Improving Lives Through Employment: Creating Job Opportunities for People with Disabilities

Everyone looks for a purpose, a reason to wake up in the morning. Our neighbors with disabilities and special needs strive to find work and independent lives, and Winona ORC provides that opportunity to over 320 people on a daily basis in Southeast Minnesota and Western Wisconsin.

How Tech Soup has Enhanced Winona ORC:

Microsoft’s Tech Soup program has been made an important impact to Winona ORC’s mission of providing job related services to people with disabilities by making computer programs affordable to our non-profit, truly optimizing our mission delivery. We have been able to achieve better impacts for all areas of service. We are truly grateful to get enhanced technology while saving money! Our most recent purchases have been Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007, and GiftWorks 2006 (a donor record keeping database).

How Microsoft has Enhanced Winona ORC:

We serve people with disabilities by creating job opportunities through our partnerships with businesses in our community. We serve over 320 people with disabilities (clients) and 70 businesses that create job opportunities (customers) with 40 full time support staff and 8 part-time support staff. Enhanced technology has impacted all aspects of our business.

Microsoft programs help us manage services across the whole organization in the administration, accounting, payroll, production, community based, case management, placement, maintenance, marketing, and fund development departments.

Key Areas of Optimizing our Mission Delivery:

Staff and Customer Communication: Winona ORC started the email system in 2003. It completely opened up effective communication between staff, supporting agencies, and our customers. Many people are in and out during the day and email connects people faster and more efficiently. We believe we have increased effectiveness and sales opportunities through improving our communication with email.

Client Success: Our technology is used for job opportunities and training for our clients. We utilize people for data entry, providing job opportunities and helping our clients realize their potential.

Marketing and Fundraising Efforts: Our Microsoft Suite package includes Publisher – an important tool used by our Marketing staff to create communication pieces including brochures, posters, and our newsletter. Creating communication pieces in-house has saved significant amounts of money and we are able to update them on our time for efficiency. We also have access to update our website with a program on our computer, again saving money and creating efficiency. And we also have our own Donor database giving us a streamlined base of information regarding our donors and giving. This has improved donor relations. We can control quality and success of our Fundraising Development Department. We have also added a Sales database to help streamline sales efforts across the organization. It allows us to have information at our finger tips and develop more strategic sales efforts.

Microsoft technologies have truly helped us gain new services, enhanced the quality of service, campaigns, and programs, and increased our reach to be more effective for marketing and fundraising efforts. Winona ORC is honored to “Show Our Impact” for this contest and we truly believe we have been able to optimize our mission delivery because of Microsoft products and TechSoup.org. We still could use more programs to continue to improve our mission and we hope to be considered for this award. Thank you.

You can learn more at www.winonaorc.org!