mRelief Internal Tools for Efficiency
Close.io is the CRM that has mastered a comprehensive communications suite with addressing the need relationship managers have for a single source of truth of all correspondence. They do this with a clean user profile that enables documentation for all things communication in one place -- text, notes, e-mails, calls, everything.
Other features that delight are: Seamless integrations with your existing e-mail client. You can throw anything at their bulk uploader and it will never walk away empty-handed without leads. Scheduling text messages in advance should be a universal standard that they are taking leadership on. So, 3 years later we manage all relationships via Close.
FullStory records a video of people using your website. It shows exactly what the website looks like on their device, where they click and where they scroll. For anyone curious about how people are interacting with a website you manage, I cannot recommend it enough. It will help you identify any bugs or sources of confusion. Also, you can set it up in under 5 minutes!
DocuSign provides a simple, user-friendly way to gather signatures for legally binding documents. At mRelief, we use DocuSign to help our users easily provide information to the SNAP office. If a user needs to verify income, clarify household composition, or confirm a rental amount, she can do so in less than 30 seconds by signing a DocuSign statement sent to her email.
To increase our internal efficiency with DocuSign, we have also built a DocuSign generator that allows us to create a statement for a user by simply inputting a few pieces of information into a customized form, instead of creating a whole new statement through the DocuSign website. Submitting these crucial required documents can now be accomplished in under a minute!
Zeplin is a tool that allows designers, developers, and other members of product teams collaborate seamlessly. From a design perspective, Zeplin’s many integrations make it easy to export finished designs from almost any design software. At mRelief, we use Sketch, and the Zeplin plugin has been a lifesaver! In addition to screen designs, Zeplin also allows for quick and simple style guide creation – all within its desktop or web application.
From a development standpoint, I’ve heard nothing but good things about Zeplin from the engineers here at mRelief. With Zeplin, there’s no need to notate design documents for developers – simply type the copy, make the icons exportable in Sketch, and your dev team can export everything they need within the Zeplin app. Developers can also see the spacing & padding of elements, generate code snippets, and stay in close communication with designers though comments.
RealtimeBoard has been a great tool for us at mRelief to collaborate with each other and key stakeholders. We use RealtimeBoard to create and share user flows, visual design elements, journey maps, and full redesigns of our product. Its comments feature is very useful for getting feedback from people in their own time, while the ability to see another user’s cursor is great for remote meetings.
Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that tracks and reports website traffic. We use Google Analytics at mRelief to gain insights about where online people discover our screener. We can see that a majority of our paid traffic comes from Facebook, while one of our top sources of referrals is The Catholic Charities in Chicago. We can use these learnings to guide us when we’re making marketing decisions, meaning we can reach people who are in need of SNAP more directly which increases our rates of connecting likely eligible people to SNAP.
Contentful is a content management system that helps us implement new languages for our entire end-to-end process by facilitating seamless collaboration with our contracted translators.
Mixpanel is an analytics tool that provides visual and easily parsable information on conversion rates. We can see how our important conversion metrics (e.g. screener view → screener completion) fluctuate over time. It has been really meaningful seeing how conversion rates are influenced by changes we ship on specific dates. As a bonus, setting it up in your codebase couldn’t be easier.
