Making an Impact: The Challenges of Pioneering New Technology
Mission Life is fulfilling a wish children across the world asked for. Children want to know their sponsors better. Occasional photos and letters are nice but our Founder and CEO, Angel Galvis discovered a trend during his research that a true connection was missing.
Mission Life is the first child sponsorship organization to pioneer video communication between families and children.
“We witnessed over the last 4 years how the relationship grows and the children thrive. It helps with the development of society here as well to have community with a person of a different culture and to build empathy in our children by having them witness and be a part of that relationship,” Galvis says.
With today’s technology, like Facebook Messenger, Facetime, or even Whatsapp, you would think it would be fairly easy to set up. But, since we are the first child sponsorship organization to pioneer this new technology, the automated software to process, monitor and track video messages currently doesn’t exist!
Right now, 2 or 3 volunteers, who serve a few hours a week, manually process all of the videos from sponsors and our 7 child centers! And with each video, the volunteer needs to complete a 10 step process using various programs and software.
“The video gets uploaded to a platform by the partner. The volunteer opens the video. If there are captions, the volunteer needs to edit the captions checking for proper grammar. Then we open our database to create a communication to the sponsor. We find the appropriate template. Copy and paste the link of the video. Select the name of the child who sent the video. Then hit send. They add notes about the communication being sent to the sponsor with the date so the team knows it has been completed. Finally, they update the spreadsheet notating the communication and date,” says Donna Miller who has been with Mission Life since day one. She built the sponsorship communication process to what it is today.
Did you get all that? And that’s just from child to sponsor. We also have videos from sponsors to their children, letters and photos that come in. We also have to manually document every record on a master excel spreadsheet so we have data to evaluate and to make improvements.
It is being accomplished but it is certainly not efficient and when it comes to collecting data, it gets complicated and it takes hours.
“If we are going to grow it is imperative,” Miller says. “Right now we are building the culture for sponsors and children to engage with video messages so it is manageable for now but over time it will build.”
And, it will build with every new sponsorship. There are many children still waiting to be sponsored and many communities waiting in the wings, who are in need of these resources.
Galvis says, “Child sponsorship creates a huge benefit in the life of children by providing critical resources and meaningful relationships. But what about the sponsors? If the sponsors can communicate in a fast and easy way then why wouldn’t someone want to help with that if families here are being impacted in a positive way? It is an opportunity to be part of something special and new in the community of New Hampshire to pioneer something that will change lives in a massive way. We are talking about millions of children and families who can take advantage of this. Just think about the ripple effects of how that will impact the world if we can influence a positive values culture for future generations.”
We have witnessed the impact. We’ve seen the change in the spirit of children at our centers when they experience a meaningful relationship and we’ve seen the hearts of families who find new things to share and talk about in their videos.
We trust that God will provide the resources and connect us to the right people in his timing. Is there one person you can share our vision with?
There are several ways to help us with this project such as making a general donation, sponsoring a child, becoming a sustaining member, participating in one of our upcoming events like Giving Tuesday or our First Annual Mission Life Charity Gala, seeing if your employer would like to become a corporate sponsor or if they offer a company match for employee donations before the end of the year (which is also a tax write-off). Thank you for your continued support to help children across the world!