Category: Skinny Jump

Jump This Week – Going UP!

I suspect many of you a familiar with the Sunday Star*Times regular column about what’s going up and what’s going down.

From time to time we get “Going Up” feedback from Jump partners and I felt that one we received this week was worth sharing.

This came from a community partner in a rural town that prepares a Skinny Jump Accountability Report for their trustees; this summarised barriers they faced and their achievements.

Not surprisingly, amongst the barriers they identified:

  1. limited supplies of modems, delaying the delivery of Jump;
  2. cell tower capacity, limiting the availability of Jump;
  3. customers with old mobile phones that didn’t support the Jump app;
  4. incorrect email addresses and forgotten passwords when registering for Jump.

But despite these barriers they reported a stunning achievement:

Completing 529 Jump registrations since March 2020, reaching over 16% of all households in the district!

Overall they summed up their experience with Jump as:

  1. Skinny Jump has played and will continue to play a vital role in the community.
  2. With the advancement IT and recently AI, by today’s standards, the ability to have connectivity is inevitable.
  3. We continue to get positive feedback from the community for they appreciate the time and effort taken during the registering process.

I know other partners provide regular updates to their managers and governance groups. Please keep doing this. One wise manager that I used to work with decades ago encouraged me to budget for ‘promotion’ as part of the project: “What’s the point of good works if no-one knows about it,” he said.

New Jump Partner guides – coming this week

As discussed during the recent Jump webinars, new copies of the Jump Partner Guide are being shipped this week, along with a new supply of the ‘Stopped Using Your Jump modem’ stickers.

Some partners will be receiving more than one copy of the Partner Guide – one copy is for general use; the others are individual copies for each Jump Specialist.

So if you are the person opening the courier pack, please make sure these extra copies find their way to your specialists – while they have completed all the Partner Pathway modules and received a Jump Specialist badge, it is especially important that they continue to have access to the most up-to-date information.

You will also find a few copies of the new Customer Guides. These are to be used when returned modems are reset and become available for re-issue.

Let’s clear those Jump waiting lists

🎶 You better get ready,
To bring homes online,
310 households
Are waiting in line!
Let’s clear those lists for Christmas time! 🎶

🎶 With 60* great partners,
And modems in store,
We’ve got what we need,
To connect even more!
Let’s clear those lists for Christmas time! 🎶

🎶 These households are waiting,
For a gift that’s so dear,
An internet connection,
To start the new year! 🎶

🎶 So rally together,
Let’s give it our best,
With Skinny Jump’s mission,
Let’s meet every quest!
Let’s clear those lists for Christmas time! 🎶

*60 partners have customers on their waiting lists (at least that we know about because they have been recorded in your Jump register).

Not really a Friday Quiz, but a little bit of encouragement (of course with help from Chat GPT) to clear your Jump waiting lists. Remember our waiting list protocol – partners should alert customers on their waiting lists when they have modems in stock and if they don’t respond within 7-10 days, then zap, they are to be removed from the waiting list.

We have also discovered some partners do keep a waiting list but this is not shared with us. This means that when we ship you new modem supplies we can not take into account your waiters, so you quickly run out of modems again.

We also know that some partners are unable to add waiters to their Google sheets because they don’t have editing rights. Thanks to Rida Malik from Hamilton Libraries, we now have a solution! It’s all about how we share your Jump GSheet with you. To date, you have needed a Gmail account to get editing rights, but Rida has shown us how we can share this with your regular email. This is a real breakthrough for partners who have IT departments that are nervous about linking Gmail accounts to their corporate networks.

So any partners who still have ‘secret’ waiting lists in your top drawer, let me know the email you would like to use and I’ll connect you up so that you can add these waiters to your Gsheet (email me at jump@diaa.nz).

PS – if any partners would like to demonstrate their Chat GPT skills and respond with a rhyme about how they handle their Jump waiting lists, then who knows, Santa might come early!

Diwali and more winners….

As Sue Kini pointed out, this was a really unfair quiz. You really had to be “in the know” as Dianne Langitan from Te Atatu Peninsula Library clearly was:

“It is a beautiful creation made of recycled Skinny Jump box. It’s a model of Ram Mandir or Rama Temple in Uttar Pradesh India. Down the centre of the temple you can spot a small image of god Rama. It’s located at Waitakere Central Library Henderson, created by one of the librarians, Dipali.“

Dipali Kaduskar is the Jump coordinator at Waitakere Library and according to Dianne, this is not her first creation. Fortunately, Dipali and the team at Waitakere Central still find time to sign up Jump customers – 175 so far this year.

But Louise Gribbon from Tasman District Libraries had the most creative response:

“Kia ora, this looks like a Diwali display to me. In my community, some of the people who celebrate Diwali are recent migrants, and ‘Refugees and migrant communities’ are one of the groups eligible for Skinny Jump. Diwali is also associated with lights and ‘dispelling the darkness of ignorance and welcoming the light of knowledge and wisdom’. Skinny Jump helps to reduce digital exclusion, i.e. brings the light, knowledge, and new (IT) skills to those in need.“

Thanks Dipali, for sharing your creation with us, and for shining a new light on Jump (in more ways than one).

And the winner is…

It is Friday and I have been promising to tell you who the winner was in our Friday Quiz from a few weeks back.

Congratulations to Wendy Brock from Picton Library “I can only think of one thing – logging on! Logging on to their email, their skinny account, and modem password! Don’t know if this counts as one or more answers.” But Wendy also suggested a solution: “If they can’t remember their email password (as their phone has a cracked screen and cannot be used) they use one of our laptops and we help them set up a new email and write their passwords down on a piece of paper (which will probably get lost). That is after giving up on resetting their password as they don’t have the same phone number…. LOL.“

I was also impressed with the suggestion from Shantel Hennessy at Taitech in Gisborne. She nearly had the right answer, like many of you, but what impressed me was how she helps people remember what to do when it comes to top-up time: “I’m guessing the answer would be payment options. I’ve had a few come to me for help with  payment or renewing plans. I’ll ask the customer to pop into Taitech and we will do it together. I’ve ended up making a print out of step by steps on the payment options that I give them, I think they forget that there is that info in the booklet they first get when signing up for skinny jump.”

And here’s the handout that Shantel gives them:

So well done Wendy and Shantel. Thanks for your helpful responses. Now a visit to Moore Wilsons to see what treats I can find for you both.

PS. Thanks to everyone who responded to my quiz.

Ooops – it’s Monday

I promised everyone that I would give you the answer on Friday to my question posed on Friday 4 October concerning what Jump customers find to be one of the most challenging things about being a Jump customer. 

Most of you sort of got it right – something to do with top-ups using the app. But that wasn’t the exact answer I was looking for. What I wanted to know is what the particular barrier was that caused nearly 300,000 failed attempts last year and what partners can do to address this.

A couple of you really hit the nail on the head with the correct answer – people simply couldn’t remember the email they used to set up their Skinny Jump account or their password!

And what was even better, these partners had some excellent strategies for addressing this (I’ll share these with you when I get back to my office).

The Jump partner guide does recommend that you advise all customers to write down the email they have used for their Jump account as well as their password. What the Guide doesn’t say is where to write this down.

We strongly suggest that during the sign-up process, and before customers leave with their modem, you insist that these details are written down on the inside cover of their Partner Guide – the little booklet that is supplied with every modem.

Friday Jump Quiz

I wonder how many partners know what Jump customers find to be one of the most challenging things about being a Jump customer. Here’s a hint. During the 13 month period from 1 July 2023 to 31 July 2024, Jump customers tried to do this nearly 300,000 times and failed! And here’s another hint – this is something you can help your customers with.

Send your answers to jump@diaa.nz and any advice about what your team does to address this, and all will be revealed next Friday! Unfortunately, Cadburys is no longer producing chocolate fish, so that’s a challenge we (DIAA) have to solve by next Friday.

Supplies of Jump Collateral

I am starting to receive requests for more supplies of the above “Stopped Using your Skinny Jump Modem” stickers; I suspect that this could mean other partners are also running out. We (DIAA) have a reasonable supply of these and can supply further copies (they come in bundles of 10). We are planning a further bulk supply over the coming months, but we can hopefully keep you stocked in the meantime. Remember to attach this sticker to every modem that you issue.

If you need more copies please send your requests to Shelley (shelley@diaa.nz) and she’ll get some on the courier for you.

And while we are talking about Jump collateral, do remember that you can order this online through our Stepping UP website: Stepping UP>Partner Resources Hub>Skinny Jump Partner Resources> scroll down to: Skinny Jump Promotional Materials

More on Jump modem packaging

We continue to get requests from partners for empty Jump boxes, so that returned modems, when reset, can be issued to new customers with the packaging. My previous posts explained that this is not a requirement; modems can be issued without packaging – the essentials are a power supply, an ethernet cable and a user guide.

My April blog post indicating that we could send partners boxes of empty boxes is no longer a viable option. For the last 2 – 3 years we have had courier sponsorship from NZ Post through their Delivering for Good programme and this made it possible for us to send out empty boxes, but this sponsorship unfortunately came to an end on 30 June.

Certainly, partners still have the option to retain some packaging that is returned with faulty modems; this could then be re-used with reset modems. Some library partners have ‘library bags’ for use by customers to carry home books; these would be a good sustainable option.

The Skinny Jump team has offered another solution – their Skinny Jump ‘zero’ bags – these are tough re-usable carry bags that scrunch up to almost nothing – see photos below.

We don’t have huge supplies, so we will only be sending these on request; please contact jump@diaa.nz with any requests.