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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Hi Allan. Steve Albertson here, from Community Voice Mail (www.cvm.org), the nonprofit providing voice mail to over 40,000 homeless and “phoneless” people in need in 39 U.S. cities. I saw your post about CVM and GrandCentral on your blog, and thought I’d chime in.
We’ve been talking with GrandCentral for the past year about a number of issues, and are pretty familiar with their service (which launched in late-September). We’re talking with them about how CVM and GrandCentral might collaborate, particularly in cities that are currently without any formal distribution of free voicemail for low-income and homeless people.
GrandCentral’s product is terrific, and might be a good fit for a lot of people who need a voice mail box or want to use some of GrandCentral’s advanced features. And, there are some features CVM voice mail has now that GrandCentral doesn’t appear to have (broadcast messaging to specific agency clients and to all clients in a geography; usage reporting; tie-in to demographic/outcomes tracking systems; sign-up can be done over the phone, etc.).
While we agree that ideally the market will bring free voicemail to everyone, including the traditional CVM user, we haven’t seen this happen yet. Perhaps GrandCentral will provide the tipping point for this realm that Hotmail and others provided for email. It’s very early in GrandCentral’s corporate life to determine that, and it’s also early for us to determine what sort of collaboration makes the most sense. We’ve seen numerous free voicemail services come and go over the years, and we need to evaluate how this one will be different.
In the meanwhile, the existing CVM sites (including yours in NYC) provide more than just voicemail—they link it to other direct services, advocacy, and support mechanisms that exist in the community. They’ve stood the test of time and even in an age when everyone seems to have a cell phone, we continue to get more than 20 requests a month for help. I
Again, these are interesting times, and there are more and more companies creating services that have broad consumer value in this area. As a nonprofit with the sole mission to help people without phone numbers get them to improve their lives, we try to take a look at all of them. When we accepted the significant offer of support from Cisco, we weighed the pros and cons of this heavily against the needs of the people and organizations we’re serving. And we’re doing this today with GrandCentral and other companies….
Thanks,
Steve Albertson
Community Voice Mail
206-441-7872
[...] actually offered homeless people in San Francisco free voicemail just like CVM. In 2006, the writing was on the wall and I counseled the Coalition to shut down the New York CVM service and we did. I’m upset [...]
[...] actually offered homeless people in San Francisco free voicemail just like CVM. In 2006, the writing was on the wall and I counseled the Coalition to shut down the New York CVM service and we did. I’m upset [...]