Learn how Teach For America has been able to use Yammer to increase communication, knowledge sharing, and deepen relationships across the country. Aaron French, who runs internal communications at TFA shares his insight on what worked in rolling out this platform. We focus on the people, process and products that went into adoption of this technology.

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Episode 12

Speaker 1: This is Using the Whole Whale. The podcast that brings you stories about data and technology in the nonprofit world. My name is George Weiner, your host and the Chief Whaler of wholewhale.com. Thanks for joining us.

Internal communications can be a challenge for organizations of any size. You’re trying to increase communication. You’re trying to boost technology sharing. You’re trying to build relationships between teams and people. This gets even more complicated when you factor in that you may have regional offices across the country and even the world.

Welcome to episode 12 where we’re talking with Teach for America about how they did this exact thing. Aaron French of their internal communications team chose a tool called Yammer, which is kind of like an internal social network, kind of like a Facebook but only your organization can get access to it to tackle this internal communications challenge. While talking to Aaron we want to pay attention to the elements of data culture as we roll this out people, process and product. Who is doing the work? Who is it that’s trying to use it? How are they using it, what is the process? Again, the product, which is Yammer. Alright, let’s jump on the phone and talk to Aaron.

Speaker 1: Alright, we’re here with Aaron from Teach for America! Aaron, tell us who are you, what do you do?

Speaker 2: My name is Aaron French. I am a director on the internal communications team at Teach for America, which is a nonprofit that focuses on recruiting, training and developing teachers for highest needs classrooms across the US.

Speaker 1: Great! How long have you been there?

Speaker 2: I have been at Teach for America going on four years now, about two years on our internal communications team. Before that I was an evil financial analyst for the org.

Speaker 1: Booooo!

Speaker 2: Yeah, boooo! Rain check.

Speaker 1: Not at all. Welcome to the force. Welcome to the good side.

Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: Alright, so you’ve been up to something interesting. Teach for America’s pretty large. How big are you?

Speaker 2: We’re 2,000 staff now with over 10,000 teachers currently in the classroom.

Speaker 1: Interesting. You are on this internal communications team. What is it that you are trying to accomplish? What is a win for you?

Speaker 2: Yeah. The internal communications team here is largely focused on connecting our staff to each other and to our mission. We do that throu