Nearly half of all infants born in the United States are being served by the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), demonstrating its importance in safeguarding the health of our nation’s future.
As dedicated stewards of maternal and child health, your time is best spent caring for your patients and providing them with the information they need to be successful mothers, rather than time spent attempting to communicate with those in your care. It may be a good time to make your ability to communicate with your soon-to-be and new mothers easier and more efficient with a mass notification system, or MNS for short. Implementing an MNS for your WIC program can offer simplified processes for employees, volunteers and mothers.
What is a Mass Notification System?
A mass notification system makes reaching groups of individuals seamless and easy. Send a single message to your entire database to make them aware of office closures, schedule changes and more. You can also create groups, static or dynamic, to segment your database to send messages to only those affected by changes.
Whether at a state or local level, it’s easy to organize and segment your audience to fit your needs. This will keep your mothers, employees and volunteers informed of any events occurring around your offices. If a new breastfeeding course is being offered, quickly send out a message to your mothers and receive real-time responses from those interested in joining.
The benefits of creating more seamless ways of communicating not only improve the efficiency of your office but also can make the women in your care have a more personalized experience. Message them through their preferred modality, including text, voice or email, and ensure they’re getting the messages they want to receive and nothing that doesn’t pertain to them.
But the benefits go beyond basic messaging capabilities. Let’s talk about three other benefits of leveraging an MNS within your WIC program.
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1. Overcome Language Barriers
Language barriers can make communicating important information to your mothers difficult. If you’re sending crucial updates to the women in your care whose first language may not be English, they may struggle to translate the message correctly – resulting in the possibility of a wrong course of action taken.
The right mass notification system will be able to translate your message into any given language needed. Women should be able to easily select the language they feel comfortable with when enrolling for alerts and receive future alerts in that language. Being able to auto-translate any message ensures the women in your care are receiving information that’s understandable, making it easy for them to take action.
2. Automate Alerts, Leverage Groups and More
A mass notification system should empower you to create automated alerts and static or dynamic groups. Send alerts to pregnant women, those who are recently post-partum or those with young children.
Further, you can automate alerts to your women to remind them of upcoming courses or health screenings. Easily send links to resources depending on their stage in pregnancy or post-partum.
And with two-way messaging capabilities, your mass notification system should enable you to not only reach those in your care but also help you collect important pieces of information with response sharing. Send polls or appointment reminders and enable women to easily change their appointment or send a poll response.
With added features like reporting, you can see exactly when your messages are received. Both in real time and after the alert has been sent, you can receive reports with key information like who was successfully reached and polling responses. The report can also help you manage erroneous phone numbers and improve data cleanliness.
3. Improve Day-to-Day Operations
An ideal MNS should also be versatile—not just to alert women in your care, but your employees and volunteers as well.
Quota calling, paired with two-way response options, makes it easy to call your employees for last-minute shift needs and resolve other scheduling conflicts. Send out alerts to your employees, prioritized by device, or by group; for example, employees eligible for overtime may need to be notified first—and the MNS can continue calling until you have filled the required number of desired responses.
Further Your Mission with OnSolve One Call Now
With customizable plans, you can build out your One Call Now system to fit your exact needs, making it easy to reach your recipients no matter where they are. You can also send messages from anywhere—any phone, tablet or use our mobile app—and reach everyone at any time.
With an unlimited number of message senders (don’t worry, you can also restrict senders to specific groups of recipients), you can ensure all your key employees are trained in the system, saving your team time. Translation options allow you to translate text and email into more than 50 different languages, making it easy to send alerts in women’s preferred language with the touch of a button.
Your team’s focus should be on WIC’s mission: safeguarding women, infants and children. With One Call Now, you can dedicate more time to the mission and less on trying to remain in contact with those in your care. To learn more about how One Call Now works, download our brochure.
