Case Study: Family Service League Multiplies Capacity With Optimum Lightpath

For more than 83 years, Family Service League has been delivering community-based programs and care to individuals, children and families in need in the Long Island, N.Y., community. Each year, the organization helps more than 48,000 individuals improve the quality of their lives at home, in the workplace and in the community. Family Service League works with the state and county governments, private foundations, benefactors from the business sector, and individual contributors to transform resources into effective programs through the personal efforts of more than 500 employees and 500 volunteers.

Today, nonprofit organizations such as the Family Service League need to be more efficient than ever to continue delivering services and support to its communities while having the agility to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the consumer.

Challenge:

With economic changes, fluctuations in employment, and a higher cost of living, Family Service League’s programs have diversified and increased with rising demand across several demographics in the community. Due to unprecedented growth in employees, volunteers and individuals served, the organization needed more bandwidth to properly arm its employees with the data collection and computing power required to do their jobs. They also needed the bandwidth to deploy smart applications to deliver improved care, more social service programs and enhanced personalized consumer attention across its five family center locations throughout Long Island.

Five years ago, the organization’s dial-up telecommunications network had reached its limit. “We were brought to a standstill,” said Larry Daniels, director of operations at Family Service League. “Our telecommunications system was maxed out and we couldn’t support the number of users we were trying to put on the system or service any additional people in the community.” It was time for a quick change to ensure downtime would not affect the ability to service consumers.

Solution:

Throughout its ongoing relationship with Family Service League, Optimum Lightpath continuously provided meaningful solutions that met the organization’s evolving business needs. Initially, Family Service League sought a telecommunications service provider that could deliver a reliable, high-speed network and services that would help them support its growing base of caregivers and consumers. They chose Optimum Lightpath for its advanced frame relay service and high-speed voice and Internet services across all five locations – which enabled them to couple its local area networks and allow the different sites to “talk to each other.”

As the organization continued to add more professionals to the system and enter valuable data about each individual served, they determined it was time for a significant infrastructure upgrade to help them work smarter, faster and better.

Family Service League again selected Optimum Lightpath as their preferred provider, deploying its all-fiber optic network in each of its facilities. The Optimum Lightpath network would provide the fastest, most secure and reliable infrastructure to help the organization improve the quality and diversity of services for the community.

“Sometimes when you deal with large companies, you might get the price but not the service,” said Daniels. “We received a glowing referral from a Nassau County-based organization whose MIS Director advised us to go with Optimum Lightpath for their service quality and the industry’s only all-fiber based Ethernet network. He was right. Staying with Optimum Lightpath was a no-brainer.”

Results:

By working with Optimum Lightpath, Family Service League increased its network capacity by 700 percent and simplified its bottom line with the industry’s only predictable flat-rate pricing. As a result, they were able to expand its services to more than 6,000 individuals and families throughout Long Island.

They also doubled the number of employees who have e-mail, allowing all 550 to access computer workstations. The deployment enabled technologies that were never before possible, due to bandwidth constraints, like an agency-wide Web-based HRIS system for employees. It also offered secure disaster planning abilities as the system supports daily uploads of all client data securely at night to a central hub located offsite for backup.

Today, Family Service League uses the technology and bandwidth from Optimum Lightpath to provide important services to different groups of people in the community. The organization:

• Enables pre-school and pre-Kindergarten classes to benefit from the use of SMART Boards.
• Provides software training to senior citizens, in cooperation with national corporation SeniorNet, including classes for word processing and email communication.
• Provides computer training at home to homebound or disabled Senior Citizens.
• Provides vocational training to middle-aged adults, which helps people learn about a number of industry topics ranging from billing software to English as a Second Language (ESL).
• Places people into industries after they complete training.

“We needed a robust system, and that is what we have,” said Daniels. “Optimum Lightpath’s all-fiber based Ethernet network significantly increased our bandwidth capacity allowing us to leverage software that will help us run our business smarter and better. Optimum Lightpath has created a new reality for us at Family Service League, and enabled us to touch more individuals, children and families than ever before.”