The Center for Employment Opportunities’ (CEO’s) mission is to ensure that individuals just coming home from prison have the ongoing support necessary to build career capital and financial stability. Its core belief is that everyone, regardless of their past, deserves the chance to shape a stronger future for themselves, their family, and their communities.
In 2016, CEO began a five-year initiative to grow the number of its locations from 15 to 30. CEO knew it needed a dynamic and forward-thinking IT team that could both service the scale of its expansion and help maximize its business leadership and technological capacity. At the time, however, it only had a two-person IT team that management believed lacked the capacity and expertise to take the organization to the next level. It was apparent very quickly that “Partners International stood out from everyone else who responded to our RFP,” remembers CFO Panagiota Mahendru. “They understand nonprofits, and how our pain points are different from those of corporations.”
One of CEO’s most important IT-related goals was to more efficiently respond to staff requests about technology. “We immediately started using Partners’ unique support system,” explains Mahendru. “The support ticketing process is both simple and effective, and employees get an immediate response from a dedicated team. It’s so seamless that, even after three years, I’m still explaining to staff that Partners isn’t our in-house IT group.”
“We often experienced delays with onboarding,” Mahendru continues. Partners saw a need for improvement and “built software for us that pulls a weekly report and creates a daily ticket with data pulled from ADP. From the moment we set someone up on ADP, we’re 100% positive that an employee will have access to the network, email, and everything else they need on the day they start. It’s incredibly helpful.”
Going above and beyond the classic model of an IT Managed Services Provider, Partners’ team has also helped drive CEO’s strategic direction. “They help to provide a comprehensive vision for our IT needs,” says Mahendru, “and lead many of our projects—especially those around cybersecurity.” Partners helps manage the company’s audits as well, and has helped CEO pass several with flying colors, including extensive audits of its cybersecurity protocols.
“It really isn’t like a vendor relationship at all,” Mahendru says. “They’re partners with us. They come in, make the effort to understand what we’re trying to achieve and our limitations, and then help us get it done. They’re also extremely adaptable and flexible, and they always seem to come back to me with solutions I never knew existed. We had a situation in which, no matter how hard we pushed our fiber provider, infrastructure limitations made it impossible for us to get the performance we needed. Partners came up with a dual SIM card solution that cost marginally less and dramatically increased our Internet performance. They’re constantly engaged in this kind of thinking and problem-solving.”
“Partners has been invaluable in how CEO makes our strategic IT decisions,” adds Tim Williams, CEO’s Senior Director of Operations, “especially in migrating all of our servers into the cloud.”
Mahendru says it isn’t easy to find a group that operates this way. “Lots of vendors can provide out-of-the-box solutions, but they often don’t meet our needs. Partners is different. Their skills are superior, and they have broad up-to-the-minute knowledge about the most current technology. I recommend Partners whenever another CFO asks me if I know anyone in the business,” she says. “Whether you need a CIO or have a CIO, whether you need a big team or a small team, Partners is the best choice.