Whisper's online office

Facebook

Whisper currently uses “secret” Facebook groups for general communication between volunteers. Business social networks such as Slack and Microsoft’s Yammer are actually very similar to Facebook with better search and document handling, but their free versions don’t meet Whisper’s needs; for example there’s no user administration facility, so you can’t remove users.

Whisper currently uses the Facebook groups listed below. If you would like to join some of them then feel free to ask.

• Volunteers (mostly for volunteers outside Uganda)
• Trustees
• Fundraising and marketing
• Child Sponsorship
• Jigger Group
• Flooring Group (a joint group with Dabaso Community Unit and EarthEnable researching low-cost techniques for sealing floors)
• Child Development
• Friends of Whisper (for fans who are unable to volunteer)
• Whisper’s World of Volunteers (for people who have volunteered or will be volunteering in Uganda)

There are also groups set up from time to time for specific campaigns, for example the Royal Parks Half Marathon.

WhisperWiki

Whisper’s wiki for internal documentation is available at https://www.whisperhealth.org/wiki/.

Google OAuth is configured here: https://console.cloud.google.com/apis/credentials

Whisper’s wiki uses the Wrap plugin which provides a lot of extra formatting options, for example the yellow “tip” box shown above.

Whisper Email

Long-term volunteers can be given an e-mail address such as john@whisperhealth.org. Whisper uses e-mail servers provided as part of Google Workspace.

You can add your Whisper e-mail account to whatever mail reader you normally use to read e-mail, although a webmail facility is also available at https://gmail.com.

The connection details for the e-mail account are given below.

Username: john@whisperhealth.org
Password: Use the email account’s password.
Incoming Server: imap.gmail.com
Requires SSL: Yes
IMAP Port: 993

Outgoing Server: smtp.gmail.com
Use authentication: Yes
SMTP Port: 465
Use same settings as incoming mail server

You will also need to enable IMAP (or POP) on the Gmail server by logging into https://gmail.com and then go to Settings icon (cog) > Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP

For how to prevent Whisper e-mails from ending up in junk mail folders, see Email Authentication.

Phone

Whisper’s public UK phone number is 0300 3020018, which costs the same as a local landline number to call.

Whisper uses Voipfone’s cloud phone service:

• they are super-cheap, particularly if you don’t make many calls through them
• for small charities they offer a free phone number and most of their value-added services are free
• they get excellent reviews
• their service is sophisticated, allowing you to do most things you might want to do with a phone, including IVR (“Press 1 for child sponsorship enquiries, Press 2 for donation enquiries…”)

Voipfone doesn’t compete directly with Skype or VSee; it provides Whisper with a public UK phone number which can be forwarded anywhere we like, so for example if whoever usually take the calls is away for the weekend they can forward the calls to somebody else. As Whisper grows, we can add “extensions” so that whoever answers the phone can forward the call to other Whisper volunteers.

Voipfone allows Whisper volunteers to make outgoing calls on Whisper business, at Whisper’s expense; the billing is PAYG. Volunteers can make calls using:

• the Voipfone Softphone mobile app (iOS/Android), not to be confused with the Voipfone Mobile app which allows you to administer Whisper’s Voipfone account
• a softphone (a program like Skype, used with a headset)
• a VOIP phone
• any mobile phone via Voipfone’s special freephone numbers

Whisper’s Voipfone account number is 30189441.

Google Workspace

Whisper has a free Google Workspace (formerly “G Suite” or “Google Apps for Work”) account under the Google for Nonprofits programme. This allows an unlimited number of user accounts with 30GB of online storage for each user account, shared across mail, Google Drive and Google Photos. The various web apps can be accessed within gmail via the square icon containing 9 black squares in the top right hand corner of the screen.

MailChimp

Whisper uses MailChimp to send out newsletters.

The MailChimp subscription is free until the list reaches 2000 subscribers. Should a larger list be needed, VerticalResponse offers up to 10000 mails a month free to nonprofits.

At the time of writing (February 2017) Whisper has around 450 addresses on its mailing list. This number should be increased to at least 1500 to be useful.

Whisper finds that about 25% of recipients open newsletters and around 2% click on links in the newsletters, and these figures are in fact typical for charity newsletters.

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is Whisper’s CRM (customer relationship management) system. It stores details of donors, their donations, whether or not they want to be e-mailed etc. Other similar systems are CiviCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM.

The reason that it’s good to keep track of who’s donating is that it’s far easier to raise money from people who have already donated than it is to raise money from people who have never met the charity before. The latter is often expensive to the point of being uneconomic.

It can be used for all sorts of things, for example to find all donors who live in the West Country because Whisper wants to hold a fundraising event there.

It will allow people other than Veronika to interact with donors; at the moment all the thank you e-mails have to come from her, which works when you have say 50 donors but when you have 2000, that won’t work.

An important use is to ensure that donors (particularly first-time donors) receive a follow-up e-mail showing them what their donation actually achieved.

Media Library

Whisper uses Piwigo https://www.whisperhealth.org/piwi as a media library to store photos and other assets for publicity and social-media.

Another candidate was Resourcespace which was originally developed for Oxfam. It’s a relatively complex package, with workflows for approving photos when they are uploaded.

Videoconferencing

We have found that Skype works pretty well from Jinja for videoconferencing.

For videoconferencing from more remote areas, try VSee which is specially designed to work well over poor-quality data connections. VSee clients are available for Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS.

Calendar

There is a need for calendars for example to show when volunteers are going to be working in Uganda.

There is no calendar package that meets all Whisper’s needs (responsive, PHP-based, self-hosted, offering SSO) but the trend is to use lightweight distributed calendars based on CalDAV, a standard that allows you to update a web-based calendar from your local calendar application of choice (Google, iCalendar, Outlook etc). Whisper should consider running a CalDAV server.

Mapping

It would be nice to have a mapping application of some kind such as Mapbox or Qgis. Low priority. It may even be better to use the mapping tools that come with Whisper’s business-grade Google Apps account.