Compassion Australia

Compassion Australia is an international Christian child development and advocacy ministry committed to helping children in extreme poverty. With headquarters in Newcastle, NSW, and regional offices in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and Maroochydore, the organisation currently sponsors more than one million children in 25 developing countries across Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. Liaising with ten partner-country offices around the world is essential to attaining the funds, resources, and assistance for program development.

“We needed a solution that improves our communications and relationships without breaking the bank.”
— Michael Macarthur, IT Manager, Compassion Australia.

Compassion Australia’s IT Manager noticed that its phone system was limiting communications across the organization. Due to the costs associated with calls between sites and countries, many of Compassion Australia’s staff had restrictions on phone usage, often sharing one phone line between four people. Not only was the previous IP phone system difficult for staff to use, but the IT team had also been spending a large amount of valuable administration time trying to repair and upgrade the system. In short, every minute spent managing the phone system was a minute less assisting children in need, and Compassion Australia could not afford to waste time.

“We had an IPBX system that was an application trying to be a phone system, as is the case with many other early IP systems.”
— Michael Macarthur, IT Manager, Compassion Australia.

Compassion Australia approached IT services and solutions specialists, Davicom, for assistance in finding a more practical and cost-effective solution to meet the needs of its busy offices. Compassion Australia chose a ShoreTel UC System with 150 ShoreTel 230 and 560 IP Phones. Other features of the system include ShoreTel Call Manager, integrated workgroups, voice presence management, calendar integration, and visual voicemail. The organisation is also using ShoreTel Converged Conferencing to host its own conference calls, eliminating more than $800 per month on external third-party conferencing services. The process of deploying video calls to regional staff and integrating other features improves collaboration across the organization, around the world. Other benefits include:

• Long-term cost savings, with a predicted $100,000 in savings over three years compared to the previous system.
• The system, which looks and behaves like a single, unified platform across Compassion’s many sites, enables employees to communicate quickly and easily with co-workers regardless of their location.
• Ease of use for staff and volunteers saves Compassion Australia’s IT team more than 20 hours per week in administration work and tens of thousands of dollars in third party service costs.
• ShoreTel Converged Conferencing solution enables internal and external conference calls, improving collaboration across the organization.

“We decided on ShoreTel because it has the rich features needed in a corporate IP system, including presence management.”
— Michael Macarthur, IT Manager, Compassion Australia.