 Hi, everybody. This is Mike Brunewald from ProbonoNet. I'm a program coordinator for ProbonoNet, and I will be moderating today's webinar, which is part of a series that ProbonoNet is putting on with LSN TAP. Our topic today is Process Mapping for Legal Services. We're very happy to have everyone with us today, and we're going to be tackling a new topic for this series. We're excited to talk about this. We're going to be focusing today on how process improvement and workflow mapping can help legal aid programs improve organizational processes, enhance service delivery, and solve issues in innovative and holistic ways. We have a great panel joining us for this webinar today. Joining us is Matthew Burnett, who's the director of the Immigration Advocates Network, Susan Southey, who's managing attorney at Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation, and Adam Hite, who's director of Probono Services at Legal Services NYC. So, just as an introduction, I just want to talk a little bit about why we're discussing process mapping today. On the slide is a quote from the LSD Summit, the report from the LSD Summit back in 2013, and the general thrust of the topic is that business process analysis and process mapping, they've been widely used in the private sector for many years. This area didn't really come to the attention of many legal aid programs until the LSD Tech Summit report, which included a specific section on business process analysis, of which is on the slide. You'll find that on page 8 of the report in case you're following along at home. As described in the Tech Summit report, business process analysis or workflow mapping can be applied to a wide range of access to justice activity. For example, how certain case types are handled, what tasks can be applied to which staff, and where technology can best augment the work of staff and volunteers. The report noted specifically that these techniques can be used within one organization, but it also laid out areas in which process mapping can be used across an access to justice community in a given state, for example, to analyze the optimal role that each entity can play in service delivery, and in maximizing the systemic impact of process improvement. So the question for us today is how can process analysis and process mapping help a legal aid program? And to put it simply, there's a few different points, sorry, going the wrong direction. Here we go. There are a few separate points that are relevant to us today. First of all, process mapping can help improve communication and coordination between stages or stakeholders involved in the given process. It can help us eliminate wasteful steps, consolidate steps, and reduce complexity, which we're all trying to do on a daily basis. It can help us identify challenges and bottlenecks and reduce them, which again is a constant struggle within our programs. It also can help us develop a picture of the ideal process and then figure out how far we are from achieving that idea. And finally, it can help us develop a fuller understanding of the role each actor in the process plays, how they work, and how their roles intersect. So the idea here is that this gives us a way to develop a total understanding of a process. All of the actors involved, all of the steps involved, so that we can identify inefficiencies and figure out ways that we can optimize our processes so that they allow us to provide greater service to our clients. So we have a number of resources at the end that we'll share, but we're excited to get started with our panelists who will discuss their own experience with these approaches. Some organizations, including those of our first two panelists, have engaged outside consultants to assist with these processes. Other organizations have undertaken using similar techniques of decomposing a project or process, identifying opportunities to improve it, and identifying places where technology can help automate aspects, which is of course particularly relevant to us. So to get started, I want to hand things off to Matthew Burnett, who is the director again of the Immigration Advocates Network. Matthew, if you can request presenter access, I'll go ahead and switch things over to you. All right, I think I went through the slides. Can folks hear me? We can hear you now, Matthew. Great, and you can see my slides. Yep. Great. All right, so I'm going to talk about a case study, and it relates to business process improvement exercise, and I think there's a lot of lingo that's used in this space. So essentially process mapping, process improvement, or business process improvement is all the same. I like the emphasis on improvement because the idea is not just to have a sort of descriptive context for the work, but then to be prescriptive about ways in which you can change it or make interventions. So I'm going to talk a little bit about our work around naturalization application assistance, and just to give some context for that. There are about nine million folks in the country who are legal permanent residents and who have yet to take the final step to naturalize and become U.S. with a lot of benefits of that. First and foremost, the ability to vote. And so we work with a number of groups, both nationally and locally to increase the numbers of folks who are applying for naturalization and have developed a platform called Citizenship Works which helps folks through that process. And our current platform leverages some of the tools that others are using, like Help Interactive and A2J, to help folks to screen and then to complete their application in the context of different service delivery models, group workshops, and clinics, and individual appointments, which I'll talk about in a minute. But we were really engaged around this process not only to understand how traditionally the work happens in the field, but also to inform work that we've done to develop a new platform on Citizenship Works that I'll show you at the end. And so the trajectory is kind of to take you through some of the different steps that we went through and then to show you how that applies specifically to the gap analysis and learnings that we were able to develop around specific interests that we had in developing an entirely new platform to assist folks to apply for naturalization, per se, or with the help of a non-profit legal service provider. So our starting point was that we facilitated a series of process mapping exercises in order to identify what's called in the parlance of process mapping or business process improvement as is. So as is what you're doing now, as you could probably tell. And that was something that we facilitated among three different locations and probably 15 different groups in one way or the other. Probably a smaller core of 5 or 6 to do the as is environment and then as we moved on to the 2B phase to describe kind of the ideal process as Brian mentioned we brought in additional stakeholders. And so we did focus groups in places in DC and Silicon Valley and in Los Angeles. And then during the last phase we did a final visioning and mapping session with a bunch of groups in LA that included some of the initial groups as well as others. So this was our sort of timeline. This was a big project. Obviously we were looking at mapping the way an entire field does something or a process that different groups are all more or less sort of in terms of getting folks into the process of applying to naturalize and then successfully naturalizing them. So it was about a six month process and you can kind of see the map here from our kickoff to the final 2B visioning session that we held. One of the things that we did early on is to identify different models or processes within the larger environment where folks are doing things slightly differently. And so we looked at workshop models which are typically larger anywhere from 25 to 50 sometimes 100 folks coming into a workshop and volunteers and attorneys there who are available to help them to complete their application and do a quality control check and help answer legal questions as well as to put together all of their information their documents in order to develop an application packet that they can submit to USCIS. The second is a clinical model which typically describes something that's a little bit smaller between 5 and 10 people more regularly often maybe once a week and then also one on one model. And so we wanted to see how to build efficiencies into each of these models and I'll show you basically this across three sites and three models resulted in a lot of different maps that we developed to get insights into the process. But this is one sample process map that takes on kind of two phases. One is a planning phase and then the actual workshop phase. So you can see here in the key and these are pretty standard ways of describing things within business process improvement. There are starts and ends to the process so that's represented in green. There are process steps so these are the individual steps that are taken in order to facilitate the process. There are decision points where a decision has to be made about how folks proceed and then there are documents which are any kind of assets that's developed throughout the process so it could be a checklist that could be an outreach flyer any kind of document or asset that's used to throughout the process and so here you can see the different starting points to the process so those range from the needs in the communities to requests of partners and deliverables to funders and then each of the steps that are taken and the actual planning of the workshop. The workshop at this point hasn't happened. This is just what goes into the upfront planning and the various decision points and how they flow through the planning period. This is the second step of the workshop planning process and you can see once you get here and you're looking at developing all the assets there ends up a list of documents so the Spanish version of the document and the additional versions hotline operator documents to help them to facilitate getting folks to clients and so it's a really intensive deep dive into the specific process that an individual organization takes and the thing to remember here is that different organizations can handle things differently and that was one of the data points that we were interested in from this exercise and then also obviously different organizations have different process steps so this happens to be one that's pre robust in terms of the planning process others that we mapped out were much more streamlined. And then I'll just move on and show you a couple of examples. So this is the actual workshop process so someone comes to the workshop and what happens during that process again each of the process steps is mapped out as well as each of the documents that are generated and it takes folks all the way through the end of the process obviously some folks get weeded out if there's a complex issue or if they need additional assistance or an in-person appointment and then we also talked with groups about what are the collateral needs so whether that's study materials or a fixed test or a fee waiver application or for folks in the military other kinds of applications that they might need and so again just an example of kind of what mapping a process looks like and we did this probably 12 or 15 times with different organizations in different processes in order to again describe what's happening now the as is environment what people are doing now as is process maps we kind of filtered out what's in common what our group's doing differently and engaged in a group SWAT analysis SWAT looks at different elements and I'll just go to the next slide so you can kind of see what that looks like their strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats and so you can see this is how we mapped it out in terms of our current internal models and then what future external models and so you can see some of the strengths that we identified through all of these process mapping exercises with different organizations and different groups in different locations were that there were best practices so partnering with USCIS doing peer review by staff things like using our platform citizenship works and then look at some of the problems so one of the big problems is only about 10% of folks naturalize every year and so how do we move the 90% who are legal permanent residents and eligible to actually take the next step how we're following up with clients the fact that applicants often come unprepared and then some of the threats that we saw throughout so the increase in the application fee political climate around immigration lack of funding lack of ESL resources so all of these things are things that we kind of surface throughout the process and that's the first step as you try to then look at what are some of the 2B or sort of ideal process steps that you might take and then for each of the models, workshops, clinics and one-on-one appointments we developed 2B vision themes so these are things that we want to change in the process that might help to improve quality or efficiency or impact through the process improvements and so we identified what the core areas are that we thought would benefit from process improvements so station flow is one ability to follow up with applicants to reduce applicants who are not leaving the workshop having filed their application education and other resources that are available to them and then for each of these themes we identified specific opportunities and again that was true of each of the models so the first we looked at workshops, this is the clinic model for a smaller group processing and try to develop specific interventions that could be made around some of the areas where process improvements were needed and then finally one-on-one and so I think the benefit of this and obviously this was a 6 month engagement we spent a lot of time on this really trying to understand how to benefit the field as a whole but also our specific interest was how do we build technology to better support some of these models so one that was very clear is that we need to be able to support different types of service delivery models whether it's one-on-one or large scale group processing or pro se assistance and then others were how can we use technology to better engage around follow up to make sure folks have what they need that they feel confident in filing their application so using SMS and email to follow up ways of doing outreach and screening streamlining the entire intake process and things like that and so the result was that we came up with a set of process improvements and technological recommendations for each of the kind of core areas so planning and logistics how we're managing volunteers promotion marketing intake client education quality control and follow up and so those all became core areas that we looked at when we were actually doing the service design of the new citizenship work system which we are currently piloting in New York here's a kind of pixelated screenshot but I'll show you a short video of the process or of the new platform and you can kind of see how all of these areas and steps that we identified for improvement were integrated into the new platform so I'm going to show a very short video that describes the platform again we're in pilot now in New York we're going to be launching the platform around Citizenship Day which is September 17th but I think folks will be interested in seeing kind of how a really concrete example of how a business process improvement sort of a broad analysis of an entire area of legal services support can help to inform how we build technology and how we approach some of these challenges with your citizenship works account we personally connect you with the help you need citizenship work simple application guides you through each step of the process from start to finish if you need help we will connect you to live online legal advice our legal experts will help you complete your application and answer all of your questions if you wish to make an in-person appointment we will connect you to legal experts our large network of dedicated professionals allows us to connect you directly to legal help in your area we are mission driven and donation based citizenship works partner network is made up of hundreds of non-profit organizations with decades of immigration law experience our goal to help all people on their path to citizenship no matter what their income is start now how we developing a platform that actually was focused on the needs that were identified through a strategy like business process improvement and to let that inform the technology as opposed to sort of making guesses about what some of the needs were in the field and so we knew that going into this process we wanted to develop a platform that would allow us to support both pro se and assisted pro se and direct representation but we didn't really know exactly how that would map to the different models that were being used in the field to ensure that the platform itself was actually a fit for the needs that were identified both by the organizations that we were working with to develop the process improvement outputs but also to ensure that we were designing that system so that it was responsive to some of the gaps and some of the challenges that folks were getting so an example of one of those challenges is folks were having a hard time always having attorneys available at workshops in order to provide case review and application review for individuals and so we built into the Citizenship Works platform a virtual legal assistance model whereby an attorney anywhere in the country really but certainly at a law firm or in the volunteer capacity or at a legal service provider could actually do and connect to clients at a workshop where you would only need to have non-legal staff or volunteer staff in the workshop so I think the ability to use business process improvement not only to look at how to improve efficiencies in the specific process but then also how to build technology to be responsive to those needs and those gaps is really important and something that I think that we should probably think more about as we design technology to be responsive to the needs of the field and at the end users who are looking to access specific legal processes or benefits. So I think that's my time I'm going to pass the baton here and take any questions at the end I think. Matthew thank you very much for that presentation I look forward to hearing questions at the end. In the interest of time as you pointed out we're going to move forward to Susan Zuckie from Land and Lincoln. I'm the managing attorney in the eastern regional office for Land of Lincoln that office is located in Champaign Illinois and the reason that we got involved with business process analysis was because we wanted to get to yes faster. We wanted to help our clients get to our attorneys faster and be able to offer them more extended representation. Jillian is running my slide so if she wants to advance to the next one that would be great. To give you some background about Land of Lincoln we cover 65 counties in central and southern Illinois. We are the only LLC funded legal aid provider in those 65 counties and the only other options are really pro bono programs within those 65 counties many of which we actually run. Our territory is the size of Indiana we have five regional offices and three satellite offices that work out of some of those regional offices. A little more than half of our clients come to us through our centralized intake which is LARC, the legal advice and referral center and that was one of the things we looked at in our business process analysis is how LARC works and how to make it more efficient. As you can see on the slide there are hundreds of thousands of people living in those 65 counties who just live below 100% of the federal poverty line and we can serve people above that so there's a lot of need and not a lot of attorney staff to go around. The other challenge about our service territory is that while 48% live in six of our counties that means like 52% live everywhere else so there are some more heavily populated areas but most of our service territory is rural and it takes hours to get to courthouses to represent our clients. We were looking to do something because we did a 2011 legal needs assessment in our service territory and at that point we were serving about 60% of our clients with family law cases. When we did the legal needs assessment the result came back that less than 25% of the people who were surveyed had family law issues. The numbers were much higher in the housing employment and consumer areas and so we started making some internal changes had a strategic plan change some of our priorities to really try and target housing and consumer specifically but in two years we didn't get what we wanted to be. The numbers really hadn't changed even though we were being very intentional about trying to move into the doing more housing and more consumer cases. So we wanted to know how do we get clients to our staff attorneys in the regional offices more efficiently how do we get them there quicker how do we get the right cases to those attorneys the accurate piece that are going to be extended representation to the staff attorneys rather than just getting some advice from the hotline. This is our process. We engaged SyFARC Lean which is a branch of SyFARC's law firm that does business process analysis. They had originally done it to work on their own internal processes and realized that it had amazing results for them could have amazing results for other law firms and then they wanted to do some pro bono or low bono work for the legal aid community. They had first worked with LAF in Chicago working on their intake client screening process and then they started working with us on both our hotline process and then in the housing and consumer realms. Our process with them was funded through a grant from our IOLTA program the Lawyers Trust Fund and so that's how we were able to engage consultants that do this all the time to help us through this process. We started in February of 2014 with Voice of the Client interviews. The consultants spoke with many of our staff and they talked with a range of our staff whether it was managing attorneys, the managing attorney of the hotline, staff attorneys, support staff they talked with a lot of different people who would be involved in the hotline and in consumer and housing cases. Once they had finished that they sat down with our administrative team and talked through what they had found out and what they wanted to do and then we had our first set of two-day meetings on April 8th and 9th as you can see the first day was just spent on mapping out the process at LARC. What happens from the moment a potential client picks up the phone and tries to call what happens with the phone system how the phone system works, what happens if they actually get to an attorney and all of the different processes that break down from that. I can send the map for that to Brian if he wants it to distribute to everybody. We have kind of the map of what it looks like before and then what it looks like afterwards. I didn't put it on the slide because there is no way you'd be able to read it if I did. We then spent the next day talking just about housing cases and one of the lessons that we learned in this process is that there will be people who have a variety of different opinions about this process. There will be some people who are cheerleaders from the very beginning. They don't really need to be sold on it. They're excited about trying something new. There will be people who aren't sure about the process but are willing to be open-minded about it and see if it works. And then there are some people who are going to think this is a complete waste of their time. They don't want to be involved. Good will come out of it except lost time. I will tell you that you have to engage that third group especially. You have to get some of those people who are the naysayers involved. If you leave them all out in the cold, you will never get complete buy-in in this process. Because we were asking the housing and consumer staff to make some changes in what they were doing, we needed all of them to be bought into this process. The first day that we talked about the housing cases, I brought along one of the naysayers and at the beginning of the day he saw that they were posted up on the wall left over from the day before and that there was going to be required writing on pages on the wall and he was ready to walk out and drive back to our office. He sat there at the beginning of the day with his arms crossed and his legs crossed and he was happy. Then as the discussion started about how different offices handle the housing cases that come through to their office, he started to fall out and become more engaged in the discussion. Part of what process mapping will do for anyone is find out how you do things and when you have five different offices you find out that there are five or six or seven different ways of handling things. This particular naysayer was invaluable in pointing out that there were some pretty big discrepancies between the ways that different offices were handling things and that some of those ways were just not acceptable. The clients were being left out in the cold based on the fact that they lived 10 miles this direction rather than 10 miles the other direction and were being served by a different office. By the end of the day he was completely engaged. He was heard across the table. He was talking to people. He was saying good things to people that were doing good things and to people who needed to be called out. He was willing to say, why do you do that? It was invaluable. That was the first day of the Housing Task Force meeting. Out of that we then started a process where we developed a new set of case acceptance policies for housing. When we went through this process every office could say what cases they wanted the hotline to send through in all of the different problem codes that we cover. What that resulted in was a very large three ring binder that every hotline attorney had to keep at their fingertips and every time a new client was on the line they had to figure out which office they were in, what problem code they were working on and then they had to read those case acceptance policies. We started a business process analysis to actually come up with uniform language that said this is what we're going to do in Landlord Tenant. This is what we're going to do in public housing. This is what we're going to do with Section 8 cases. This is what we're going to do with mobile homes. All the offices can do is say yes we'll take those cases now or no we're too busy we can't take them. Rather than having pages upon pages for the hotline attorneys to flip through to figure out what's going through. We're using those in the middle of June in 2014. Then we came back about a month later to look at how it was going so far if the housing attorneys were feeling completely overwhelmed with new work because that was one of the concerns. I will tell you that none of them felt overwhelmed. They felt like they were getting the right cases which was really exciting. We felt like the process had been working. Then we spent the second day looking at the consumer cases that we did again talking through how do you handle consumer cases which consumer cases do you handle and then spending a couple months creating standardized consumer case acceptance policies again with the same concept it's one set of language and the offices just say yes we'll take them or no we won't. As part of this process we also created for the hotline intake scripts so that every attorney when it came time to do a landlord-tenant intake on the hotline they knew which questions the housing attorneys wanted answered and they could just start using those. Right now they're in a Word document that they cut and paste into the case notes. We are working on making that automatically populate in legal servers so that it doesn't have to be a cut and paste thing. Then we also came up with canned notes so that they have the same information that they're providing to each applicant who calls in about the same types of cases. Another improvement that came out almost immediately is that all of the hotline attorneys got dual monitors so that they could actually keep the canned notes or whatever they needed on one monitor to the left and then on the right have the actual intake and legal server going. Here's some of the results that we've gone through so far. BART handled 37 more housing cases in the beginning of 2015 as compared to the same timeframe in 2014 because of this process they were able to get through more cases. They were referred 56 more housing cases to the regional offices in those two time span comparisons. And then in the consumer realm it was interesting that they actually handled 36 fewer cases in that same span of time but they referred 18 more. We're talking to less people but actually referring a much higher percentage of cases to the regional offices for the attorneys to evaluate for extended representation. In housing 48% of the housing cases that were closed by the regional offices resulted in extended representation in the second half of 2014 from the second half of 2013. Now what we've noticed is we looked at the first half of 2015 compared to the first half of 2014 is that there's actually a slight reduction in the number of extended representation. One of the pieces of business process analysis is that you don't just stop with making the changes. You have to keep evaluating and figure out were the changes, the right changes to get the results that you wanted and if you aren't getting the results that you wanted, why not? And so that's something we'll look at in a slide or two. And consumer, this is the area that we're not sure that it really fixed anything. You can see that in the first half of 2015 we actually took a pretty big drop down in the number of extended representation cases in our regional offices from the same span of time in 2014. The pieces that we're looking at now are the evaluation pieces for LARC and consumer and housing. Is LARC more efficient? Everything that we've seen so far says that they are actually able to handle more cases overall, that new attorneys that come in can get acclimated faster, especially in housing and consumer because they have scripts to work with and canned notes and they know it's a much more standardized set of case acceptance policies. We have to look and see, has staffing changed at LARC over the past year? I talked with the managing attorney and one of her workhorses retired. And so there's going to be some fluctuation in our numbers based on the fact that one of our highest producers is no longer working. And so you have less experienced hotline attorneys trying to pick up the slack for what he was doing before. We also have to look at how the staffing has changed over the past year. Does that have some impact on our numbers? And then the final question, do these revisions really have no impact on whether we're getting more extended representation or not? And those are just, I mean, they're pieces that you always have to look at. If you make a change, you want to make sure that it was the right change. If it wasn't the right change, why wasn't it? Go back and evaluate it, see if there's something else that needs to happen. I can tell you that we don't have all the answers. And we have to keep looking at it to figure out why are, especially the consumer numbers, not really changing. So here are some of the lessons that we've learned or we're learning. Legal aid can learn from big law and big business. These processes from larger organizations really do work. When you come down and you look at these processes, you can make improvement. You can figure out what's working, what's not, what's efficient, what's inefficient. Even in our offices, as I mentioned, one of our biggest naysayers at the beginning, I brought him to the meeting. He's from my office. Since this process has started, he continually sends me emails saying we're doing in the office to say, hey, is this something we should look at? This process that we need to tweak a little bit here. And so, as the third bullet says, the naysayers exist. You need to engage them. Don't ignore them. They will create a problem for you if you ignore them because they will be the ones on the sideline complaining about everything. But if you engage them and they can see that real results will happen, they will become part of the cheerleading group and they will want to be looking at more things in the future. One of the biggest dangers, I think, with a lot of organizations is getting stuck and we've always done it this way, Mud. And it's really important to have an open mind and think we don't have to do it this way. I was one of the only, in fact, I was the only managing attorney who looked at every new case that came into the office. The other managing attorneys didn't do that. I thought it was part of my job. But as part of this process, I found out, no, that's not what everybody else is doing. One of the support staff assigned those cases out to attorneys. But I thought that's the way it's supposed to get done. So I was willing to give that up right away. But there are some things that are a lot harder to give up. We're thinking about pleadings and having more standardized form pleadings and more standardized form letters. And I'm sure you have attorneys on your staff who think that only they can write the perfect divorce petition or the perfect motion to dismiss. It's really hard for them to give up some of those individual things for the sake of efficiency. So you have to be open-minded and not get stuck in that mud. And finally, don't give up. Sometimes it's hard. But you've got to keep moving forward. Keep looking, keep evaluating. Don't just do something and drop it. And don't stop improving. Even if you fix one thing, there's going to be something else you can take a look at and make changes to. It's my contact information if anybody wants it. And somebody had asked a question about the timeline. Right, there you go. Did this timeline come about in an organic way, or did you sit down ahead of time and strategically determine this? So our timeframe was really set at least initially with our consultants and the administration team to kind of pick out the original dates. Now, from then, once we had the meetings in April, then it became a little more organic because it took some time to figure out how long housing was going to take to get worked out and then figure out when we could start consumer. One of the important things that our consultants provided was one project manager who every two weeks got the right people on the phone and said, did you do your assignment? Because like many organizations, I'm sure, you get busy and you let some things slide. And without John Duggan calling people up every two weeks and saying, did you get your homework done? We would have backslid a lot in our timeline. Okay. Great. Susan, thank you. Yeah, we're actually getting the interest of funding to move ahead. But if there are any additional questions for Susan, please bring those in at the end of this presentation. We're going to go ahead and move on to Adam Heinz, who is with Legal Services NYC. My name is Adam Heinz and I run the pro bono program at Legal Services New York City. I'm going to talk today briefly about a project that we undertook with pro bono net to build a volunteer management tool in Salesforce. But my presentation is maybe more appropriately called process mapping for dummies. We did not hire a process mapping consultant for this. But we were able to work together with pro bono net to come up with a plan for making this project work effectively and efficiently. Luckily we had some folks at pro bono net who had the basics of process mapping in hand and were able to guide us through this process with just some of the basics. Unfortunately without some of the fancy charts you saw in others. I want to give you a sense of the problem that pre-existed this project. One major issue that not only Legal Services NYC but other providers in the New York City area face is how to deal with individual volunteers. Most pro bono programs in New York City are focused on placing cases with law firms and corporations which is a great resource for us because there are many, many of them in the city. There are about 25,000 private attorneys at big law firms in New York City and they absorb a lot of the burden when it comes to administrative work associated with taking on cases when we send matters to them. But we also have this vast pool of individual volunteers who want to help us on all kinds of matters. Unfortunately it is a massive burden for us because there are so many folks who are reaching out to us. We are getting around 100 emails a month from people who wanted to help out in shape or form. Just sort of responding and following up to that many people is itself a full-time job and unfortunately not something that we had funding to pay for a volunteer coordinator in addition to the pro bono program that we have in place. Another issue for us has to do with our size. We are big. We are about 365 staff spread across all five boroughs. We have 20 different practice areas. Those practice areas generally repeat for those who are interested in helping out. There is a lot of work to figure out which borough are they able to go to which practice area they are interested in what are they capable of doing how long they want to volunteer etc. A second huge problem came up during Hurricane Sandy. There was this massive outpouring of interest from volunteer attorneys and others who wanted to help after the storm. We made use of a lot of volunteers but we realized that we really should have been doing in terms of actually utilizing volunteers effectively. That was just because we didn't have the systems in place to make it work. We didn't at the time actually have anyone in my role either. There were hundreds of emails coming in to various staff trying to figure out how volunteers could get involved and help out and just coordinating that especially in the face of a disaster when we were all scrambling and half of our servers were offline so we used volunteers but we know that we kind of missed the boat on a large number of them and after the immediate disaster abated there's still a ton of legal issues for Sandy victims but there wasn't the same pool of people who were reaching out actively so we wanted to think about how to do that better if another disaster happens. The project that we got involved with came about because of a grant that was not enough to get from LSC to help us figure out how to help hurricane Sandy victims and we worked with Pro BonoNet to come up with a proposal for that. We were also very fortunate because LSC was really open to us taking our time to come up with the right kind of process for this grant so we were able to really look through a variety of different potential projects, talk to people outside of the organization and then test things out before finally building the tool and sharing it with others. This gives you a sense of the phases of the project. We took about four months to talk through what we wanted to do with tech. It wasn't clear in the beginning that we were going to take on a volunteer management tool. There were a number of other possibilities on the table. Let me also just mention this may seem like a very low timeline in the context of a storm. I should note that we got the money more than a year after the storm happened, which if any of you have dealt with disaster funding is an unfortunate reality of how this work is often funded. It's often kind of late. On the one hand we had Sandy clients and we felt urgency to continue serving them but on the other hand it wasn't like we were starting this three weeks after the storm and trying to sort of get something up and running ASAP. So we took about four months for that initial stage. We then worked on an action plan and requirements for developing the tool. Pro BonoNet in particular did product research and testing. Then we worked together to make sure that what they came up with made sense for us and met our objectives. And then ultimately we chose a final system and worked on implementation and refinement, which took five to six months, a little longer than we'd expected, followed by documentation of what we'd done and training so that we could disseminate this information about the program and how to use it across the organization. So let me take you through some of those steps. The assessment phase was one that we held here at Legal Services NYC together with Pro BonoNet who facilitated a good portion of the meetings. And we pulled together stakeholders from across the organization to just throw out ideas and brainstorm really openly about what might be useful. We of course included disaster relief attorneys and other staff. We also included technology staff and Pro Bono staff along with some others who were not formally any of those but are a little bit geeky and therefore interested in talking about this stuff with us. After that initial phase we met again to sort of review our final choices and then talk about the products we wanted to research and finalize which system we were going to go with. So as you can guess the priority area that we identified was a tool to help us to utilize these individual volunteers on behalf of Sandy victims to place them with our staff to prevent me from being a bottleneck between those many applicants were getting a month and the 365 staff that we have many of whom need volunteers. And also a tool, this was a key component was for us to be able to use this for the next disaster to not have the same problems we had last time so that we could actually efficiently and effectively review a really big influx of individual volunteer applications. So in terms of the process improvement I'll be very candid. Our process prior to this being in place was a volunteer inbox that people would just email with their interest in volunteering which left a lot to be desired. So here are four key pieces that we identified that we wanted to achieve with this project and then we found more later on that I'll explain briefly. One was to allow applicants to apply online including all sorts of questions we might want to ask around language geography that they're willing to work in expertise areas, how long they're willing to volunteer for etc. We wanted to I in particular did not want to deal with another spreadsheet. So we wanted the ability to classify, tag and sort applicants by any of the criteria I was identifying above and to do all of that within one system not have to transfer that data to a separate system on my computer. We also wanted to make the data easily accessible for multiple locations so that each of our bureau offices would be empowered to utilize that data again preventing the bottleneck effect and then we also wanted a way to collaborate with Pro BonoNet. So a mechanism for volunteers who apply with us to also automatically enroll to be Pro BonoNet users and connect to other kinds of opportunities. This shows you some of what Pro BonoNet put together based on our meetings. We talked through a sample workflow about how a volunteer might first get interested in us then apply through the system we were building how we would review that classify it, track it and then move through to actually utilizing the volunteer and potentially afterward as well. I'll just zoom through this because I think we are a little bit behind time. So that was our sort of broad process getting started and building the tool. I want to show you a little bit about what we ultimately came up with. So if you aren't familiar with Salesforce already it's a it's a big product for the private for corporations and in the private side of things. It's a customer relations management platform it's used by really big corporations to deal with hundreds of thousands of different customers so it had incredible capacity. They also had a volunteer module in place which is fabulous but challengingly as with I think many tech projects there were endless possibilities which was really overwhelming for us and something that was crucial to figure out how to eliminate. We wanted something clean and simple that people who were not techies and who did not have 10 hours to learn it could use easily. Finally it was helpful because Salesforce gives 10 user IDs for free to non-profits so unlike a number of the other tools we initially looked at there's no ongoing cost to the organization now that it's been built. And here's what we settled on having Salesforce do for us. As I mentioned we now have an online application for volunteers. It also has all of this capacity to do automatic messaging to staff for the volunteers so when the volunteer implies they get an automatic email thanking them and telling them we'll be in touch in a certain amount of time. Staff also are notified in particular ways so we really thought through how the workflow would function so for our office we have each of the boroughs has a contact person and they're responsible for tracking the individual volunteers related to for example wanting to work in Queens. I also keep an eye on everything as well but it has a lot of granularity so that we can change it as needed so say the Bronx foreclosure unit needs a volunteer you can set up automatic messaging so that it notifies the Bronx foreclosure team when there's a volunteer who applies for that interest or you need a Spanish speaker or whatever. There's also a dashboard of applicants for vetting and tracking thankfully no longer on a spreadsheet. It also tracks all kinds of activity on individual volunteers, perspective ones once we actually utilize and people who volunteer and then move on. We realized as we started building this that we had a lot of data needs and there were a lot of benefits that we could get from collecting all of this information not just kind of bringing people through the door and getting them on their case so that was one thing that we learned as we went along and something we developed further. Another feature is mass-emailing so you can send an email to everybody there's a disaster we need you to volunteer at a particular location or you can email any subset you want so you want the Spanish speakers in Manhattan you can email them or whatever. It also has scheduling features which is not something we'd initially contemplated for this project but we ultimately decided to make use of so in the case of for example a future disaster you could set up a number of clinics FEMA related clinics in the far Rockaway way say and then you would send an email out to particular categories of volunteers and they could opt in to decide to staff those clinics so that was a really you know exciting feature once we got familiar with it and then we also built that collaboration feature so that when you enroll as a volunteer or apply as a volunteer with legal services at MYC you automatically assume you check the box will be enrolled as a pro bono net user so I'm just going to go through these very quickly but so you can see some of what I just talked about this is what the online application looks like or at least a portion of it you could see some of the classifications we were interested in learning more about from volunteers so we could figure out where and how to place them moving to sort of what we see at MYC on our end you can log into the system and this is the view that we have of all of the particular subset of volunteers so we use this views feature which you know this is very customizable but we came up with categories for people who applied new applications not reviewed yeah they seem great let's get them going not right now not a good fit for us and you know people who we thought really weren't right maybe ever and then we also have current volunteers and former volunteers so this was a way for us to sort of quickly see these different categories of volunteers as they came in it was also a way for us to come up with a system for uniformly classifying volunteers so that if you know one of my colleagues in Staten Island decides to look at an application and makes a call on them not being you know an appropriate volunteer for us you know that person knows how to classify them in a way that I'll be able to see it or someone else will be able to see it and make use of that this gives you a view of an individual volunteer application so you can you know go in and click on I blotted out the names but you can click on an individual volunteer and then you'll see more specific information about them including all of the questions we asked earlier and then there are you know these other features that you can see here where you can add notes about the volunteer you can see the activity of the volunteer thank you that was sent out on a particular date etc so that's the system in a nutshell in terms of where we stand now we've unrolled the system across the organization per button that helped us with training everybody up we came up with a great manual for our staff to understand how to use it and did a little webinar for them that we recorded but you know we really felt like that wasn't enough because I know from a lot of conversations with my peers at sister organizations in the city that the problems we faced here in dealing with individual volunteers on an ongoing basis and when it came to responding to Hurricane Sandy are not unique to us we're all in the same boat and a lot of folks are facing these problems and really no one had come up with a system for dealing with it yet beyond to their Excel spreadsheet so we've been working hard to tell other providers about this system and you know my goal is to make our sort of process as straight forward and open and clear to them so that they can copy whatever is useful for them so we formed a subcommittee of the New York City bar committee on pro bono and legal services which is a sort of very active committee to work on that particular project and one of our big projects has been creating a start hit to show other nonprofits how to make this actually work for them and we're kind of in a testing phase right now we sent that to some other organizations and we're having them try it out and see what we forgot to tell them and how they're liking the system but the ultimate goal for us now is to figure out how we can collaborate with our sister organizations in the event of a future disaster because really there's not going to be a shortage of volunteers immediately in a new disaster and there's no reason why we can't all potentially work together with a shared platform if something were to happen again and have legal services NYC post about two tabling events that people can opt into then have the legal aid society post about three tables that they're having and so on and so forth so that's going to be a whole new process maybe we'll need to think about retaining a process consultant for that stage of it but we're really excited about moving it forward down the line so that's the end of my presentation happy to take any questions great thanks Adam so we do have a few about five minutes left for any questions from the audience and also to go over some tools that you all can check out going forward for your own business analysis needs so I'm going to oh let's see we do have a question I was confused as to what the startup kit was for nonprofits Adam can you elaborate on that yeah absolutely so the startup kit is basically a step by step guide on what we did to create our system in Salesforce and really it's not that we invented any new tools within Salesforce I think if anything it was more figuring out how to use as few tools as possible so that people weren't overwhelmed because I know without a grant and a consultant which most organizations don't have they're just realistically not going to be able to set up something like this it does take time and focus to get it set up so we kind of explained everything that we did step one contact Salesforce foundation to get your 10 free user IDs step two login and you know the key areas you're going to want to build up step three here's how you create the views and do the you know the automatic emailing to volunteers and so on and so forth so it's really just a guide to what we built how to copy it and you know how to sort of I think troubleshoot some of the steps that that caught us that caught us up a little bit when we were getting going and you know part of the goal of it is you know for sure I want pure organizations to have the benefit of this if it's something that's helpful to them as well but you know it also connects for me to the the shared platform for future disasters piece because I really don't think that we can work together with organizations who aren't already familiar with the system so if we create a shared platform and we have you know 10 organizations signed on but eight of those organizations are not actively using Salesforce and aren't super familiar with it I think that's a recipe for well disaster no pun intended the next time something else happens because they won't be able to move smoothly and quickly through it in the context of of a huge crisis so by getting others to you know sort of borrow what we've done and start using it themselves we hope that they will you know get greater comfort with the tool and greater ease with using it and then potentially we can also work together in the future we just wanted to offer some suggestions for possible workflow mapping tools that you could use going forward all of these I believe the effective video have a free option when I checked out lucid charts they also offer reduced pricing for nonprofits I'm not sure if that's the case for the other tools but definitely check these out draw.iolucidchart.com gliffy.com and bubble.us and then video on the Microsoft Office site so I know we just have another minute left here just wanted to call your attention to some of the resources that you might want to check out again this will be posted online so I know we're moving quickly to try to stay on time but if you want to go back and review this slide later on to get these links please feel free to do that I think one thing in particular that you might find useful was a session from the 2015 TIG conference that covered business process analysis and I believe talked about a process in Illinois including Susan's so this I think would be really helpful to check out for future reference finally since we are at time just contact information for all of our panelists please feel free to reach out with questions since we did run out of time for additional questions I'm sure that our panelists would be happy to answer any questions you have please feel free also to reach out to me if you need additional information about tools that you could use going forward and finally thank you for attending today we really appreciate it we had a great crowd I'm sorry we didn't have time for questions but again please use offline means for communicating those questions we'll be doing another in this series webinars with LSM TAP the next topic is cultural competency and legal technology considerations and best practices which will take place on Wednesday September 9th and you can find more information about that on LSM TAP's website yeah and just to let people know I did drop those links into the chat you should be able to cut and paste them from there we will add those links also to the end of the or to the video description on YouTube and in our blog post that we put together here make it a little bit easier to access those thank you guys so much this was a new series for us I am putting a survey into the chat also if you guys could give us feedback especially over this topic we'd appreciate it great thanks Brian and thank you again to all of our panelists and to all of you for attending we appreciate it have a good afternoon