I reported last week about a problem that Dunedin Library was having with copies of some Kawa of Care not being sent to the family or to DIAA. We diagnosed this to be a problem when using Internet Explorer as the browser for completing the Kawa of Care form. But we have now been advised by the form developer that there was another problem – new options had been added around the end of March to the “how did you find out about JUMP” part of the form without the back-end processing part being updated. So any family selecting ‘Salvation Army’ or ‘Computers in Homes’ were ending up in a cyber black hole. Fortunately this had no impact on their JUMP service; it only affected our records for acknowledging receipt of the Kawa of Care. This has now been fixed, but we do ask all partners to complete columns B & C in their JUMP Google registers with the names of participating families and the date the modem is issued in column E (the yellow shaded columns) – this then provides an alert if we don’t receive the Kawa of Care. If you find you don’t have editing rights in your JUMP Google register please contact sparkjump@diaa.nz so that we can give you permissions. You do need a Gmail email address or an email linked to a Gmail account to access the Google Docs world. To complicate matters, many local authorities to not allow council emails to be linked to a Gmail account, so the solution many library partners have adopted is to create a generic library gmail address – the most innovative one we have discovered is imustreadabook@gmail.com. There has to be a prize for the first person to work out which library this is!
Category: Spark Jump
Kaitaia Library achieves record number of JUMP sign-ups for any one month
Congratulations to Helen Yuretich and her team at Te Ahu Library in Kaitaia for signing up the most JUMP families ever in one month. 41 families signed up at Te Ahu Library during May, just squeezing Glen Innes Library off the top slot with their 40 sign-ups, and Whanganui District Libraries snapping at their heels with 38 sign ups. This is an outstanding achievement by all three libraries, contributing to a new national record of 359 sign-ups by 56 DIAA partners, 100 more than any previous month.
So how do these libraries do it? 37% of the sign-ups in Kaitaia come through the Library’s Facebook listing. At Glen Innes Library, all the staff have been trained to help family’s sign-up to JUMP; there is rarely a day that goes past without at least one family signing up. And Whanganui District Libraries offers JUMP at three locations – Davis, Gonville and Hakeke Street libraries with a fourth (Rangiora Street in Castlecliff) being added in June.
Thanks to Spark Foundation; a celebratory morning tea is winging its way to the Far North.
Glen Innes reaches 200 JUMP Signups
Today marked a special milestone when Glen Innes Library reached 200 JUMP signups (and today isn’t over yet!). In recent months, they have consistently topped the country for the number of sign-ups each month. Glen Innes Library supports one of the lowest socio-economic communities in New Zealand, so maybe this high demand for affordable internet is not all that surprising. It has been recognised for 20 years that families living in low socio-economic are less likely to be connected to the internet and a new survey by Network for Learning (N4L) has revealed that this is still the case. The survey found that at one in six of the poorest schools less than a quarter of the students had home access to the internet.
But this achievement is also a result of the commitment of staff at Glen Innes Library, all of whom have been trained to help families set up their JUMP modems. So, every day of week, people are turning up at the library to sign-up for JUMP. Nearly half of the sign-ups (48.5%) are the result of a referral from a friend; another 41% find out about JUMP when they visit the library.
The top 10 JUMP delivery partners are:
Glen Innes Library, Auckland 200
Masterton Library 187
Whanau Resource Centre, Pukekohe 147
Linwood Library, Christchurch 106
Whangarei Library 98
Kaitaia Library 78
Whanganui Libraries 77
Rotorua Library 74
Ngai Tai o te Awa, Whanganui 67
Timaru Library 60
TechMate, Christchurch 60
Speed Test Voucher Delay
Families who complete a speed test when they get home and enter the results into the speed test form are sent a complimentary $10 JUMP voucher. There is a temporary delay in sending these vouchers, while we await new supplies. This currently affects over 50 families who have sent in speed test results since 1 May 2019. We are aware that some families have been asking about when they can expect their voucher; all we can advise them at this stage is that they should receive this before the expiry of their first $10 – 30 days after activating their modems.
Stunning JUMP Achievement by Glen Innes Library
Our congratulations to Olivia Bender and the team at Glen Innes Library. They signed up a total of 38 families during January, making this a new record for a single partner in one month. While most of New Zealand has been on holiday, we were delighted to see 39 of our partners were signing up new families to JUMP, achieving a monthly total of 150 new connections. In January 2018, we had 22 active partners and between them they issued 65 modems. So this is a giant leap forward. If we keep this up, we can easily reach 2000 new connections for 2019, but our goal is ten times this – 20,000!
As at the start of this year, there were 108 active JUMP delivery partners, with another 31 in the pipeline. If every partner connected four families a week, we can easily achieve 20,000! Olivia has demonstrated that she can connect nearly 10 families every week, so do let us know how we can help all our partners achieve this.
Some partners are still using the old (20/20 Trust) Kawa of Care
We have noticed that some partners are still directing families to an old version of the Kawa of Care. We understand how this might be happening if you have set up links on the desktops of your computers to make it easy for families to find. Please update these links to this one. You know you have the right one when it lists Digital Inclusion Alliance Aotearoa as the Spark Jump Partner at the top of the online form. If it says 20/20 Trust, you have an obsolete link.
You can also access the correct link from cell E2 of your Spark Jump Google register or from the Stepping UP website.
The Spark Jump Gsheet register challenge!
Some Spark Jump delivery partners have trouble accessing the Google sheet set up to record modem allocations. This is usually because the partner does not have a Gmail address linked to their normal email. Partners must have a Gmail address to access and update the Spark Jump Google Sheets. This affects many libraries in particular where staff have a district council email address. Check first with your IT team whether it is possible to link a Gmail account to your work email. If not, we suggest you do what a number of libraries have done and set up a generic library Gmail address such as southland.library@gmail.com and then we can add this email as an authorised user in the Spark Jump register.
More Spark Give vouchers distributed
We have received 451 complimentary $10 Spark Jump vouchers as a result of donations by Spark staff during the third quarter (ending 30 September). They have been allocated as follows:
- Canterbury 74
- Auckland 151
- Wellington 28
- Porirua 14
- Napier 7
- Northland 28
- Hutt Valley 28
- Dunedin 7
- Gisborne 7
- Dannevirke 7
- National 106
These vouchers have been distributed to partners in these regions for use at their discretion to support families with the greatest need. Partners receiving the vouchers must provide details on the second tab of their Spark Jump registers, indicating how the vouchers have been allocated – refer to the instructions in my previous post. Further details are also on the Spark Give Information Sheet that we send with each batch of vouchers.
For regions not receiving these vouchers, do encourage anyone you know who works for Spark to nominate your region when they join the Spark Give staff programme.
Spark Jump – DS31 Handout & Survey
The DS31 Spark Jump handout has recently been updated to include instructions on how to connect a smartphone to a Spark Jump modem. If you have time in your session to show each participant how to connect their phones then please do so, otherwise families should be able to follow the steps in their handout when they get home.
Also note a new Spark Jump survey at the end of this handout. The survey has been designed by our DIAA researcher and is significantly shorter than the Stepping UP generic survey. It will take a participant 3-4 minutes to complete and we would appreciate your Spark Jump trainers allowing time for this at the end of each session. We will share the statistics from this survey with your organisation on a quarterly basis.
Spark Jump Test Modems
A number of partners have requested use of a Spark Jump modem as a Test Modem, i.e. one that they can use for training and for testing performance in marginal coverage areas. Spark Foundation has approved this use, which is generally limited to one unit per delivery partner. Someone needs to be accountable for the Test Modem and must complete an online Kawa of Care with contact name and address. We suggest that the School field in the Kawa of Care be used to identify this as a Test Modem, as well as a note in the Comments field (column H) of the Spark Jump register. The pre-loaded $10 will expire after 30 days, as for other Spark Jump modems, and partners have the choice of topping up to retain the modem as a test unit, or advising DIAA (sparkjump@diaa.nz) that the modem can be reset for re-issue.
Digital Inclusion Alliance Aotearoa 