Cutting Costs

>The information costs for our medium-size nonprofit are getting to
>be too much with multiple web sites, cell phones, land lines, a fax
>line for the fax-o-saurs. We need a "Take Charge of Your Information
>Costs" book. Short of that, any suggestions?

Interesting problem that I understand - I hate monthly costs. The
main one I'd note for the moment is that prepaid cellular plans can
be a lot cheaper overall than monthly ones, though only if use is
relatively low. See the article we ran on it recently.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/9082>

Actually, using Internet faxing and/or fax software instead of the
fax line might also be a savings. See this article (and be sure to
check out the related ones too).

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/8049>

cheers... -Adam

On 8/29/07, wyoder <wyoderppcms.org> wrote:
> The information costs for our medium-size nonprofit are getting to be too much with multiple web sites, cell phones, land lines, a fax line for the fax-o-saurs. We need a "Take Charge of Your Information Costs" book. Short of that, any suggestions?

Bundle, bundle, bundle! Cell phones, landlines and fax can all be
provided by the same carrier, and they should discount you heavily for
that contract! If you do a lot of calling between members of your
organization, you can usually get deals where calls to home base from
the cell are free/cheap.

VOIP solutions are certainly available if you do a lot of outbound
calling, and are quite reliable. (I'm talking Cisco here, not Vonage
-- although if your'e on the very-cheap, you could certainly try your
luck with Skype or equivalent.) You can also use VOIP systems to
route cellular calls (so they call your VOIP system and then out from
there -- nice if you can get the home base phone number to be free for
airtime minutes.)

Get all your web sites on the same host and negotiate a good price for
the whole hosting. You can also get VPS (virtual private server)
solutions that are (if you have a large quantity of web sites with
moderate traffic) often cheaper than private servers (but rarely as
cheap as a simple shared hosting solution).

If you're also paying for web design and development, see if you can't
put the designer/developer on retainer for maintenance work. They get
steady income out of the deal (hard to find in that business) and you
get a predictable rate. This should result in a healthy discount.
(When I was doing outsourced IT work, I'd charge about 20% less on the
predicted hours for people who put me on retainer/contract.)

Faxes are their own beast, but a number of business multifunction
printer/scanner/fax dealies can do fax-to-email and
scan-to-digital-fax so you don't need separate lines. If you're using
a fairly low volume of faxes, eFax (or its many competitors) might be
a money saver.

Hope this helps!

--Nik

I would second Adam's suggestion of utilizing internet faxing and/or fax software to optimize fax costs. In fact, I would go so far as to say that beefing up your IP space and collapsing as many messaging services as possible into that space probably is the most cost-effective way to go, provided that you have access to IT resources sufficient to own the solutions and get them running properly in your environment (and to cost-justify each component as it is proposed and built out).

Free solutions are limited, of course, but there do exist a number of fax server products that essentially create a digital fax workflow on top of your existing IP infrastructure. This can be helpful not only for cost savings, but also for records keeping. If your business requires document archiving, say, or guaranteed delivery options, fax servers often can get you there.

One product that particularly impresses me is the Xerox Office Fax Pro server, a re-branded and somewhat de-featured version of Omtool's excellent enterprise fax server. The Xerox version is cheap, handles up to 2,800 fax transactions per day, routes fax traffic to and from paper and digital origins, integrates with email systems, etc., etc.

Nobody ever talks about Office Fax Pro, not even within Xerox, but it does exist and with a little IT elbow grease successfully can streamline obsolete messaging workflows.

http://www.office.xerox.com/software-solutions/xerox-office-fax-pro/enus.html

http://www.omtool.com/products/genifax.cfm

James Atkinson

>The information costs for our medium-size nonprofit are getting to
>be too much with multiple web sites, cell phones, land lines, a fax
>line for the fax-o-saurs. We need a "Take Charge of Your Information
>Costs" book. Short of that, any suggestions?

Actually, using Internet faxing and/or fax software instead of the
fax line might also be a savings.

wyoder wrote:
> The information costs for our medium-size nonprofit are getting to be
> too much with multiple web sites, cell phones, land lines, a fax line
> for the fax-o-saurs. We need a "Take Charge of Your Information
> Costs" book. Short of that, any suggestions?

I'll skip VOIP for now. It has it place but it doesn't always live up to expectations. Around here Time Warner isn't offering it to businesses because they still can't get nearly enough 9's in the reliability ratings.

If you have more than one land line on a roll over setup there is one simple thing you can do that typically has a 2 month payback. Many small organizations have a dedicated FAX line or a shared one where they sometimes step on things. Plus they like to have a "back door" phone number to allow whoever to get in when the phones aren't normally being answered.

Distinctive Ring is a great way to do this. (It goes by a LOT of different marketing names around the country. Here in Bellsouth/AT&T Raleigh it is called Ring Master.) If you get a GOOD distinctive ring break out box that doesn't answer the line but just re-directs based on incoming ring you can do something like this. Say you have 3 lines in a roll over sequence. L1, L2, and L3. On L3 get 3 numbers each with a different distinctive ring. So now you have R1, R2, R3a, R3b, R3c. Office number is L1/R1. It rolls to L2/R2 then to L3/R3a. Make the "back door" be R3b and the FAX R3c. Put the distinctive ring box on L3.

So now going into the office you have 3 lines with 5 numbers. In the office after the ring master box you have basically 5 lines. But the last 3 are shared and if in use anyone else calling in our out gets a busy. The assumption being you don't get FAXes and calls on the 3rd rollover or back door that conflict often enough to be a hassle. This basically gives you 5 numbers on 3 lines. You can do it as 4 numbers on 2 lines, 3 numbers on 1 line, or with say 2 ring master boxes, 6 lines with 10 numbers. For the example I described the wires would look like:

Outside Inside
L1 -------> L1
L2 -------> L2
L3 -------> RM BOX ----> L3a
                +------> L3b
                +------> L3c

It's low tech but if you do it with a good ring master box it's rock solid. I've put in about a dozen setups like this over the last decade and the only problem has been with lightning. And if the box isn't blown, just a power cycle will fix it. :)

Given that around here a fully funded business phone line is $35 or $50 depending on if it is a rollover line and a ring master is $10 well it doesn't take long to pay for the ring master box.

And the most reliable box I've found is the one from Multi-Link.
http://www.multi-link.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=12&Itemid=27
Check out the SR series. They have other products that can also help out in various situations. I have no link to this company other than satisfaction.

David Ross

At 3:27 AM -0700 8/29/07, wyoder wrote:
>The information costs for our medium-size nonprofit are getting to
>be too much with multiple web sites, cell phones, land lines, a fax
>line for the fax-o-saurs. We need a "Take Charge of Your Information
>Costs" book. Short of that, any suggestions?

        I host several sites with DreamHost. They really pissed me
off by mis-handling a security breach, but generally they offer an
excellent range of services and features.

        If you have tax-exempt status, they offer shared hosting plan
with "all normal upgrades" for free, which includes unlimited domain
name hosting (domain *registration* is $10/domain/year after the
first included domain name).

http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Non-profit_Discount

https://dreamhost.com/

        Note that they're doing a promo right now.


                                                Chris
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
                              <http://www.extrapepperoni.com/>
The Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>