, You know, the climate and everything. It's been about [00:28:00] once a year. We have inclement weather where we have to close the stores or, you know, stay tuned. We don't know if we're opening or not or what's going on. And so we rely heavily on our text messaging system for that.

So it's, it's another mode of communication for us for that. We also use this use the mobile messaging system quite a bit during open enrollment. So first we will push out, you know, it's open to everyone. It's open enrollment season. It's open enrollment time. Make sure you sign up. Here are the benefits guide or, you know, all the information.

But then we also put the A Texas link on and QR code as well. On our posters. So we use the code. Oh, he 1124. I think that was state. I just made up something. So basically, you know, they text us this and similar to what we just did just now, right with the QR code and you got the automatic message back.

We use it for open enrollment and say, you know, Hey, thanks for contacting us. It's open enrollment period. [00:29:00] Here's a link to the benefits guide. And you know, here it is. And again, we use the mobile web for our hosting of that. Yep So here's another one on open enrollment, but we also used it for job openings as well So this is now an external since I was supporting HR text jobs for a list of our jobs Then right, you know text jobs and then we give them a link and it takes them on to our 

[00:29:29] Dave Asheim: Yep.

[00:29:31] Christina Lee Thorsen: Yes. So any kind of sort of Some back and forth you know, text us for this. And we, we found that very engaging and useful, that part of it. 

[00:29:43] Dave Asheim: How often are you sending a text out typically? 

[00:29:47] Christina Lee Thorsen: Well, right now, you know, on quiet days, so normally we're really just sending out a newsletter. So our campaigns would be, you know, open enrollment when we have as I mentioned, implement weather, we also have team member engagement survey.

So that's another time when we'll push this out quite a bit surveys, right? English and Spanish as well. So anytime we're really pushing for mass participation and just a campaign. We also I pushed out a CEO end of the year message through this. So more mass communication for us at the moment.

[00:30:24] Dave Asheim: So it's not weekly, it's in the fall, maybe three or four times and maybe once a month with the newsletter and things like that. 

[00:30:32] Christina Lee Thorsen: So yes, it just really depends on, you know, what, what our campaigns are at the moment, what we're doing. Yeah. 

[00:30:38] Dave Asheim: We have a question from Serena who wanted to see the job site link. If it's, if it's still open. 

[00:30:45] Christina Lee Thorsen: Actually, it just, I think it's a short link. So what Engage by Cell does is it says, Would you like to shorten this link? Right. And I hope it's the right one. Would you like to shorten this link? Because, and I think Dave, I'll have to speak to this a little bit. It has to do with not getting blocked and so on. By the carriers, right? Yes. So this should actually take me to Yes! There it is. It was a short link to our external job site, which is on our external website. Yeah. So instead of piping in, you know, Goodwill at Central Texas, which also takes up, you know, so much, so many characters in the text message, which we want to, you know, limit ourselves on and Engage by Cell actually shortens the links for us. And then yeah, so this is our external recruitment site that's on our, Website. 

[00:31:32] Dave Asheim: Because the text doesn't have to go to one of our mobile sites, it can go to, it can go to any site. It can go to your job fair, it could be to anything.

Christina, if you didn't have this tool around open enrollment, I mean, not everybody in Goodwill maybe even has their own email account, and certainly they're not checking it. Every day. How would that information be getting out there if you didn't have this texting? 

[00:32:03] Christina Lee Thorsen: This is definitely one of our engagement tools. This is one of our platforms, you know. So it's word of mouth, it's getting out there, posters, and, you know, definitely we appreciate having this extra method to communicate. It's not an emergency communication. No, this doesn't cover that. So we're very clear on that. But in general, you know, communication, it's working out very well. 

[00:32:40] Dave Asheim: Right. Kevin, Smith asked a question in the chat window. Christina, are you under the Texas Workforce Commission using WIOA funds? To help. 

[00:32:52] Christina Lee Thorsen: Oh no. So I inherited this actually. So we've budgeted this internally, but you know, remind me what that is. I should look that up. Yeah. 

[00:33:07] Dave Asheim: Right. Although Kevin, we have plenty of clients that do get funding for these tools because it's now covered under WIOA. So that is something that should be available as of about six, six months or so ago. 

[00:33:22] Christina Lee Thorsen: Yeah. So we also, as I mentioned as well, so the more regular text message once a month, our benefits department will message new team members as well. Right. And saying, Hey, you know, your deadline's coming up. You haven't signed up, you know, make sure you call us if you have any questions kind of thing. 

[00:33:41] Dave Asheim: Well, that is fabulous. How about some more questions for our experts, Kelly and Christina. All right, here's one from Serena. Christina, do you want to take that one? Yeah, about, 

[00:33:55] Christina Lee Thorsen: yes, so there is actually, I think it's mandatory now, there's an opt out stop in every message that we send, and it gets automatically added to the messages.

[00:34:06] Dave Asheim: Yeah, and it gets blocked from so if, if you, Serena, replied, stop, Christina would not be able to send it to you. She wouldn't. She, it, it, you still might be on the list, but the carriers through our system will block that. So it's very easy for people to self-enroll or take themselves off of the list.

Good question. How about a few more questions before we wrap up this great session? Nothing left.

All right. Kelly, I'll have you give your kind of summary recommendation for anybody who has a desk full of information that needs to get transmitted to employees, job seekers, and the community, What do you recommend? 

[00:34:57] Kelly Booker: Well, I mean, honestly, I think that the website [00:35:00] has eliminated a lot of paperwork. It has eliminated a lot of questions and it has provided tons of answers and provided tons of resources. I actually stand by it because of the number of people that are, and I can actually see it on the, on the website on to see how many people have gone into the, the actual GPS website.

So, I mean it shows that people are looking for resources. And people are actually taking advantage of the website. I, I also wanted to show you the flyer that I left because just when I leave, I want everybody to still be able to have the information at their fingertips.

So basically I'll show you exactly what I drew up and all right, there you go. Can, can you see this? Oh, that's beautiful. All right. So basically this is what I leave at all the goodwill websites that I visit after I speak with everyone. And it has the website actual HTTP website on there as well as the QR code.

And it makes Everything's streamlined. It makes everything easy. And it's also easy for anybody who forgets, they can easily just go back and reference it. I stick this up in the break rooms next to all the labor laws and things of that sort. So everything is right there for them. And really, it has been a game changer.

It has eliminated the amount of mileage I have to put in. It has eliminated the amount of times I've had to visit stores. And it eliminates the questions in the paperwork. So I'm all for it. It's all great. 

[00:36:39] Dave Asheim: Great. And Christina, what's your kind of summary, especially from a, from a text messaging point of view and contacting with people?

[00:36:49] Christina Lee Thorsen: No, I think For us, we just have a lot of frontline team members there, you know, in stores are not desk bound and it's just really made a difference for us as having this extra channel to reach our team [00:37:00] members. So, and especially it's helped a lot, as I said, you know, during times of inclement weather.

And during times of really time sensitive campaigns and engagement that we have to run. I've loved seeing what Kelly has, has used has been, because I've been taking notes, you know, of like different stuff that we can add onto our site as well. Yeah, so I'm very internally focused. And so this, it's great information as well that, you know, he shared. So yeah, loved it. 

[00:37:29] Dave Asheim: Maybe put the final slide with our, yeah, there we go. And it's going to send out another text, kind of thanks for attending. If anybody on the call wants a free test account, just text back, email us, put it in the chat window, and We'll turn on a free test account and show you how it works.

So you could send some text messages and you could create some content so that you can show your boss or your colleagues, how this might work for [00:38:00] you folks. So no obligation, if you'd like that. And then here are Christina and Kelly's information and we'll send these slides out tomorrow as well. So before we go, thank you, everybody.

And it's been a pleasure to have Christina and Kelly share how they are using this. It's really fantastic. And as I said, anybody that wants to play around with this on their own in their own account, just text us back or email us and we'll get you all set up. 

[00:38:31] Kelly Booker: And Dave, you know, I wanted to say one more thing. As far as this is compared to an app, this destroys apps. So it just, it's way, it's a lot more user friendly and anybody could get to it. And I mean, a lot of people don't, they don't want to download apps constantly. So this is perfect. 

[00:38:48] Dave Asheim: Thanks for that. Right. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for attending. And thank you, panelists. So great to have you. Have a great day, everybody. 

[00:38:57] Christina Lee Thorsen: Thank you. Bye.

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