Well, it looks like Grandcentral understands how much of a fatal blow they’re dealing to Community Voicemail. They will NOT work with current users of the Community Voicemail program. It’s apparently an unofficial restriction intended to prop up Community Voicemail. Unfortunately, this means my organization or even New York City can’t get the same treatment as San Francisco. Sigh. This is a purely artificial restriction as there is nothing to stop your average social services client from signing up to Grandcentral (all they need is the URL and about fifteen minutes on the Web). To summarize what Grandcentral offers:
- Hunt groups. Your own number complete with a hunt group so that Grandcentral can basically go through a list of numbers you provide (cell, work, home) and if no one answers it will take that person’s voicemail.
- Free voicemail. This is the death blow to CVM at least in its current incarnation. If you get free voicemail ON YOUR OWN, in the same way that you can get free e-mail then there’s really no point in relying on CVM. Many social services clients have e-mail accounts of their own through Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. Expect the same for voicemail in the next year.
- Unified messaging. Grandcentral will forward the voicemail to the e-mail address of your choice. Pretty slick — not so useful for the average client but still pretty neat nonetheless and frankly, something that CVM should have thought of many moons ago.
- Business continuity. This service is going to be a big hit for the smaller nonprofits that need a disaster recovery solution for their telephony needs. Grandcentral can probably step in temporarily in the face of a larger disaster.
The only thing missing with Grandcentral are the evaluative pieces that CVM provides for fundraising purposes. My guess is that even this functionality will go the way of the dodo. After all, no one would ever consider doing outcomes measurements for clients that use Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail and the same would be true (eventually) for Grandcentral voicemail.
In a deep way, this really gets to the heart of what any non-profit’s true mission is which I believe is to render itself obsolete. If the private sector in the guise of Grandcentral is providing free voicemail, then shouldn’t every non-profit that is currently providing free voicemail in a very serious way ask: “Should we shut down our free voicemail services?” While this may be a sad outcome for many people, we should consider it a victory ultimately for the ability of our sector to step in when no one else did and conversely, to back off when others pick up the slack.
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