Virtualizing Chapter Operations, Improving Client Response Times, Reducing Costs

Shared and supported by SCORE Cleveland Mentor, Mark Krosse

Simple Steps to Driving Mentor ZOOM Adoption:

• We provide direct guidance to mentors on 3 Simple Steps to get them onboard with their @scorevolunteer.org ZOOM account.
• We track adoption across the chapter by using a helpful report from National showing ZOOM accounts compared to the Chapter roster.
• We do ZOOM screenshare sessions with mentors that need some white-glove assistance. We review chapter adoption statistics at our ExComm meetings.

Results: As of April 15, 55% of SCORE Cleveland active mentors now have ZOOM @svo account. This percentage is increasing weekly.

From an infrastructure perspective... 

With the adoption of the Google Cloud (@scorevolunteer.org) infrastructure and Google applications, new capabilities are available to SCORE chapter offices to reduce costs and IT support hours while increasing volunteer usability and productivity. SCORE Cleveland needed to dramatically reduce costs, IT labor burden, and technology risk for their Downtown office. For many years, they had an in-house Windows Servers supporting 5 Windows Desktops. "It was a maintenance nightmare and a security risk. We began migration off Windows devices onto Google Chromebox devices in 2018."

With 100% adoption of @scorevolunteer email addresses, mentors are now able to use their @SVO credentials when logging into an office Chromebox. Doing so syncs their Chrome browser settings from home and also gives them SSO (single-sign-on) to Engage and to help.score.org. NO MORE FORGOTTEN PASSWORDS for multiple systems! Mentors can also set Google 2FA for their @SVO account for enhanced security and ease-of-use.

A Chromebox is zero-maintenance with automatic software updates from Google. If a Chromebox fails, we swap a refurb for as little as $99 and wipe/dispose of the failed Chromebox.