Jump Sign-ups – Digital Inclusion Alliance Aotearoa

You do not need a new modem for the CIENA plan!

We have nearly reached our target of 350 new families signed up to the Ciena plan, but just a word of advice for partners signing up the last few.

Yesterday, a customer signed up for Jump and the helpful library staff explained about the CIENA plan, so she signed up. But oh, oh! When she got home and plugged her modem in, she discovered that she only had 35GB instead of the promised 210GB. So thinking that the library team had given her the wrong modem, she promptly reported this to a Skinny Care agent who determined her modem was faulty and asked for a CIENA replacement to be sent.

Fortunately she had a distinctive second name and this rang alarm bells in our office when the faulty request arrived.

So, a quick email to explain to the customer that all Jump modems are provisioned for standard Jump, so everyone receives a free 35GB start-up package. This hopefully keeps them going until the CIENA provisioning request makes its way to the Skinny team and the customer’s account is updated to CIENA (normally within 24-48 hours) – this is carried out remotely and has nothing to do with the physical modem. When it is provisioned, hey presto, customers discover 210GB data on their account, which is renewed on the 1st day of every calendar month. There is no need to replace the modem.

So hopefully, all’s well that ends well.

Just a reminder to everyone signing families up for CIENA, please tell them it might take 1-2 days before the CIENA provisioning is in place.

Getting older – is Jump right for you?

Two partners have raised really interesting questions this week about how to deploy Jump for older people who would have difficulty managing a pre-pay account. Both have been attracted by the low cost pricing structure for Jump and they definitely qualify.

What the people caring for both these older people want is a “set and forget” option in terms of managing ongoing payments and plan renewals. Personally, I think these two older people represent the tip of a growing iceberg – the big D or dementia iceberg.

Case 1: Social worker working with an older woman to try and get her a phone she can use. This enterprising social worker had discovered a phone (in Australia) that she thought would do the trick – AUS$110.

Big buttons, even family pictures with auto dial. So she was then wondering how to organise some automatic billing for a Jump connection.

Alarm bells starting ring!

Skinny Jump does not support normal voice calls; the device she has in mind would need a fibre or copper fixed line connection. She could of course make voice or video calls using WhatsApp or other internet-based services, like Facetime on Apple devices. But this makes things much more complicated than a device where you just push a button to call family or friends.

The next alarm bell comes with the need for a ‘set and forget’ prepay billing arrangement. She could use an auto top-up option to add funds to her Skinny account when the balance gets low, but Jump does not support ‘auto plan renewals’ or ‘set and forget’ options. So she would still be faced with have to login to her account and select a new plan when she needed her next 35GB.

Case 2: Request from a support worker from a supported living organisation for a resident who could not manage the top-up / plan renewal process

The downside of pre-pay services like Skinny Jump for people in this sort of situation is that it is not a ‘set and forget’ service (unless it is someone with a very low data usage, who can live on the free 15GB a month). We have encountered situations where a family member takes responsibility for setting up the account and managing the top-ups and plan renewals – even when they live in another country! But I am not sure a support worker would want to do this.

The solution here is to identify who is going to be responsible for top-ups; they need to take responsibility for setting up the account and linking to the modem with their email. All the person using the service needs to do then is plug the modem in and connect their device to wifi, which I am sure is something support workers could help with.

So thank you to the two partners who raised these issues and for going the extra mile in trying to help. I’d love to hear how things develop with your two customers and their social/support workers.

The clock is ticking for Ciena signups

As at the start of May we have reached 271 new families signed up for the Ciena plan since the start of the year. So the clock is ticking for our 2026 target of 350.

The good news of course is that it’s not too late to sign families up for this amazing sponsored plan – free internet for the rest of the school year!

There’s a lot of talk about ‘affordable’ internet and research has revealed that $30 a month is the limit for many households. This is not news to the Skinny team, who set this cap 10 years ago (6 plan renewals x $5 = $30, for those who skipped maths at school).

But if $30 is affordable, what is $0? With 8 months left of 2026, the Ciena package can save families up to $240! (8 x $30 = $240). Now I am sure there are a lot of things families could do with an extra $240 in their pockets.

So roll on up – keep those Ciena referrals flowing.

“Never say never” that’s the moral of this post

Pātea is famous for two things. One is world famous and the other, well, perhaps less famous outside Pātea.

Let’s start with the most famous thing – Poi E!—a groundbreaking Māori-language hit created in the early 1980s by the Pātea Māori Club. Written by Dalvanius Prime and performed by local community members, the song fused traditional Māori culture with contemporary pop and hip-hop influences at a time when te reo Māori was rarely heard in mainstream music. Its national success—topping the charts in 1984—helped revitalise pride in Māori language and identity, while also putting the small Taranaki town of Pātea firmly on the cultural map. Today, Poi E! remains an iconic symbol of grassroots creativity and cultural resurgence, and Pātea is closely associated with its enduring legacy.

Well that’s what everyone knows! What you might not know unless you live in Pātea is that for many years there has been no broadband capacity on the local cell tower. So much so that this has been Sue Kini’s reliable ‘go to’ place when explaining the ‘no coverage’ message that partners sometimes see when checking coverage for a Skinny Jump customer.

But last week this all changed and for the first time in many years the coverage checker returned this message for a Pātea address:

So of course the moral of this story is “never say never” when you have to say no to a potential Jump customer. Encourage them to check their address from time to time for coverage and they might receive a nice surprise. The address checker is updated every night, so things can change overnight, or as we have seen in Pātea, this can take some time.

PS for the Pātea LibraryPlus team: Can you remember the people you have had to turn down; perhaps let them know it might be worth checking their address again before the internet in Pātea becomes as popular as Poi e!

Update on Jump app issue

The Skinny Jump team has advised that the issue reported yesterday has been found and fixed. They confirmed this by running a test and have managed to successfully progress through (see below)

Their advice for Partners/Customers:

Close Jump App
Check to ensure both app (via Playstore / App Store) and system software are up to date (via device Settings)
Reopen app and continue Sign Up process

They also reminded us of other Useful Resources if you encounter problems with the app – Jump App Cheat Sheet that is available on the SteppingUP website, here.

Possible problem with Jump sign-ups using the app

One of our Jump partners has reported a problem in signing up customers with the Jump app. They are getting the following error message:

The Skinny Jump squad has been able to replicate this error for both Android and Apple signups and have escalated the issue. In the meantime, their advice is to use the web browser signup process. They have confirmed this is still working as expected.

However, the partner who reported the problem is still experiencing a sign-up problem using this approach as well. Mel from the Skinny Jump team has advised: “I tried earlier and it worked and tried again just now to ‘Create a new account’/Register via desktop web browser and its worked and allowed me to progress through to enter First and Last name? You might need to clear cache, try incognito or different browser.”

Change to Jump Sign-in using a laptop or desktop computer

Thanks to Helen McCubbin at Tasman Libraries and her team at Tākaka Library who in December noticed a change in the Jump sign-in page when using a desktop computer:

This means the instructions in the Partner Guide now don’t make sense; these will be updated in the next issue, probably later this year.

In the meantime, please follow these instructions when signing a new customer up using a laptop or desktop computer:

Go to http://www.skinny.co.nz/jump and select “Login”
Click ‘Create an account’ (formerly ‘Register’)
Enter email address and new password for Skinny account
…..then continue with steps to Register and Activate account

You are not too late!

Unlike the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland you are not too late to sign families up for Ciena Jump.

A number of partners are starting to ask whether it is too late to sign up families with school-aged children for Ciena Jump, but it is never too late! OK, I understand that families signing up in November will only get two months of support under the Ciena plan, but that’s still a saving of $60!

But the best news is that if Ciena extends their sponsorship to 2026, existing Ciena families will automatically receive a fully subsidised Jump connection for 2026 – that’s a saving of $360!

If the Ciena programme is not extended in 2026, anyone on the Ciena Plan will revert to standard Skinny Jump, which is still the most affordable internet connection available in New Zealand.

We are on track to sign up 600 new Ciena families in 2025 – we have 63 places left! 300 families with school-aged children sign up for Jump every month, so that’s 600 over the next two months. So go for it – ask every family signing up for Jump if they have school-aged children and if they do, offer them the free Ciena option. This will save them $60 this year and guarantee them a front-row seat if the programme is extended in 2026.

And one last thing – if you missed Sue’s email inviting you to complete our short Ciena survey – it’s not too late! Here is the link to the survey.

Why do I need to complete a Jump Profile Form?

I received an email from a partner yesterday who had just completed a mini stock-take and discovered 3 modems listed on their GSheet that they no longer had. He thought this was probably because Profile Forms had not been completed by some staff members when the modems were issued.

So this led him to ask was: “what is the impact of us not completing the profile form?” He wanted a compelling reason to explain to staff issuing modems why this is important. Fair enough, I thought.

Sure, we ask for a lot of demographic information – this is used in our annual report to programme funders, providing evidence that the modems are reaching the target groups. But that is not the most important thing.

We ask for the address where the modem is going to be used, so that we can avoid issuing more than one modem to the same household. But that is not the most important thing either.

We also use the address information to provide summary reports by town and region to provide evidence that Jump is reaching the most digitally disadvantaged communities. But that is not the most important thing either.

We ask customers to tell us who is helping them set up their Jump modems. We think the support provided by libraries and local community partners is absolutely critical to the ongoing success of Jump, and this helps provide the evidence. But this is not the most important thing either.

We ask customers if they have school-aged children and therefore qualify for free internet connections with programmes like Ciena. But that is not the most important thing either.

We ask for the phone contact details of the customer and their explicit approval for any follow up calls to get feedback on how Jump is helping them. But that is not the most important thing either.

OK, enough, I hear you cry! What then is the most compelling reason for completing a Skinny Jump Profile Modem??

Quite simply, so that we know when to send you more modems!

We (DIAA) manage the modem supply process for Jump, and for probably rather obvious reasons, we do not have access to Skinny’s customer database. So we rely on the Profile Form to update us on the modems being issued. We closely monitor all partners’ stock levels and each week, prioritise deliveries to those with low stock. So if partners issue a modem without completing a Profile Form, we think you still have this modem, and you move down the re-order priorities.

We strongly recommend that all partners periodically do a stock check and confirm that the number of modems they actually have aligns with the number in cell E2 (Actual Stock on hand) of your Jump GSheet.

If there is a mismatch please send a schedule of the IMEI numbers of the modems you are holding to jump@diaa.nz and we will update your GSheet accordingly.

The good news for the partner who raised this issue was that when his Gsheet was corrected, it immediately flagged the need for a new order, which we have actioned.

Chat GPT drops the ball! But Tim comes to the rescue.

Tim Edmonds, one of our Digi-Coaches based at Kapiti District Libraries, has given us a timely reminder that GPT doesn’t have all the answers to life, certainly when it comes to data analytics!

We have been trying to present our Jump stats by local and regional authority area, but have been struggling to find a look up table that groups NZ towns and cities into these regions. I thought this would be an excellent job for Chat GPT. Chat GPT helpfully identified StatsNZ as a source of data (something I sort of already knew), and directed me to some stats tables that might have been useful if I had the skills to navigate them, but after numerous frustrating attempts I failed to get the output I needed.

So with nearly 50 Digi-Coaches now working in libraries in Northland, Waikato, Central North Island, Wellington and the Top of the South Island, I threw out this challenge to them and Tim came up with the goods, in less than an hour, he said.

His solution was not to use Chat GPT, nor Claude, nor Gemini, nor Co-Pilot, but a proprietary tool called ArcGIS Pro, something he was familiar with as an Insights Data Analyst in a previous life.

So what are the results? Here’s a taster. Probably not a lot of surprises. We are planning to develop this a bit further – we are missing 10% of all issues in smaller towns and this also doesn’t include the online orders (another 10%). So with Tim’s help, we plan to add these to the pot and also do a sort by TLAs (Councils).

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