Dropbox Business helps the children‘s charity maximize donations by making it easy for employees and partners to access fundraising materials whenever and wherever they need them.

Children's Miracle Network Hospital's Key Results

Easier mobile access and collaboration

Increased availability of IT resources

Improved oversight and backup of files

The challenge

A system needing attending

Every second, a child enters one of the 170 Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals across the U.S and Canada. Since its founding in 1983, the non-profit’s support for children’s hospitals has been nothing short of miraculous, raising over $5 billion through efforts like telethons, celebrity appeals, and donation boxes at grocery-store checkouts. To maintain focus on helping children in need, the charity realized it needed to upgrade the ways its employees stored and shared work, such as the large videos and other files containing the stories of the children it was trying to help. “There were logistical complexities when someone was on the road, and they tried to access the server through our VPN but a connection was not made,” Senior Vice President of Information Services Tony Rehmer says. After looking at different cloud storage options, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals decided on Dropbox Business when it learned that 75% of its employees were already using personal Dropbox accounts. “How information technology teams work nowadays is really based on what your employees want,” explains Nick Ward, Vice President of Digital Marketing.

“People know how to use Dropbox. It’s easy. It’s intuitive. There are no installation problems, no access problems. There are no problems in general. We don’t hear a thing about it. I wish all my deployments were that easy.”

The solution

Raising hopes on the go

Deploying Dropbox Business allowed Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals to better control the sharing of files both inside and outside its network, which can be harder to manage when employees use personal Dropbox accounts for work. “We knew that was a little bit of a risk for us and that we needed to gain control of that,” says Ward. With Dropbox Business, employees separate their personal and work accounts, enabling Rehmer and his team to maintain oversight of all workrelated files though the Admin Console. “Moving to Dropbox Business eliminated a lot of the pain points we were having,” he says. The iPad-heavy organization relies on the Dropbox Business mobile app to stay productive on the road when visiting member hospitals and fundraising partners. “It’s nice to just be able to log in wherever you are and grab your important files,” Ward says. When collaborating on Microsoft Office documents, employees use the Dropbox badge to make sure they’re always working off the latest version. “We work from a shared folder and we can see when somebody else is modifying it, when it’s locked, when they have a new version up,” says Ward. “And it’s just made working with remote employees really, really slick.”

“I love the badge. We work from a shared folder and we can see when somebody else is modifying it, when it’s locked, when they have a new version up. And it’s just made working with remote employees really, really slick.”

The results

More visibility, fewer bottlenecks

With Dropbox Business, Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals can keep upping the ante. For a Spring 2015 fundraising appeal featuring its celebrity spokesperson Jennifer Lopez, the charity relied on Dropbox Business to distribute all the campaign assets that were individually tailored to each of its 170 member hospitals. “We were able to set the right security permissions, and there wasn’t any confusion,” says Ward. Rehmer says Dropbox Business has quickly become a key part of how Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals gets work done. “People know how to use Dropbox. It’s easy. It’s intuitive. There are no installation problems, no access problems. There are no problems in general. We don’t hear a thing about it. I wish all my deployments were that easy.”