How Cobry helped Simon Community Scotland use the Cloud to better serve Glasgow’s homeless

As the National reports Glasgow is setting out to be a leader in tackling homelessness, and to distill that success into a repeatable blueprint for others to reuse.

Glasgow has many social organizations working towards this goal. Simon Community Scotland is a Glasgow-based charity which has been operating for over 50 years. Today it operates from 15 service locations throughout the West of Scotland.

The organisation’s mission is to combat the causes and effects of homelessness and work towards a vision that everyone should have a safe place to live and access to the support they need.

Challenges

Due to the physical distance between the services and head office, communication is a key challenge for Simon Community.

Before moving to the cloud, Simon Community were operating from a server based IT system. This was costly to support but such a setup presented many other challenges:

• Security
• Reliability
• Difficult to get all stakeholders integrated into using technology
• Flexibility & Scalability – being responsive to changing relief workers, staff members and service users
• Mobile working plays a huge role in the operation of Simon Community as many team members carry out activities on the move – and the previous technology was not geared for working ‘on the go’
• Ageing infrastructure

Solution – Moving to G-Suite

Simon Community decided to move to using G Suite after evaluating various options. They required a solution that would make remote communication and collaboration between teams effortless, that was intuitive for staff to use and offered new opportunities for improving the way they delivered services. In addition, access to unlimited licences for no cost under the Google for Nonprofits program provided significant cost savings.

This also allows the team to scale easily at no direct extra cost. Cobry helped Simon Community make the technical switch from using an on-premise server to G Suite.

Featured Digital Scot: Cobry

This case study provides an example of how these services are especially helpful to non-profits, who may lack the in-house IT expertise of larger organizations but still need the same modern tools and practices.

Cobry specializes in helping organizations of any size adopt the latest Cloud best practices notably Google Cloud services.

Training

“Cobry were able to deliver on site training pitched at the learning needs and expectations of the organisation supporting us to make a smooth transition from a Microsoft-dependent setup to G Suite”

Advice

“We have no in-house IT expertise so we need to trust the advice and support of external experts in determining our digital strategy. Cobry worked with us throughout the process not only in implementation of G Suite but in building a long-term digital inclusion strategy involving staff and people who are homeless”

On-site

“Perhaps one of the biggest challenges and benefits was moving multiple sites onto a shared drive. For us the process was simple but we underestimated the challenges staff would experience in managing the shared drive. That was were Cobry came in, supporting managers and teams to work within a new filing structure and extract the benefits of this in a way that gained their commitment. There are always going to be challenges with a new system but continually heralding the benefits and ‘tricks of the trade’ helped people to buy into the change.”

End Results

Switching to a cloud-based system supports Simon Community’s vision of using the latest technologies to not only support their team but also open up these tools to our service users who are almost always excluded from access to IT.

Devices

“Significant cost savings in hardware as we were due to upgrade existing hardware in services. Cost of Chrome was half that of PC, as well as faster, more secure and mobile”.

Reliability

“Since moving to G Suite we have experienced no business interruptions. On rare occasions we’ve lost local wifi but staff have been able to tether their phones to Chromebooks so it’s been business as usual. Chromebooks are fast, light, immense battery length, simple to use and to date we’ve not had a single issue with their reliability. We are so confident in their reliability and performance we are in the process of replacing all PCs with Chromebooks.”

Availability

“The front facing simplicity of G Suite masks the enormous functionality the different apps bring to the whole. The ability to integrate into mobile environments and access anything, anywhere at any time is incredible.”

Get Digital

In this video they explain how they worked with Get Digital Scotland, a Simon Community initiative to support people affected by homelessness improve access to the digital world.

Previously their work was inhibited by a slow and expensive system, moving to Workspace provided them the fast online collaboration that enabled their front-line staff better perform their work. They use Google Forms to collect and aggregate data, capturing the impact of the Get Digital program.

Cobry helped them migrate their workflows and email from the old to this new system, and have been an invaluable partner in supporting Simon Community to scale and roll the program out across Scotland, enabling the homeless to better participate in the new digital economy.

Roadmap

Cobry maintains an ongoing, supportive relationship with clients, helping them formulate a roadmap plan to expand their use of technology and the benefits they enjoy from doing so, such as:

• Converting old laptops to run on Chrome OS and providing free wifi in all our accommodation services to give to service users access to the digital world.
• Using our YouTube Channel to produce different ways to train and communicate with staff.
• Using Hangouts to routinely connect staff and to build networks of staff from different geographical locations, in particular nightshift workers.
• Apply the $10,000 adwords credit (part of the Google for Nonprofits programme) to reach an online audience will previously we would not be able to communicate with.

About Cobry

Founded and led by Colin Bryce, Cobry focuses on the often overlooked change management challenges of moving to the Cloud, emphasizing the importance of essential success factors such as comprehensive user training and ongoing support.

Over 90% of Cobry clients said they would recommend Google apps for work and Cobry for their implementation.