Kent White is a Project Manager for a NPO called "A Child's Hope Foundation". So when he contacted us to be part of Azendoo NPOs' program we jumped on this occasion to ask him about his Azendoo usage.
Could you tell us a bit about your work?
A Child’s Hope Foundation helps orphans and abandoned children find a safe and loving home either with an adoptive family or inside a family-style orphanage.
We build and remodel orphanages to support these children, but our work doesn’t end there. We know that children need more than a roof over their heads. They need love, nurture, and comforting, so we take volunteers on work projects to meet the orphans, play with them, sing with them, hold them on their laps and really get to know them.
Many of our volunteers consider these children virtual cousins, nieces, and nephews and try to go back regularly to visit them. So we’re actually creating a virtual family for orphans and abandoned children to get some of their emotional needs met while we’re improving the framework to meet their physical and safety needs.
How do you use Azendoo to organise your work?
Azendoo has been vital to keeping a large group of volunteers always on the same page about what needs to happen. Al of the people within our organization have full-time jobs outside our organization, families, or other commitments that make their lives hectic. We rely on Azendoo to make their work with us focused and on-task so that they can attend to all of the important things in their lives in addition to their charitable work with us.
When a need arises, we only need a moment to type it into Azendoo and assign the task. Then we are free to put that thought out of our minds until it needs to be attended to, without ever worrying that some important detail has been forgotten. Azendoo takes all our brain clutter and organizes it into a simple format so that we can relax and know that everything will be dealt with when the time is right.
Did you have any facilities in getting your team to join the application?
Absolutely! The people we’re working with are very busy people busy owners, managers, mothers and fathers. Asking them to create a new account with a new website to check regularly, a new password to remember, and new emails coming into their inbox makes some people wary. However, when they see how Azendoo actually helps eliminate clutter from their lives, most have been happy to adopt the platform.
How has the application changed the way in which you work?
We use many fewer spreadsheets and emails. Fewer tasks slip through the cracks. Now when we have a spreadsheet or another document, it is very easy to find because it is linked to the subject we are working on.
What is your favorite feature of the application?
My personal favorite feature is the ability to comment within a task. That way, we can keep documents and ideas all organized in one place instead of having to go back to check emails or text messages to remember what we had decided to do about something.
When I start my day, I just open up Azendoo and I know that everything I need will be in one convenient place.
What does the future hold for you and Azendoo?
In the past, we’ve only used Azendoo within a certain part of our organization, but we’re in the process of getting everybody in the organization signed up. We feel like our organization will run more smoothly and we’ll get much more accomplished if we can get everybody working and reporting in one central place. It’ll relieve a lot of the headache we have had in the past with information not going out to everybody that it needs to. In other words, we’re hopeful that Azendoo will make our group even more of a unified team.
Who would you recommend the application to?
We’re recommending Azendoo to project managers, in particular, and leaders within organizations that want to be able to get a feel for what’s happening in their organization quickly and efficiently. It can be used on any scale, however. Even a busy stay-at-home mom could benefit from keeping her long list of tasks organized in one place so she can get rid of all the post-it notes and white boards scribbles.