Customer Story: Beginnings and Beyond

Beginnings and Beyond has 3 childcare centres in the mid to southern Delaware area providing early childcare and wrap around care for infants and school age children. They employ approximately 75 employees.

For any communication between staff and parents, Beginnings and Beyond use Bright Wheel. However, when they tried to use this platform for internal communication, they realized it wasn’t as competent.

Danielle Harrison, owner of Beginnings and Beyond, researched possible communication solutions for months and even considered asking a developer to create something bespoke to solve their communication challenges.

She had found all other providers were either too hard to use or too simple in their functionality. Luckily, before going down the development route, she came across OurPeople whilst searching on the internet and realized she had found her solution.

Paper-Free Solution

Since using OurPeople they’ve stopped having to rely on printing important information and expecting staff members to keep hold of documents. Nowadays, no one loses documents and staff member can’t claim they can’t find anything anymore. Being able to view everything on phones has also helped their efficiency as a company.

Being able to segment the audience when sending messages has been useful as they can choose who receives messages, either by centre or all staff.

Currently they use Broadcasts and Smart Forms but they are planning on using surveys more.

OurPeople has also helped their resourcing as they can put all links to training on the platform. This has helped keep every team member up to date on relevant training.

Communication Challenges Solved

Their communication challenges are now a thing of the past. The management team was getting frustrated at having to save employee contact details in their phones and relying on text messages to communicate. They found they couldn’t text everyone at the same time and if different managers had different staff lists, they couldn’t sync these together.

Now their communication is super smooth. Everyone knows everything and is on the same page.

Increased Staff Morale

As a result, the staff at Beginnings and Beyond are more appreciative. Staff morale has improved as they now feel their head office is communicating fully with them and this is making them feel more respected and cared for.

When describing the OurPeople platform, Harrison says:

“OurPeople is affordable and worth it. It has so many components that you might not realise you need. I wouldn’t move away from it now. It is easy to use, especially for those that aren’t that good with tech. The customer support is awesome. Any question we have gets answered. Never feels like I don’t get a response. It’s huge.”

She continues:

“I can see what my admin are pushing to my staff. It’s perfect. My staff like it as it is so easy to use and it’s really great all around.”