Category: Jump Profile Forms

Managing your Jump Waiting Lists

Thank you to Jump partners who are using the Waiting List process as described in my blog post from August 2022. For the most part this seems to be working very well, although we are aware that some partners have their own processes for doing this.

The benefit of using my suggested process is that we can take into account people on your Waitlist when sending you new supplies. Our objective is to try and keep you stocked with Jump modems so that you never run out. But we can’t do this if we don’t know how big your waitlist is.

We currently have modem orders in the pipeline for over 150 partners and this means that there can be a delay of up to 2 months before new supplies arrive. We are continuing to give priority to Ciena partners and partners with waiting lists recorded in their GDoc registers.

There are currently around 500 people on the Jump waitlists – and these are just the ones we know about. As modems are issued and we receive completed Profile Forms, we add the customer to your GDoc and remove them from your waitlist. This works most of the time, but we would appreciate your assistance in keeping your waitlists ‘real’.

For example, some people have been on a waitlist for over 6 months and we suspect that they might have found other options. If you know of anyone in this situation, please delete their names from your Wait List.

The Auckland Library team has come up with a good process for managing their waitlists: when they receive a new supply of modems, they notify customers on the waitlist that they have 2 weeks to arrange a time to collect a modem. Anyone who does not respond within 2 weeks is removed from the waitlist and the modem becomes available to issue to other customers.

One final point about the waitlists – please make sure you include the date in column E when customers are added to the waitlist, using the following date format: 9-jun-2023. Google Docs can get confused with dates in the following format 9/6/2023 – is this 9 June (NZ format) or 6 September (US format)?

Jump Profile Forms required for all CIENA Jump Signups

Our Ciena Jump signups are moving along steadily, so thank you everyone for your efforts.

There is possibly one area of confusion that would be good to remind everyone doing Ciena signups about.

Every Ciena signup must include a Jump Profile Form, whether a new modem is being issued or not.

We are receiving some Ciena Referral Forms without a Profile Form being completed, often for customers who already have a regular Jump modem and are just seeking the additional sponsorship. But what this means is that we can’t process the application. We rely on the Profile Form to communicate with the Skinny support team that is responsible for Ciena provisioning. Ciena applicants identified through the Profile Form are extracted and added to a Google Sheet shared with Skinny. Skinny then updates this sheet when the modem is provisioned for Ciena and we advise the customer.

It would also be helpful if you can ensure that the parent authorising the Ciena application is the same person as the one completing the Profile Form. Sometimes, we are finding it difficult to match names, especially when it is impossible to read the handwritten name on the referral form.

Another important update for Ciena Partners

It is good to see that nearly half of the Jump Partners who are participating in the Ciena Pilot have now signed up one or more students in their area. Over 80 families with school-aged children are already benefitting.

But as partners sign up their first customers, they are discovering little challenges in remembering exactly what to do in terms of our back-end processes.

Yesterday a partner signed up their first customer and issued a new modem but then discovered the family already had a Jump modem. The family said “thank you very much for the new modem; we’ll bring the old one back”.

Unfortunately, issuing a new modem to family that already has a Jump connection creates a number of problems:

(1) Ciena modems are exactly the same as standard Jump modems; the only difference is the Jump plan (the Ciena Plan) that is applied to the customer’s account linked to the modem.

(2) We have an ongoing national shortage of modems; we do not issue replacement modems when the current one is working perfectly well and in the case of Ciena customers, this is a back-end process in terms of provisioning a new plan on the customer’s account (nothing to do with the hardware).

(3) Customers are unable to activate a replacement modem using the same email address until their old modem goes through our Modem Returns process (where the customer’s account is de-linked from the modem), and this generally takes up to 24 hours.

(4) Customers could use a different email for the replacement modem but then they would not be able to transfer any residual funds from their existing account to their new one.

So, any partner traversing this path is creating a lot of problems for their customer, when all that is needed is a new Profile Form (where the details of the existing modem are recorded) and the Ciena Referral Form. The Skinny Team then works their magic to reprovision the customer’s existing modem for the Ciena Plan. No new accounts to be set up. No new WiFi passwords needed. No modems to be returned. Simple as!

Q & A Updates for Ciena Partners

A couple of questions have been raised about Ciena sign-ups.

Q: Can we proactively ring existing Jump customers to ask if they have school-aged kids and then invite them to switch to the Ciena plan?

A: The focus for Ciena is definitely not meant to be on existing Skinny Jump customers. If an existing customer hears about the Ciena programme and comes in to ask to swap, then it is fine to swap them over if you’re confident they have school aged children. They don’t need a form from the school to do this necessarily but you should complete one with them on the spot at the library to have on record. We don’t want you to be proactively reaching out to existing Skinny Jump customers to ask if they want to swap, the focus is intended to be on completely new sign ups. It’s also an issue with privacy as we are very limited in our ability to share customer data and there are many customers that have not opted in to be contacted so this also needs to be considered.

Q: Filling out the Stepping UP [Profile]form is supposed to be for a high school student details so perhaps this should come before actually assigning the modem to the parent who has come in and registered in their own name?

A: No, the Profile Form should be in a parent’s name; the same name as the parent signing off on the Ciena referral form. The Ciena Plan is open to all families with school-aged children and this can include very young children who clearly can not be the point of contact for any ongoing communications. The email used for all Jump signups (and the Profile Form) should belong to a responsible adult in the household. This email will be used to communicate with the family later in the year to explain their options when the 2023 funded year comes to an end.

Q: If a family already has a Jump modem, do they need to complete a new Jump Profile Form to transfer to the Ciena Plan?

A: Yes, everyone applying for the Ciena Plan must complete the standard Jump Profile form as well as the ‘Ciena Jump for Students Fund’ referral form. The Jump Profile Form was updated with an option to switch from standard Jump to the Ciena Plan when applications opened for 2023 on 31 January. But also note the response to the first question above; partners should not pro-actively encourage existing Jump customers to switch, but can do so if asked.

Q: Children in this family spend time with parents living at two different locations each week. Can both households have a Ciena Plan?

A: While both households are welcome to have a standard Jump connection (provided of course they are both in Jump coverage areas), only one can participate in the Ciena Plan. We suggest the family select the household where the children spend most of their time.

Jump profile form changing tonight

From 8.00am on Tuesday 31 January Jump partners will notice a change in the Skinny Jump Profile form that you complete whenever you issue a modem. From 31 January a new process is being used for students to sign up for the CIENA programme, which for the last two years has been managed by participating schools.

We have upgraded the Profile Form to capture the additional information needed by the Skinny team to provision Jump modems issued by existing Jump delivery partners for the CIENA plan.

32 partners are participating in the CIENA Jump for Students Fund trial; these partners have already received an information pack on the programme. Depending on how things go this may be extended to other partners.

Most Jump signups will continue as normal and provided you select “Standard Skinny Jump” instead of the sponsored plans, the signup process should look much the same. The one change that you will notice however is that we are now asking every applicant to indicate the address where they plan to use their Jump modem. This is to help with our modem returns process; we are frequently being asked to send replacements for faulty modems, but no address is being given.

We hope this change will be seamless; you can continue to use the same URL for the new Profile Form.