Articles

A multi-skilled crew of BEA volunteers designed and built an interactive Web site for the Talking Information Center (TIC), a 24-hour radio station in Marshfield, Massachusetts that provides print-disabled people with access to the printed word, over the airwaves and over the Web.

The Talking Information Center started as a reading service on a small Marshfield radio station. With the support of 500 volunteers, it now originates live, delivering interactive programming to 20,000 listeners through six affiliate stations across New England. By broadcasting and streaming news, airing public affairs shows, and reading books aloud, TIC is able to bring the printed word to the many listeners who are legally blind or suffer from illness or severe physical conditions that make the act of holding a publication or turning its pages impossible.

The BEA team was formed after they attended a Burlington Volunteer Committee presentation by Theresa M. Ellis, Executive Director of Harbinger Partners, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April. Ellis explained the mission of Harbinger Partners: creating opportunities for nonprofit and for-profit corporations to work in partnership, helping nonprofit organizations use technology strategically while expanding the reach of corporate philanthropy.

The innovative, explosively-successful Harbinger Partners model leads nonprofit Technology Pioneers Program participants through a strategic-technology planning process, then connects them to volunteers such as those from BEA, who implement small technology projects.

After the BEA visit, enough employees for two Tech Volunteer teams signed up. Those from Ed. Services are Ted Osborne and Tom Hardy (both curriculum developers), Lisa Iacono (certification program manager), Jeff Bradburn (curriculum designer) and Christina Lamkin (curriculum editor). They have been working with John Van Pelt (product manager, Platform group, Engineering). All but Bradburn serve on the TIC team; his team will develop an Access database to automate the tracking of client records for Lazarus House, a provider of services to homeless and low-income residents in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Because the TIC office is over an hour from Burlington, Zach Goldstein, Program Manager at Harbinger Partners, held the project kickoff meeting in Cambridge -- a great time-saver. He provided a detailed project specification, and explained the structured Tech Volunteer process. Part of the model's appeal is that volunteers can work at their own pace and location, so their time investment is flexible and very efficient.

Van Pelt, with his background in visual design, led the team through the first phase, developing a universally-accessible design. The others developed content; learned the capabilities of JAWS screen-reading software, which is used by most site visitors; set up a Web server for testing; learned to use Dreamweaver; and managed communication and scheduling.

Melding the visual design, navigation structure, and content into a draft website was a satisfying milestone. At the online walk-though, the coherent, clean, standards-based design made a strong positive impression on Ron Bersani, Executive Director of TIC, and Jeannie Richards, Webmaster.

The team developed a streamlined content-management process that can be learned easily by TIC's own volunteers, who will maintain the site. The group reviewed its work each week in a conference call with Bersani, Richards and Goldstein, who provided technical and management guidance.

The new website (http://www.ticnetwork.com) went live in June. It features an engaging, pleasing visual design, dynamically-selected photographs that keep pages fresh, a Google search function, and a clear logical structure that lets users find information easily. Behind the scenes are easy-to-use page templates for posting program-schedule and events-calendar items, and adding pages.

TIC and Lazarus House are participants in the Technology Pioneers Program of Harbinger Partners. The link to BEA was originally made by Lamkin, a former Harbinger Partners intern and current Volunteer Committee member. Her Harbinger Partners experience showed her how to do what so many mouse-potatoes would like to: help people in need, in a way that puts the value of their technical skills to work.

It's easy to understand how people with demanding jobs and family commitments, able to offer only an hour or two per week, might avoid important but time-consuming volunteering activities such as soliciting sponsors or participating in a bike tour. It is very difficult for individuals to try to match their software-related skills to the needs of a nonprofit organization.

Harbinger Partners has had nationally-recognized success in exploiting this niche of availability. Lamkin was impressed by the BEA commitment to volunteerism, and eager to bring the two organizations together.

About Harbinger Partners

Founded in 2000 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Common Impact develops and implements skills-based volunteering programs that pair business professionals from leading companies with high-potential local nonprofits addressing crucial after-school, housing, and community health care needs. Through its innovative model, Common Impact channels untapped resources into the nonprofit sector and fosters relationships that bridge the for-profit and nonprofit worlds.

Since its founding in 2000, Common Impact has worked with leading companies including Fidelity Investments, BEA Systems, CA, Cisco Systems, and State Street Corporation, achieving a 7:1 social return on investment.

For more information, please contact Lesley Edwards, Vice President of Partnerships, Common Impact (e-mail: ledwards@commonimpact.org, phone: 617-868-1014).

About BEA Systems

BEA is the world's leading application infrastructure software company with more than 15,000 customers around the world, including the majority of the Fortune Global 500. Companies turn to BEA to help them evolve their existing enterprise software applications from inflexible, redundant, legacy architectures to highly responsive, mature Web infrastructures. Companies built on BEA software are able to use IT to affect rapid change within their organizations and achieve breakthrough levels of efficiency and responsiveness. The BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform™ provides the application infrastructure foundation that converges application development and integration, simplifies the flow of information, decreases the costs of managing applications, and makes an enterprise more agile, productive, and connected. BEA's platform is also the de facto standard for more than 1,600 systems integrators (SIs), independent software vendors (ISVs), and application service providers (ASPs) who partner with BEA to ensure the successful deployment of your solution.

Ron Bersani,
TIC Exec. Director

Jeannie Richards,
TIC Webmaster