Texting & Mobile Tools for Workforce Programs

Learn how workforce programs use workforce texting tools, mobile workforce engagement, and SMS for workforce programs to improve communication, boost participation, and streamline operations with simple, effective mobile solutions. Transcript below.

Max Schelkopf [00:03-00:55]: Welcome, welcome, welcome. Happy Thursday, everyone. We’ll give it a minute or two here and let everybody who wants to join, join. Thank you again for taking the time out of your Thursday afternoon or morning, depending on where you are, to join me today to talk about some mobile tech and workforce development. While we’re waiting and giving it a minute or two for everybody to get in here, if you want to, throw in the chat where you’re joining us from and maybe what organization you’re with. My name is Max Schelkopf, and I am joining you from Central Illinois today. I’ll throw that in the chat window and kick it off.

Max Schelkopf [01:00-01:20]: Also, just curious if anybody’s going to the NAWB Forum in Las Vegas next week. Throw that in the chat. I will be there, and I hope to see some of you there as well. We’ve got some Gallia County folks.

Max Schelkopf [01:22-02:12]: Hello, hello. Some good Ohio friends. Again, we’ll give it another 30 seconds or so and allow everybody to join who wants to join. If some of you in attendance today met me down in Orlando at the SETA conference the other week, it’s great seeing you again. We’ve got some folks from New Jersey, New York, Ohio, kind of all over the place. Fantastic. Alright, we’re two minutes past, so I’ll go ahead and get started here. Thank you again for joining us, and I’ll share my screen here. Let’s get it pulled up. I have a couple of slides to start with.

Max Schelkopf [02:12-03:44]: Again, my name is Max Schelkopf. I am a senior consultant, and I spend 95% of my time working with workforce development professionals like yourselves. That’s really my main focus: being involved in all of those different projects and organizations in workforce development. We’re going to be covering some texting and mobile tools for workforce development today. A little bit of homework before we dive in: a little bit about Engage by Cell. We have been in business for 20 years now, which is great. We’re a 100% domestically based company. I know that’s becoming more and more important every single day, especially when you’re talking about software and government procurement. They’re really looking to keep as much of it within our borders as possible. Something I always like to touch on too, and some of you folks from Ohio joining us today can attest to this, is that we provide 100% real customer support. We don’t have a phone tree if you need assistance. We have real humans on our end who help you, jump on Zoom, and provide assistance as needed.

Max Schelkopf [03:44-04:56]: As a little precursor to what we’re going to go into today, our texting and mobile web app platforms are used to send millions of text messages, and millions of folks visit those mobile web app platforms, even specifically in workforce development. They help bridge some of these communication gaps. So what are we talking about today? Some of the mobile tools, resources, text messaging, and communication tools that we provide are really helping address challenges that are going on in workforce development. I’m sure all of you on this call who work in workforce development are having the same pain points as everybody we talk to across the country. We are deployed in over 30 states now, so we are pretty national at this point, East Coast to West Coast and everywhere in between.

Max Schelkopf [04:56-05:57]: The big challenge is: how do we do as much as possible with less budget and less staff? Things are getting really challenging, so we need to make the most of everyone’s time and be as efficient as possible with the staff we do have and the resources at our disposal. The first big challenge is all about engagement. If the tools in your toolbox for engaging with job seekers, program participants, apprenticeship folks, TANF programs, or whoever you serve are phone calls and emails, it is getting extraordinarily difficult. Nobody picks up the phone anymore. We all have caller ID on our cell phones, and we all let calls go to voicemail if we don’t recognize the number. Then we get to those voicemails when we can or when we feel like it.

Max Schelkopf [05:57-07:07]: Email, especially with younger demographics but really across the board, has become so inundated. I encourage all of you to put it in the chat if you’ve got me beat, but to explain the “why” behind texting here, I always pick on myself. I’ve got 46,449 unread emails in my personal Gmail account, and I’ve got two voicemails in there I haven’t gotten to yet. As you saw, I have zero unread text messages. Old Navy is trying to email me ten times a day to get me to buy a new shirt or whatever it is. The point is, phone calls are getting extremely difficult, and they’re extremely difficult to scale as well. If I’ve got 30, 40, or 50 people in my caseload, nobody likes being a phone warrior and sitting down to make 40, 50, or 60 calls a day when less than half of them are picking up anyway.

Max Schelkopf [07:07-08:11]: From a community outreach perspective, if you have 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000 people in your database, it’s impossible to call them all. That’s why the text messaging platform really bridges that communication gap. I’m going to share my screen and do a little demo of both tools I’m about to discuss, but a couple clicks of a button can get everybody in the database a text message. You can automate your caseload follow-up so everybody in your caseload gets a text once a week, and it can be a two-way communication. If they do respond, you can have those long-format conversations and actually assist those people, provide the information they need, and help them. There’s just less chasing involved with text messaging.

Max Schelkopf [08:11-08:56]: Another huge challenge going on in workforce development is all about resource accessibility. What I really mean by that is workforce development has always been, and unfortunately still is, the best-kept secret. There are so many amazing programs and so many amazing resources available to people, and they just don’t know about them. Part of that is because these resources are scattered all over the place.

Max Schelkopf [08:56-09:14]: That’s part of the challenge. We have all these amazing resources, and they might be on one website, another website, a state-sponsored site, or still on paper at the job center. They’re spread out all over the place. There isn’t a great central resource hub that brings them together until Engage by Cell developed the mobile web app platform for that.

Max Schelkopf [09:14-09:55]: Quick recap on the challenges here: budgets are getting slashed, we have less staff, and we need to do more with less. Nobody is picking up the phone, nobody is answering emails, so we need to start utilizing some sort of mass text messaging platform to bridge that communication gap and ramp up engagement to the highest degree possible. The other challenge is all about information accessibility. Our resources are spread out all over the place. They haven’t been digitized, they’re still on paper at the Job Center or Career Center, and we can assist by building a centralized resource hub and digitizing what needs to be brought into the 21st century, elevating information accessibility to the highest degree possible as well.

Max Schelkopf [09:55-10:18]: How do we do that? Two main tools: the text messaging platform and the mobile web app platform. Again, I’m going to share my screen and run through a quick demonstration of both of these tools, but before I do that, I want to give a brief description of both of them.

Max Schelkopf [10:18-12:23]: The text messaging tool really has three main use cases and tools inside of it. There is a mass inbound component to the text messaging platform, and really it’s a program recruitment tool and an information access point for folks. I’m sure all of you on this webinar have seen something like this before, whether on the side of a truck, on a billboard, or on a flyer: “Are you looking for a new career? Text JOBS to XYZ phone number.” What that does is enable you, as the workforce organization, to put that call to action out into the community, encourage people to text in, and automatically text them back, maybe providing a link to the website, a link to an eligibility form for WIOA programs, or some kind of information to help them get started and learn about what you do and how you can help. It also simultaneously captures that person’s phone number. So when they text in that call to action, it helps you build that database of potential program participants that you can start engaging with. There’s that mass inbound component. There’s obviously a mass outbound component. Like I mentioned earlier, with a couple clicks of a button, everybody in the database can receive a text. A super common use case is something like, “Hey, job fair next Friday. Click here to register,” or “Hey, we have this new career opportunity local to you. Click here to apply.” Things of that nature, general communications. The second most common use case with mass outbound is for case managers. As I mentioned, we can’t scale phone calls, nobody picks up, and nobody answers emails anymore. A case manager can upload their entire caseload, whether it’s 10, 20, 30, 40, or 100 people, and automate their follow-up.

Max Schelkopf [12:23-14:49]: Once a week, once every two weeks, or once a month, everybody in their caseload receives a text message, and it can be personalized. It might say, “Hey Max, this is XYZ over at the Job Center. Don’t forget, you can always text me back if you need assistance.” You’re ensuring that everybody in your caseload is receiving that text and staying engaged in the program. That leads into the third and main use case within the text messaging platform, which is the one-on-one component. If I’m a case manager and I push out that weekly text to my caseload and someone responds, it notifies me that someone responded. It kicks that conversation into a separate queue where you can have those long-format conversations and actually assist that person. You can obviously go in and follow up with folks and do it really quickly and efficiently inside that system as well. The mobile web app platform—let’s start by defining what a mobile web app is. We’re all super familiar with the term “app.” We all have 20, 30, or 40 of them downloaded onto our phones. The technical terminology for that hard-downloaded app is a native application. Engage by Cell used to build native applications, and we stopped doing that quite a while ago because the data suggested, and the writing was on the wall, that it was getting extremely difficult to get individuals to download an app. If I was a case manager, I’d have to call that person in my caseload and say, “Do you have an Apple or an Android? Okay, go to the app store. You need to download this app. No, that’s the wrong one, it’s the one with this icon. And keep it up to date because we’re always putting content in there for you.” At the end of the conversation, that individual might just say, “I don’t want this on my phone,” or they’re not going to keep it updated. It created a download barrier, which is what we refer to it as. It had a lot of friction in that process.

Max Schelkopf [14:49-16:09]: The mobile web app looks, feels, and acts as close to a hard-downloaded app experience as possible, but it’s entirely web-based. What that means is there is no hard download required. The access point is a QR code or a clickable link. It pairs really well with our text messaging platform, because in the example I gave earlier, I could shoot out a text with a clickable link to someone in my caseload and say, “Hey Max, I’d love to help you with your resume. Just click this link and upload it.” That individual clicks the link, and the mobile web app pops up. You can put your job board there, allow people to upload documents, fill out forms, fill out PDF forms, use e-signatures, watch videos, complete polls, quizzes, and surveys—any and all of that content can live inside of there. The big advantage is that it’s super easily accessible. No hard download required, no IT required either, and as I’ll show you here in a second, it’s all done via drag and drop. If you wanted to create a job fair page with a flyer and sign-up sheet and text it out to a thousand people, you can do that in five minutes or less.

Max Schelkopf [16:09-16:45]: No IT required, it’s really quick to build content, and the other big advantage is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You already have all these phenomenal web-based resources, but they might be on this site or that site, with your job board over here and your calendar over there. Because it’s web-based, you can take any existing web-based resource you want and easily link it inside the platform. Everything lives in one super-accessible spot and is very easy to get into people’s hands.

Max Schelkopf [16:45-17:34]: Alright, those are the two main tools. As I dive in here, we’re not at question time yet—we’re on the demo. I’m going to make this as interactive as possible, and I encourage all of you to take out your cell phone real quick and scan this QR code. What it’s going to do is populate a text into your texting app that says MAX to the phone number 925-431-6822. If you hit send on that text, you will get a text message back. Again, if you scan that QR code, it will populate a text in your texting app that says MAX to 925-431-6822, and if you hit send, you’ll get a text message back. I’ll give you ten more seconds to get that done.

Max Schelkopf [17:34-18:01]: Alright, so let’s dive in. What you’re looking at here is the back end of Engage by Cell’s platform. Just so you’re all aware, you access this tool by going to EngagebyCell.com. There’s a little login button, and it takes you to a login page.

Max Schelkopf [18:01-18:49]: All of your staff will have their own login credentials, so there’s a high level of accountability. You can frame who has access to what and give certain levels of permissions. You’re in control of that. I know that’s a big deal, and if I’m a manager in the platform, I can actually add additional users. If I onboard new folks to my team, I can easily go in and create their accounts for them. To get started here, across the top there are a bunch of different tabs for the different tools that we offer. The ones I’m going to cover today are the text messaging, the mobile web app, and reporting.

Max Schelkopf [18:49-19:16]: On the text messaging tab here, on the left side, there are a bunch of different tabs for the tools I just discussed: the mass inbound, the mass outbound, and the one-on-one piece. What we all just texted into is considered a primary keyword response.

Max Schelkopf [19:16-20:28]: What this looks like and what this does is give you that call to action. Rather than texting MAX to that 925 number, you’d be texting the word JOBS, or the acronym for your board, or “Career Center,” or something along those lines, to a full 10-digit localized phone number. That is the number you would operate the platform through, so individuals local to you feel comfortable texting it. They recognize the area code and know this is someone close to home trying to help them get employed. This primary keyword gives you that call to action to put out in the community, automatically texts that individual back, identifies who you are, states why they’re texting in—“Hey, it’s the Job Center, we’re going to help you get employed”—or whatever messaging you want. Then, arguably most importantly, if we click the “See Subscribers” button, there are all of our phone numbers. It’s capturing those phone numbers and helping you build that database of job seekers that you can start engaging with. Down below we also have secondary keywords.

Max Schelkopf [20:28-21:58]: Secondary keywords are a fantastic tool for you to create additional calls to action. The most common one I see is creating a little keyword like JOB or CAREER. We’ll call it JOBS, and we can say, “There are so many amazing local career opportunities near you. To start your job search, please click here.” We’re going to pretend for a moment that we’re one of the job seekers in Ohio. This is their state-sponsored job board. We’re going to include that clickable link, and we have a little shorten URL tool. If you copy and paste any URL into this little box and hit submit, our system will automatically shorten it, because sometimes URLs are not text-friendly and are super long. We’re going to hit save and attach a new list to it called Webinar Job Seekers. Now we have a whole new call to action for folks in Ohio. If you text the word JOBS to that same 925 number or scan the QR code, you’ll get the text message back that we just created. If you click that link, it’ll take you to the Ohio state job board. Other use cases I see here include creating calls to action for specific programs like adult services, youth programs, or apprenticeship, or breaking them down by career opportunities. If you have a lot of manufacturing or healthcare jobs, for example, you can create one called WELDING, and when people text in the word WELDING, it automatically texts them back with a link to maybe a hot jobs page that just lists welding opportunities.

Max Schelkopf [21:58-22:09]: You saw me attach a separate list to it, and what that does is build a little bucket of folks. Everybody in that example texted in the word WELDING.

Max Schelkopf [22:09-22:09]: That means I need to cater my outreach to them based on that knowledge. I don’t want to be sending CNA opportunities to a welder. They want to learn about welding. So you can get really targeted with your outreach by utilizing these keywords to build little buckets like that.

Max Schelkopf [22:09-22:08]: Alright, that is the mass inbound tool. The next piece is mass outbound text messaging, and again there are two main use cases: general communications and case management.

Max Schelkopf [22:08-24:25]: A great example of general communications would be a job fair push. We can say, “Job fair next Friday from noon to 5 p.m., hiring on the spot. Please click here to register.” I’m going to use that same Ohio link as a hypothetical, but imagine that taking them to the mobile web app where they can register. If you have some other platform you want to use for registration or other information, you could include that. There’s a little preview of it on the right side. You look it over and make sure it looks good. Step two is choosing which list or lists you want to receive it. Again, you can have an infinite number of lists in our system. You’re already breaking people down into buckets, pipelines, or funnels—whatever you want to call them. Oftentimes I see them broken down by different stages in the WIOA process: pre-eligibility, post-eligibility, actively seeking a career, employment verification, TANF programs, different locations, or folks who have attended job fairs in the past. Most of our workforce development clients have a lot of different lists because people are in different stages of the process and you need to be specific with your outreach. I just picked the list that a bunch of us are on today. In this example, my job fair is next Friday, so you can schedule and automate this to go out in the future. If I wanted, I could hit them tomorrow, next Monday, Wednesday, and probably the day of the event. I choose what time I want it to go out, hit save, and it automatically takes care of it. For right now, I’ll leave it unscheduled and hit send, and all of us who texted in earlier will get that text message shortly. I just got mine.

Max Schelkopf [24:25-25:10]: The other main use case here is for case management. I could say “weekly case management follow-up,” and write, “Hi.” We have these personalization tokens that will automatically populate everybody’s first name. We highly recommend that for case management. If you address them by their first name, there’s a much higher likelihood they’re going to respond. Since I don’t have any of your first names, I’m going to say, “Hi, I hope you’re doing well. Don’t forget, you can always text me back if you need help with the job search.”

Max Schelkopf [25:10-26:08]: I’ll just choose the list that we’re all on again, but if I were this case manager, I would set this up to go out weekly. I want everybody in my caseload to receive it every Tuesday at 10 a.m. or whatever time I choose. I can set that up and then set it and forget it. Every Tuesday at 10 a.m., my caseload is going to get that text encouraging them to reach out if they need assistance and helping keep them going in the program. I’m going to push this out to everybody because it leads me into the next portion of texting, which is one-on-one. We all just got our text messages for the little case management example and the job fair. I want us all to role-play and pretend that we are a job seeker who just got those texts, and respond to them. I’m going to say, “I need help with my resume,” but you can say whatever you want.

Max Schelkopf [26:08-27:35]: Under this conversation tab, this is where all of those incoming messages go. I can see, “Hey, Max texted me and said, ‘I need help with my resume.’” I can respond, “No problem, Max. Would you like to send it over?” I can jump over here and respond to someone else: “No problem. Let’s get you an appointment scheduled.” I can jump over to another person and say, “You need help with interviewing skills? Not an issue. Let’s get you some mock interviews set up. What day works best for you?” The point is that I can jump in and help all of my clients really quickly. The first question I get asked about this is, “How do I know someone is in here? Do I have to sit and refresh this all day?” The answer is no. You can put your email and/or phone number in here, and it will alert you through your preferred method, whether that’s email or text message. It will tell you, “Hey, Max is in the queue. You need to jump in there and help him out.” So you get alerted when people text in.

Max Schelkopf [27:35-28:59]: Just so you’re aware, you can send picture messages as well, so program flyers, hiring events, and anything else you’re already pushing out in image format can be sent through the platform too. That’s super important. Alright, manage lists and manage subscribers. Again, you can have as many different lists as you want. You can go in and create new ones, rename them, see if there are scheduled text messages or workflows attached to them, see how many people are in them, and delete them if you need to. Manage subscribers is used more day to day. This is where all of our contacts are. Obviously, you’re already working with a lot of people, and what you can do is take your existing database—or even just your caseload of 20, 30, 40, or 50 people—and easily upload them into the system by clicking the Upload Subscribers button. It’s a very simple Excel file: column A, B, and C—first name, last name, phone number. You can also add additional identifiers if you’d like, such as a case number ID or where they are in the process, like pre-eligibility or employment verification.

Max Schelkopf [29:00-30:01]: So that is texting in a nutshell. The next part, and I know I’m running short on time, but I’ll go quickly here, is the mobile web app platform. Let me get a live example pulled up for you. I live in Central Illinois, and we’re finally coming into spring here, so I’m going to pull up the Virgin Islands mobile web app because it lets me live vicariously through them. I’ll have a big QR code pulled up here for everyone to scan, and I’ll show you some different examples as well. Real quick, the big advantages here are no hard download required. As you’re about to see, we’re all going to scan this QR code and it will pop up right on your phone. No IT required, so you can build a bunch of content really quickly and distribute it via text to a lot of people very simply and very fast. Third, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can easily add all of your existing amazing content. For example, the OhioMeansJobs page could easily live inside of there.

Max Schelkopf [30:01-31:18]: Alright, so let’s run through this. Just like before with texting, you’ve got some tabs here on the left. Keep in mind these are very customizable and can look and feel a lot of different ways. This navigation tab is how you control your home screen. They have a pretty common set of use cases. They link out their jobs page, which is just their territory-sponsored job board, similar to OhioMeansJobs. They’ve got training resources. You can upload documents inside of here. Keep in mind every little link, bar navigation item, or icon inside of here has its own unique URL. If I were trying to help someone with their resume, I could grab the link to this resume uploader, text it over to them, and they click it, snap a photo of it, and I have it. They also link their hot jobs. You can book appointments at job centers or any career center in here as well, so you can help with appointment scheduling. You can trigger text message conversations.

Max Schelkopf [31:18-32:22]: For those of you who scanned it, if you click “Chat with us today,” it will actually put you in contact with a case manager in the USVI. If you’re looking for a new career down where it’s sunny, feel free—it’s probably a nice person named Khalil, Kate, or Troy. You can have your calendars in here. They have a linked-out Metrics Learning page where people can get online certifications. They’ve got a cool little AI prompt builder that you can totally customize. For example, if I want to be an Amazon delivery driver, it will suggest keywords to put on my resume. These are all customizable large language model prompts there for you. So how do you build content inside of these? Under Build Your Pages—and I’m going to go to a page where nobody is probably hanging out—we have all of these content engagement icons.

Max Schelkopf [32:22-33:44]: Again, text, video, audio, any file type—PDF, Excel, Word doc, PowerPoint—maps to help people get directions to locations, fillable forms, fillable PDF forms, e-signatures on documents, quizzes, polls, surveys, you name it. It can easily live inside of here. You can iframe and embed existing websites as well, so you don’t have to create everything and be redundant. If we were hosting a job fair, we can click the text icon, drag it into the builder window, and say, “Job Fair, March 23rd.” We can add a little program flyer by dragging in an image. We’re integrated with Canva, so you can easily design your flyers or whatever you want to put in here. I’m just going to grab a super basic logo, maybe from an employer partner like USPS. We’ve got our little flyer, and then we want a registration form. We can have Job Fair Registration, ask for their full name, phone number, email, and maybe whether they are currently employed. Then we hit save, and live in real time there’s our little job fair registration. Again, I would just grab the URL to this and text it out to a thousand people, and they’ll start signing up for your events right away. I’m going to delete those before the USVI calls me.

Max Schelkopf [33:46-35:05]: Some other quick examples I can show you—let’s go to Chicago. This is for the American Job Centers in Chicago, and they use it a ton. Over 20,000 documents—I think it’s 20,000, it’s a lot, in the tens of thousands—have been submitted through this. Again, it’s a fillable PDF form, so all those paper forms you have flying around can easily be digitized, with an e-signature capability as well. When that individual fills it out on their phone and hits submit, it will email it to you or whoever on your team needs it, filled out and ready to go. They use it for their WIOA orientation. They have orientation videos, employer assessments, and all kinds of forms in here. We can do a basic skills screening. There’s a little e-signature example. Again, once someone fills this out and hits submit, it goes right to them. They also provide a PDF version, so if that individual wants to print it out and fill it out the old-fashioned way, they definitely can.

Max Schelkopf [35:05-36:32]: The last little bit here is reporting, so let me jump back over to my demo. Then we’ll wrap it up with any questions anybody has, and feel free to start throwing those questions in the chat window right now. Let me get my account pulled up so I can run over reporting real quickly. Alright, reporting dashboard. Data is really important. Under texting, all of these are different reports specifically related to text messaging—how many texts were sent, how many were received, and whether people actually clicked the little links embedded in messages. You’ll be able to differentiate whether 100 clicks came from 10 people clicking 10 times each or 1 person clicking 100 times. If you needed to pull all the text messages between you and an individual, such as everything for a caseload, you can easily do that. You own the data; we just house and protect it. You can pull it based on time ranges and export it as Excel or PDF, or print it out. Mobile web reporting gives you the same kind of data: how many people are going to the mobile web app, when they are visiting, dwell times, whether they completed a form, and so on. Again, all of that can be easily extracted into PDF or Excel, or printed—whatever format works best for you.

Max Schelkopf [36:33-37:01]: Alright, I hope I didn’t go too far over time here, but I want to give you some time for Q&A. Any questions anybody has, please feel free to throw them in the chat window at this point. Yes, this is recorded, and we will be sharing it. Absolutely. Any other questions from anybody?

Max Schelkopf [37:05-37:30]: If any of you do want to learn more, and you’re not an existing client, I’m happy to meet with you and do a demo for your team. You can reach out to me anytime at max@engagebycell.com

. That is my direct line as well, 309-635-3943. If you want to talk about a trial, pricing, or any of those kinds of questions, please feel free to reach out.

Max Schelkopf [37:32-38:19]: Thank you, Erica, I appreciate it. I’ll give it about another minute here. I know I went a little bit over time. But if none of you have any questions, we will go about our Thursdays. Happy spring, everyone. It’s Thursday afternoon, so we’ve got one more day and then it’s the weekend. I hope it’s nice where you’re at and that you can get outside a little bit. I know that’s what I’m going to try to do. Again, if any of you are going to be in Las Vegas next week for the forum and want to connect, I’d be more than happy to do so. I’ll be in Vegas Monday through Thursday, and I’m looking forward to the forum. It’s always a great event.

Max Schelkopf [38:19-38:56]: If none of you have any questions, I’ll be happy to give you some of your day back here. Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to join me. Oh—“Are there new updates on Engage by Cell available to everyone?” Yes. Gallia County, if you reach out to either Casey, Fred, or myself, we’ll get you all set up. Don’t worry about it. Alright, well, have a wonderful day, everyone. Thank you again for joining me, and I will talk to you soon and maybe see some of you in Vegas next week. Bye now!

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