Storytelling with Data: Making the Case for Technology Upgrades

Watch Greater Ohio Workforce Board's Expert Rocky Rockhold and Engage by Cell's Workforce Development expert Max Schelkopf for a discussion on using data to tell your organization's success stories Find the transcript and time stamps below.

‍

[00:00:00] Max Schelkopf: I'll introduce myself. My name is Max Shelkoff. I am a senior mobile solutions consultant with EngageBuySell. And we've been in business for 17 years now, several thousand clients ranging from private sector to Museums and historical and cultural facilities to a lot of government orientated work like Rocky's in with workforce development.

Rocky, if you want to introduce yourself real quick on this slide too, buddy.

[00:00:34] Rocky Rockhold: Great. Thanks, Max. I'm Rocky Rockhold. I am the director at Greater Ohio Workforce Board. We are Ohio's largest covering board. We cover 43 of Ohio's 88 Ohio Means Job Centers. And for those of you who are not familiar with that world, it is part of the America Job Center Network.

So again, we, we cover just about half of the state's one stop centers. Fantastic. Next

[00:01:02] Max Schelkopf: slide, pretty please, Kaylee. All right, so what the bulk of today's conversations kind of focusing around the data is going to be around two tools. And these tools are provided by Engage by Cell, and it's all about mobile technology, right?

So, Everybody nowadays has something in their pocket, right? Everybody has one of these. I'm sure Rocky's is sitting on his desk right next to him right now. There we go. And I'm sure everybody on this call has one sitting within an arm's reach of them right now. So how do we start incorporating these tools that are just built into our everyday lives now into some data collecting tools, some engagement tools communication tools?

There's a million different ways, but just to kind of cover some of the basic bases here collecting data through forms engaging with people through text messaging, whether it's one on one or one to many. So a couple clicks of a button and you communicate with an audience of thousands of people all the way down to maybe that one on one.

In Rocky's case, typically it's under a case management or if it's helping someone that needs it. And then Enhancing that communication capability and making it a simpler end result for those users to provide you with the information that you need, whether that's again, forms or documentation, or if they're filling out polls, surveys, quizzes, tests.

So on, so forth. And then not only kind of what that data tool does, but then on the back end, right, collecting all of it, refining that data, being able to show real results with it too, because that's what's most important, right? I feel like a lot of times when you're having any kind of data conversation, that's what Rocky and I were talking about the other day is.

Once you have all this data, what do you do with it, right? So, what is it telling you, right? So, that's going to be the bulk of of the conversation. Next slide, pretty please, Kaylee. Alright, so the two technologies we're going to cover. Text messaging platform. Again, that has several different kind of capabilities in it, which I'll go into in more detail.

And then mobile web apps. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term mobile web app, we'll go into a lot more detail on kind of the advantages and what they are, what they do, how to use them, and then we'll tag Rocky in for some of his use cases and how it's been implemented across his large territory in Ohio and how some of his staff are, are implementing them into their processes.

But next slide, we'll talk about texting real quickly. So,

When I started my professional career, and this will tell you how old I am, but if when I started roughly, let's say 15 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, I was kind of coached, you know, texting is very unprofessional. Don't text. It's not what you should do, right? And how's the, what's the only way I can get ahold of you now, Rocky, if I need to talk to you, you, you, you

[00:04:19] Rocky Rockhold: better text me or that email is going to set for a minute.

[00:04:22] Max Schelkopf: That's right. So the texting kind of statistically, I want to touch on has a 90, 98 percent open rate, right? So, I always pick on myself first. Rocky's seen me do this a hundred thousand times probably at this point, but I want everybody to take out their phone, look at their personal email account, and in my email, I'm at 28, 000 right now.

And I have zero unread text messages. So, that is the why with texting, right? So, how many emails do you get a day, Rocky?

[00:05:00] Rocky Rockhold: Well, if we're talking on my personal email that's unread, I'm less than you, but from work, I traditionally get between 120 and 130 a day.

[00:05:09] Max Schelkopf: Right. So we're all constantly inundated with email is the point.

So, especially for those folks that are kind of, Not in the space where they're using a work email necessarily. Right. And it is a personal email is their main means of email communication. It's bogged down by old Navy email them three times a day, trying to get them to buy another shirt. Right? So the texting is much, much more effective from an engagement perspective.

And that's the why with it, right? And the how with the texting, so a couple clicks of a button, it's a mass communication tool, like I said earlier, a thousand text messages can go out, all the way down to creating call to actions, of getting people to text in, we've all seen these before, whether you knew it or not.

An example with Rocky's teams is creating a call to action of jobs, right? So we've all seen that billboard, or we've seen that truck passing by us, or walking into an office building, and it says, you know, are you looking for a new career? Text hiring, or text jobs to the XYZ phone number, right? Mass communications outbound, mass communications inbound by creating those call to actions and then all the way down a couple additional layers of engagement capabilities with having those one on one conversations, too.

So, simple use case, someone pushes out a text message, and I'm gonna stick with Rocky's use case here with a job fair or a hiring event, something along those lines, and you push out a text to a thousand folks, Saying, hey, hiring on the spot, job fair, bring your resume, click here, kind of thing. Those individuals who get that text can respond, and that will trigger that one on one conversation to start happening.

So, it really enables you to blanket out communications, but then narrow it down to the one on one needs as well. And Max,

[00:07:10] Rocky Rockhold: one of the things I'd love to share with folks on here is we cover lots of rural areas. And we have some one stop centers, some, some job center networks that they literally the case managers or the business surface service folks share phones.

So imagine trying to send tech via a phone and then I have to turn it over the next day because you're going into the field, right? So that's one of the things that our people love about this is we can set up and send these texts from our laptop. Right, so each agency doesn't need a phone. Everybody doesn't need to have a phone in their hands to do it.

[00:07:47] Max Schelkopf: Absolutely So like rocky said it can really take the place of having to have that phone, right? So people don't have to have the 500 work phones or whatever cell phones they can communicate via sms text message straight from their laptop or their mobile device if they sometimes the burden is I don't want to text people from my personal cell phone, right?

It's work related. I don't want to put that on there. So it can really fill that gap too. So next slide pretty please, Kaylee. So mobile web apps. Is anybody on the call familiar with mobile web apps? If you are, throw it in the chat window. I want to see if anybody's familiar with it. Or better yet, can anybody tell me the difference between a mobile web app or and a hard downloaded app?

Brenda, I see you from the Ottawa County OMJ. You'd better be able to answer this.

[00:08:51] Rocky Rockhold: Alright, so. I can share with you what a great example in my house is, Max. My wife traditionally downloads every shopping app or every app possible known to anyone, but she does it on my phone. So talk about my phone getting drug down with with app after app after app. So That, that leads us directly into why we like an actual mobile web app.

[00:09:20] Max Schelkopf: Exactly. Great. Great point. And in the huge advantage with the mobile web app. So I'll kind of start by explaining the two differences, which Rocky touched on. There we go. Heather said nothing to download internet based. Exactly. So mobile web app. Looks, feels, and acts is close to a native application, which is just the IT terminology for a hard downloaded app that you go into the app store to download.

So it looks, feels, and acts is close and as functional to a native application experience, only there is no hard download required. And why is that important? exactly why Rocky just explained, but it's much, much more accessible for the end users. Right. And it's much quicker from that standpoint too. It's not you're standing in line or I, you know, if I'm working with Rocky and I got to get Rocky to download an app and I got to call him and say, Hey, do you have a iPhone?

Do you have an Android? Okay. You got an iPhone. You got to go to the app store. This Nope, that's the wrong app. You got to download this one. Keep it up to date for me cause it's going to change a lot, right? So on so forth. So we really transitioned to this mobile web app platform for a couple of purposes.

One being breaking that hard download barrier and eliminating that whole process of Rocky and I going back and forth, trying to get the right thing downloaded. To It's super quick and accessible from that standpoint. Scan a QR code, boom, up pops the mobile web app. Inside of these mobile web apps, this is where a lot of this data conversation is going to come from too.

So the tools inside of these mobile web apps, fillable forms, videos, polls, quizzes, surveys, document uploading, and you can see an example of there of one of Rocky's County's All of those different documents can be easily uploaded via the mobile web app inside of it. So you're creating a much, much more accessible point for these people to provide you with the data that you need and you're going to use to assist them.

Right? And most importantly too, in my opinion, because I am not a software engineer and neither is Rocky, there is no IT required. Right. So the analogy I always use, if you can build and maintain a PowerPoint, you can build and maintain one of these, right? It's all just drag and drop content creating.

So,

[00:11:49] Rocky Rockhold: yeah, yeah. And Max, that no, it has been big in our area. We, we obviously are, are very government driven.

And many

[00:11:56] Rocky Rockhold: of our computers are actually not even owned by our Ohio means jobs. They're owned by the state. So having to get anything downloaded. Same with our phones. Many of our phones are owned by the county.

So having to get permission to download an actual app can really be a time drain if you get it done at all. So that's one of the many reasons we love these, these simple access. No download.

[00:12:20] Max Schelkopf: Awesome.

[00:12:21] Rocky Rockhold: Thank you, Rocky.

[00:12:22] Max Schelkopf: Next slide, and we're going to dive into Rocky's specific use case here. Next slide, pretty please, Kaylee, there you go.

All right, so, Rocky, in a quick, you know, minute, two, three minute, explain the, the use case for the Greater Ohio Workforce Board, and then what are the challenge and kind of what we're going to discuss further is Painting that picture, right? That's what I want to definitely touch on is, is how you're using it.

And what picture was it painting with the data for you?

[00:12:58] Rocky Rockhold: I love how you put a time limit on me right away, Max, you know, let, let, let me first of all say that, right, right. Let me first of all say that we, we we, we are falling in love with, with everything that we're utilizing. as an area. And as I said, we're a very large area.

And because of our size, it's imperative that we're able to contact each other or communicate seamlessly. So we're using these platforms to not only communicate across our one stop centers and, and communicate internally with this. We're also using it externally. So we're able to text out job fair reminders.

We're able to text job opportunities. We're able to engage our youth. In Ohio, we have very strict regulations on how often to engage youth. Something hilarious about that when we were following up with some of our youth to ask them, hey, how's this working for you? One of them literally quoted and said, it's about time.

So they've been waiting for this type of thing. And by the way, the backstory to that is that was a youth who had been dormant in one of our programs. They had not been communicating with us. They had not been following up with one of our programs. So for them to respond to that really gave us a chance to engage them.

In services or re engage them in services, which is pretty cool. The other thing that it's done for us, especially from the, the, the ability to have QR codes for each thing is we've taken entire walls of what we call job boards or hot jobs, and we've been able to reduce it to an employer name and a QR code so we don't have to list the multiple jobs that employer now has available or all of the duties that are that are involved in that job.

job, the job description, which could be a couple of pages in some places, we've reduced that to a QR code. So it's much friendlier to look at. It's much friendlier toe to click on to because you're not getting pages and pages. So that's some of the things that we're doing right now. We expect this to grow.

We're still baby users in this thing. As a as a whole, we started late, very late in 2024. And so we do consider ourselves kind of, kind of youth still in this. But we're growing it and it's going fantastic so far. The feedback that we're getting has been incredible. So, so yeah, that's some of the ways we're using it.

We know there are more applications, but that's, that's the baseline of what we're using it for. I think it's important that not only you mentioned the youth component, right? Because that's the only way we're going to be able to communicate with that demographic moving forward for the end of time, I believe.

[00:15:46] Max Schelkopf: Right. But, and I think it's easy to pick on the youth, but. I think also that that translates to almost all demographics, right? Everybody is on social medias. Everybody is nowadays used to consuming information, whether it's entertainment or whatever that information is in these little 90 second clips or, you know, TikTok has fried our brain, Rocky.

So I think incorporating those tools and making it digestible is the most important part, right? So not only are you gonna see As you continue to incorporate the, the, the platforms into your services, Rocky, I think you're going to see all these engagement rates jacked way up, but also the digestion of the information is going to be much better, too, because it's little bite sized pieces, right?

We're not trying to throw the book at people anymore, because it just doesn't work, right? Next slide, and I'll let Rocky kind of, that leads well into, you know, we're talking about all this transition into, These new forms of communications and implementing texting for these digestible pieces and making sure people are reading them, etc.

What were you doing

[00:17:03] Rocky Rockhold: before? That's a great question. So we were, we were pretty archaic from the standpoint that we were old school creating and printing flyers and literally emailing them out to community providers to say, Hey, job fair. Here's what we're targeting. Or we were old school driving them and literally putting them on the boards, the cork boards in the, in the lobbies of Places that, that we work with.

We were physically having to take them sometimes to, to unions, right? Yeah. To post job fairs because those unions were laying off. So we were physically out there and, and moving things. Of course we emailed, of course we used email. Honestly, we had gotten. Far away from phone calls because of the rate of phone calls that go unanswered.

There's no 1 probably on this on this who could call me and get me to answer on the 1st time. You'd have to call me twice. So I knew that it was important or you better send me a text and say, hey, can we chat? So we'd even gotten away from phone calls now. Our, our huge push was social media. So over the last two years, we've pushed out a lot of information via social media.

But what we realized is that's kind of on the individual's terms, meaning if we post a job fair on, let's say, our Facebook page for an Ohio means job center that requires you to be. In Facebook and looking at our posts and then catch on to it. Right. But what we've learned with text is it gets picked up quickly, right?

It doesn't matter whether you're walking across the street or you're standing in line, waiting on something. When that text comes through, we have a tendency to open it. And so we're, we're learning that that's been helpful, but we were pretty archaic in how we were communicating. We were having some pretty poor performance of responses back to us.

[00:18:54] Max Schelkopf: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, it's also important to touch on with the, with the calling, right. Is, is the labor it takes to, I mean, let's be real. If I'm a case manager and I have a hundred people in my caseload, how long one does it take me to call all of those people? And to Nobody likes doing it. I don't care how I am probably one of the most outgoing people in the world you've ever met and forcing myself to sit down and make 100 phone calls a day.

It's hard, right? And the other piece to that and I want to make sure that we're clear on this. The other piece of that is. Yes, we're impacted by phone number changes, but when you're calling and those phone numbers change, you don't know that that number's gone, right? You just, you just get potentially a an outdated voicemail that had been left on there.

[00:19:50] Rocky Rockhold: Meanwhile, someone's changed numbers on you, which you pick up with texting, right? You can tell immediately that that, that number is no longer valid.

[00:19:58] Max Schelkopf: And the, the super important part that both email and phone calling. Email does a better job than phone call, but texting, in my opinion, obviously all the wild amount of data associated with it, right?

So the data you receive by doing the texting, whether it's for the blanket perspective, right? So, when you push out a thousand text messages, you'll get delivery rates, engagement rates link clicks. So, if Rocky pushes out a text to a thousand folks, telling them about an amazing new career opportunity, or program, or apprenticeship, or whatever it might be, and there's an embedded clickable link inside of that text, you'll be able to differentiate, was it, You know, if you had 100 clicks, was it one person 100 times?

Was it 10 people 10 times? You get all of those amazing data points accompanying all of that text message engagement. And then if you push out that thousand text messages and that respondee answers back to you, you get all of those transcripts of those conversations. You get the timestamps and you next slide pretty please Kaylee.

This will lead good into the next one for us. So, it's going to help Rocky and his team paint that picture of the data, right? So, I know you explained to me one of the most impactful things that I think was kind of unanticipated, maybe? Not sure, but if it was kind of, you know, you have your metrics of You know, hey, we need to place a hundred people into jobs, right?

And that's the metric that you see, but you never had or didn't have a great way of getting that data to kind of tell that story of how it got there and show effectiveness and and and that's why I wanted to Lead into this because I think that's one of the big challenges, right?

[00:21:56] Rocky Rockhold: Absolutely. I think let me be clear.

I am. I'm not a data guy. Like, I'm not a guy who sits around and looks at surveys and who does research on the most up to date data. I don't do it. It's not something that fits well for me. And so, as a consequence, I think. That leadership has kind of pressed down to other people and they're like, well, we'll wait for you to tell us what the data means or, or what it says, as opposed to looking at the data.

What we found is that. A huge portion of our funding really does get determined by being able to tell a story. And there's two kinds of story, stories that you can tell, and there's usually two kinds of stories that are heard. One is, Hey, I helped Max. I changed his life. He, he was and we were able to get this down and out.

We were able to align him with the right services. We got him a job. This is Max now and we can show that picture, right? That's one way to tell a story. What we learn is it's hard to tell that story in an elevator, right? And we need elevator speeches when it comes to talking to members of of our legislation.

And so what we learned is we needed something to capture good data and help us tell the story. Yes. We had a job fair and we push this thing out. And instead of having 50 participants, we had 500 and here's how many we pulled in from utilizing a text message service because we have that data. So we've got to be able to tell a quick story.

We've got to be able to to do that. So it has power behind it. They'll feel good. Stories are always wonderful. And you should always keep those in your back pocket. But. That data story applies to everyone. And so that's where we were missing the boat. Like probably some of the organizations that I've seen that that jump on here.

And I saw helping hands of of Vegas. And so. I'm guessing that you have to tell your story. You have to tell who you're helping. You're going to have some people that just don't care about the feel good story. They want to see the numbers. Show me the numbers. Show me the numbers. You can do that with this system.

And that's, that's where we've grown leaps and bounds. And Max said this earlier, it, It wasn't something we thought we would get. It's not something we thought we would benefit from. It's just something that has happened and has been beneficial. Yeah.

[00:24:33] Max Schelkopf: And, and

[00:24:35] Rocky Rockhold: it's such

[00:24:35] Max Schelkopf: a important piece for really.

Any organization to now, obviously you're a government affiliated organization and you have specific metrics You need to answer to to maintain funding and that's going to be the case for a lot of non for profits as well that are receiving grants But also in the private industry or even in the cultural space, right if I visit a museum And i'm walking through the museum all that museum is worried about is what my experience was like in that museum Right.

And, and taking these tools and applying them in any one of those kind of places to start gathering that feedback, even if it's simple surveys. Right. I mean, we've all sent out a MailChimp survey via email. And if we get that 10 percent response rate, we're celebrating, you know, we're like, Oh, we killed it.

But we need to get those numbers up around that 50, 60, 70 plus percent range. So we actually know what we're doing and we can paint that picture and improve our processes. Yeah,

[00:25:41] Rocky Rockhold: and Max, just as a, as a quick use case I know I've talked a lot about government, but we also are utilizing this service for our businesses.

So we're using it as a, as a business service. And one of the things, one of the feedback that we've received from an actual business is they ask, Hey, you posted that job for us. How many people opened it up? How many people actually applied through the QR code through the link that was embedded in that QR code, and we're able to tell them that right?

So they can get instant feedback on the number of people applying for jobs. So that's not a government thing. That's that's. Private industry. That's business. So very helpful to be able to provide that feedback. And what it has done is it's given us even more credibility with our business partners,

right?

Because

[00:26:31] Rocky Rockhold: they're like, Oh, wow. So government does need to move at the speed of business when I need that. Right? Yeah.

[00:26:37] Max Schelkopf: Yeah. And that transitions well into the next slide. Pretty please, Kaylee is. You know just speaking on behalf of what you just did this isn't just for the job seekers, right? This is all audience.

We touched on the youth in the business services side of things, you know For those of you who aren't super familiar with workforce development, what are the business services people? Who, what do they do? How do you work with them? What, you know, what data matters to them? What are they trying to do?

What are all, you know, what, what are they?

[00:27:12] Rocky Rockhold: That's a great question. So the obvious is those that are job seekers, right? They're looking for employment, whether it's better employment or just employment in general. So those are obvious. So we also have a business service side of of our house. And so with that business service side, we really do meet 1 on 1 or in groups with business leaders to determine what their needs are.

And those can consist of us posting jobs for them screening for those jobs. It can consist of us. Helping them with new hires. How do we help you get them on board? There's some funding available to help you train new hires. There's funding available to help you train your incumbent hires. And so those are some of the things that we work with them on.

And us being able to communicate with them quickly and efficiently has been a game changer. Frankly speaking, our businesses probably love this service as much, if not more, than our job seekers. And and we're talking some are very large businesses. Literally thousands of employees. Some of them are small mom and pop shops.

Guess

[00:28:17] Rocky Rockhold: what the mom and pop manufacturing they're checking their phones as well. Of course. And that's what we've learned. We can get ahold of people a lot quicker.

[00:28:25] Max Schelkopf: I think it's fascinating that the data can really be dredged and gathered from the point of the employer all the way to the employment verification, you know, and all those different steps along that way.

And I think that's really rare. To have that capability from a to totally z There's there's numbers involved. There's actual engagement rates involved There's different avenues to gather that data put it out there make it very simple for those folks as well that's what always strikes me is is really impressive in workforce development is it's not just That stigma of unemployment office.

There's so much more to it, right? absolutely,

[00:29:11] Rocky Rockhold: so And that's a great let me just add on to that. So we have a reemployment service in Ohio, which is part of our unemployment. And so, if you're receiving unemployment, and you're you're selected out of that group to come in and do a session with us, we have seen.

It's unbelievable. We have seen by using. Disengaged by cell model that our actual show rates for those appointments have went up. And the reason being is because people are scheduling those appointments through the app. Those people are seeing the text come as a reminder to their appointment. It's not lost somewhere in their personal email box that we sent them an email and then they missed the appointment and come back later.

So it really drives up our efficiency levels, right? I'm not having to schedule Max three and four times because something's caught in his email of 28, 000 that he hasn't seen. I can schedule Max one time he gets the notice via text. He can accept the notice via text. And therefore accept the appointment.

So even on that side of it, that again, as part of our business service side.

[00:30:19] Max Schelkopf: Yeah. The show rate increasing for sure. Next slide, pretty please, Kaylee, this, this goes into kind of Are these hard to use, right? Cause that's always the biggest concern, especially with large teams like yours. Rocky is, is, you know, I have 200 people, are they going to be able to do this?

And, and going back to when I started my career. You know, texting was frowned upon. Is there this big stigma around it? Like, do they feel comfortable with it? What was rolling it out like? What is the feedback? Is it difficult to manage all of these different things? What does that whole process look like?

[00:30:59] Rocky Rockhold: Yeah. So not only did we know we were going to have some challenges managing and rolling out these tools initially we weren't sure how we were even going to begin to train on them. The reason is if you took a map of Ohio and you drew a line for the workforce boards, our, our area doesn't line up in a map at all.

it, not even a little bit. And so people think that that's odd, but it's an effective management for us to do business. But we, if you can think about it, we're all the way in the northwest corner of Ohio and then we have a blank spot and then we're all the way down in the southeast. And if you're not familiar with Ohio, that probably doesn't make a lot of sense.

But just know From a geographical standpoint, our area does not align. We don't, our borders don't touch. All right. A lot of our borders do not touch. So we weren't sure how we were going to launch this thing. The other thing that we knew is that in order for us to launch this effectively, we were not going to be able to do it.

We knew we had to put Max and the team from Engage by Cell in front of our people and give him a captive audience so they're not distracted by whatever's going on because of a virtual meeting. So, I say all that to say we ended up breaking down our groups into essentially regions. And in order to roll it out, we had Max come and he He was, he was an absolute soldier, but he came and he traveled our state for a full week and we did in person training and that in person training was a game changer because when our people walked out, they were very comfortable and very confident that they could get things started.

And that is, is really What we wanted out of the training. The other piece that I think we did and Max, I don't know if this is unique for for engage or not, but I felt like it was it was definitely unique for us is once they walked out. We immediately scheduled regular. weekly touch points. So Max and his team was available for us once a week every week on the same day at the same time.

And you could just drop in as a customer. That was a game changer for us because it allowed people to go. Hey, I have a question about outgoing text. And they could jump in. They could ask their question. And once they got their answer, if they chose to, they could jump out. But most people would stay because they wanted to hear the questions from someone else.

It's that old adage that I have a question, but I'm not going to ask. I'm going to wait till somebody else asks. And so we found that people stayed engaged with it. So I say all that to say, we were worried about the challenges of Of launching this thing and Max and his team and this is not a sales job.

I want everybody to know we've already bought the service. So I don't have anything to sell you. We're we're in. We're all in, but Max and his team have probably been some of the most gracious. Folks, when it comes to customer service, responsive, gracious, and to this day, we're doing regular touch points.

We've backed them off now because our people are not, are way more comfortable. So we're not doing the weekly, but we're still doing, we we're still doing regular touch points for folks and then we're gonna circle back in a few months and see if new. staff have come on board will ramp that training r launching.

It wasn't near I thought it was going to wasn't near the problem t it was going to be. And a to the hands of our frien sell. We're getting d where I didn't know we wo And if any of you are like us, we're bad at telling our story at America's job centers were probably the best kept secret when it comes to community services that there are because we're bad at telling the story.

So to tie all of that together, rollout was smooth and I did not expect it to be, but it was smooth.

[00:34:57] Max Schelkopf: Yeah, and I just want to make a point that, you know, any platform that Engage by Cell provides isn't just to turn on and good luck. It doesn't matter if, you know, someone on the call is from a super non for profit that, you know, small but mighty team of five people, you're going to get the same amount of attention, right?

And that's, I think, what makes a huge difference in the success of the platforms is. We don't just turn it on. We have calls where we talk about what, what is your goal? How are you going to use it? What data means the most to you? And we coach you through all of the different kind of steps and strategy and, and tips and best practices that we can encourage you to take to ensure that you're successful with it.

And, and we never lose that humanistic element of it. And that's. That's a huge difference in a lot of, of platforms out there, right? Is, is great. I know what it does, but how do I do it? That getting started component, right? Like you said, and, and there were a couple of areas in, in Gobi, Greater Ohio Workforce Board that are very, very, very rural communities, right?

And they were a little hesitant and I, and they would be comfortable with me saying that, right? And, and, and, and it's not, that you think your audience I think we're all guilty of assuming sometimes that we know what our audience wants You know And and and it's just even in rural communities or small audiences in my opinion.

It's most impactful Right? Because you need those extra tools to help communicate with those people any which way you possibly can having more tools in your toolbox only gives you more avenues to make that end user experience better.

[00:36:53] Rocky Rockhold: 100%. And I will tell you, I was in one of our very rural counties yesterday for a meeting. And one of the things that the director of that, that county said to us is this is more than we ever thought it would be because we thought it was bigger than what our little county would use. So they already had this perception that they were too small and they wouldn't get data back.

And that the input would be far more great than, you know, Then they thought it would be the amount of work they had to put into it. They thought would be far greater than it actually is. And the results for them are off the charts. And they're a tiny county. They mean, they literally have 1 worker doing wearing probably 11 different hats.

The, the receptionist is probably the same or not. Probably the receptionist is the same person who may get a call and say, we, we have an issue in children's services. I need you to go. Right? So very. Yeah, next slide pretty please Kaylee and we'll skip over this. We've kind of next slide. There we go So those are kind of combined and we've covered a lot of the previous one But most importantly I want to talk about the future right like you said, this is everybody keep in mind Rocky and his team is You know, a great area has been covered and we've gotten a lot done in the the three to four months of onboarding You know a couple hundred people in this process and getting it launched So we're just at the the tip of the iceberg with the greater.

[00:38:20] Max Schelkopf: Ohio workforce board I know we covered kind of the audience you know from job seekers to business services, etc But what are your plans in the future? What are the big ideas?

[00:38:37] Rocky Rockhold: Sorry about that. I was trying to click mute off and I was missing it. You know, it's a, it's a great question. And it's 1 that we've, we've been kind of asking our locals because we really do want this to be a local tool and locally driven. 1st and foremost, we are going to, and we've already. Again, baby steps to this process with the team at Engage by Cell is already meeting with our social media contract folks to make sure that this has a seamless touch from what we use on the the mobile platform to what we use with our social media.

One of the things we didn't want to do as Max knows, is we didn't want to have to post things multiple times. If I'm posting a job on my Facebook page, I don't want to post that job again on a mobile platform, right? So we're merging those. And we're in our, we're in our baby steps of doing it, but we know that's going to save time, making us more efficient.

We also know it's going to touch more eyes. So we're really excited about being able to merge those and, and push those out. The other piece that is important for us is that. The way that the uncertainty of funding from the federal level at this point has us a little on edge, or at least it has us anxious.

And so 1 of the things that we're doing in a major way is we're using the touch point and the access data to tell our story of just how big of an impact we have in our communities. And so, again, we're bad at storytelling. So, utilizing that data is going to be super helpful for us in the future, being able to organize it in a way that says, look at all the work we do in the community.

This is where your tax dollars or your funding dollars go. So being able to tell that story. And then last, but, but certainly, certainly not least we're fortunate in Ohio that we have a state director of job and family services that is really tuned into what we're doing in our area. And our hopes is that we can show them the value in this and long term have every community service that's under the job and family service umbrella utilizing and engaged by cell.

So that includes would be our child support organization, Medicare, Medicaid, that includes. Again, I said our job and family services, which is our public assistance entity and then our children's service folks. So being able to utilize these services to communicate to people in a, in a manner that's quick, efficient, and gets data back is what our state director wants to do.

So our future is to have this thing cross the entire state of services. And, and, and I

[00:41:19] Max Schelkopf: think it will in, in next slide, pretty please Kaylee. I just wanted to touch on this because this is what I want for the future too, is to keep growing this component with your teams, and it's it's the one on one communications, and you can go to the next slide too real quick, pretty please Kaylee, because as you continue to use those one on one communications, you're going to see some of these numbers continue to climb, but Rocky gave us permission to share just some of the, again Data points that he has experienced across the greater ohio workforce board in a short amount of time Please keep in mind.

This has been something that really You know in my opinion has gone live live in the past 45 to 60 days something like that, right? Yeah, let's

[00:42:07] Rocky Rockhold: let's not short change. We've launched this thing during the holidays, right? And I don't know. I don't know about Folks on here, but, but I'm a little slower moving when it comes to work stuff at the holiday.

So keep that in mind when you see these numbers.

[00:42:21] Max Schelkopf: And in some of the huge factors here that I want to point out, right? So the active users on the mobile web app, 1200 people. Already, right? So that's 1, 200 people that have been impacted by this that have had some sort of experience probably exchanged some documentation or signed up for that event or whatever that interaction was and then with the opt out rate, that's always mission critical, right?

So we all anybody who's ever been in charge of any kind of communications or engagement knows You know, if email is your only tool in your toolbox, if you get an opt out rate that's high, right, that's because people are choosing not to receive your messaging anymore. And not only is it going to be a little bit higher, but oftentimes they're not engaging with the emails.

But with the opt out rate that Rocky and his whole team, with almost 20, 000 text messages exchanged, Four and a half percent under four and a half percent opt out rate bananas. That's crazy. So, I mean, you can't get much closer to a hundred percent, right? But thank you. We'll wrap this up as always.

Rocky and I are going a little bit long today, but that's okay. But there is Rocky and I's contact information. If any of you have any questions, please feel free to reach out or throw it in the chat window right now. But we appreciate everybody's time today. Anybody have any questions for Rocky or myself?

You can throw it in the chat window real quick. Give it a quick 30 seconds. And thank you again, everyone, for attending. Thank you for your time today, Rocky. I know you're a very busy person.

[00:44:01] Rocky Rockhold: Of course. Of course. We love sharing our story.

[00:44:06] Max Schelkopf: Yeah, all right. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap it up. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you again everybody for attending Thank you rocky for sharing your story And again, if anybody has any questions, please feel free to reach out at any time But have a great day folks. Enjoy the rest of your week Thanks, everyone

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍

‍