Woodcraft Rangers is a Los Angeles-based non-profit that serves 16,500 young people with the opportunity to learn and be enriched through after-school programs. The organization, which started in 1922, goes into the most in-need neighborhoods and provides students in kindergarten through high school. The kids learn and explore through physical education, visual/performing arts, science, math, technology and literacy.
With a field staff spread across the Southland region, they need a flexible and dependable technology infrastructure to power their operations. The Nokia Lumia 900 is now being toted by Woodcraft Rangers staff and is actively making them more efficient and connected to the office and one another.
Getting stuff done
More than 90 employees at the non-profit have received the Lumia 900 in the Cyan color, and they staff says they love them. Woodcraft Rangers looked at every smartphone option in the market, including costly BlackBerries, and chose the Lumia 900 because it was easy to use and extremely practical.
As to what convinced Woodcraft Rangers the Lumia 900 was the right solution, the IT staff liked the sturdy construction of the Lumia 900. David Lara, IT administrator for Woodcraft noted:
“The sturdy construction of the Lumia 900 stood out to us. Other options seemed too delicate and focused on entertainment. Nokia’s option gave us the functionality of the most popular smartphone in a format that lets us focus on our work.”
In daily operations, site coordinators use their mobile phones to share and review documents in the field. Also, employees can use an app on the Lumia to work with their time cards – ensuring payroll accuracy.
Nokia Lumia is built for business
With many organizations already having Microsoft powering their back office operations (it seems almost everyone uses Outlook at work), the Nokia Lumia is a powerful tool for mobile professionals. With support for Microsoft Office built in to the Lumia line along with productivity tools such as Microsoft Lync, SkyDrive, Evernote and thousands of other business apps, the options for professionals are astounding.
“We were looking to repurpose BlackBerry servers so right there we are saving money,” said David Lara, “Additionally, our site coordinators like the big, bright Live Tiles, the Lumia’s large screen and we like the seamless integration to our Office Suite,” he added.
With Lumias serving as a mobile extension of your employees’ office, CIOs and network admins can leverage the back office investment they’ve made with no additional licensing costs for using mobile phones.