Twilio

Juma Ventures was built to provide low-income youth with asset management skills, advanced education, and professional training. Juma is a social enterprise: business revenue contributes to it's social mission -- so above all, Juma is a job. For 15 years, Juma has employed youth 16 to 19 years old as ballpark vendors, barristas, and ice cream scoopers, in addition to providing them social services. Its small enterprise team of managers schedule up to eighty youth to work every week at sports events across the San Francisco Bay Area and major US cities.

Juma's young employees and job environment are unique. Most don't have computers, and using email to communicate is a challenge. Staffing sporting events requires flexibility. Each game had different requirements: football games need lots of youth employees, and baseball games can be scheduled every day. Communicating with all these youth employees previously took Juma managers several hours per week.

This summer, Juma adopted Twilio to improve communication.

Juma's youth employees began receiving custom automated reminder calls on their mobile phones. "Hi Jenny, you are scheduled to work this Saturday, the 9th, at one o'clock, at the Oakland Coliseum." Youth hear what games they are scheduled to work, when to arrive, and directions to the game.

Youth then press a key on their phone to acknowledge the reminder and confirm or cancel the shift. This status information is transmitted to a web portal in real time, giving Juma managers an up-to-date view of youth availability.

By telling youth when and where they are scheduled to work, and by helping managers more efficiently coordinate team members, Twilio helps this innovative non-profit save time and money. Juma can focus on their social mission and worry less about operational details.

Juma uses Twilio to integrate web and phone communications.

Twilio worked with Juma to develop an integrated web/telephony platform that combines inbound and outbound call control with a web site for managing youth, initiating calls, and viewing real time attendance information. A single web application written in Python allows Juma managers to:

• Create and schedule upcoming events
• Build youth profiles and assign youth to games
• Click a single button on a web page to issue a reminder call to a group of youth employees
• Provide an incoming phone number for youth to call to hear their upcoming schedule, customized by caller ID
• Give Juma managers a real time view of youth participation
• Send automatic outgoing call alerts with schedule change or updates

All this was implemented in a few weeks on a limited budget.

Juma's success

Enterprise Manager Jesse Zitrin staffed some 150 sporting events in 2008, coordinating over 2,000 shifts.

"Twilio simplifies my workplace," Jesse says. "It saves time, money, and brain cells. I recommend it to anyone who needs to coordinate lots of people and events."

"People ask me if I'm a sports fan, or if I like working with youth. I love both aspects. And now, I get to focus on the things I like most!"