My name is Ryan McReynolds and I've been with Cru for nearly 21 years. In my current role as National Director of Operations in the Northeast, I regularly communicate with hundreds of people in Cru all over the Northeast region.
Cru is a non-profit community of social entrepreneurs who are passionate about helping people connect with God and help others in need. Cru started in 1951 with a mission to reach out to college students across the United States. It has since grown into a global operation with a presence in over 100 countries with tens of thousands of full-time members and volunteers.
Because our organization is global, our primary tool for collaborating is email. For a long time, we were using Microsoft Exchange for email as well as our other scheduling tools like calendars and contacts. Early in 2013, the entire organization switched over to Google Apps and there has been no looking back. While Google Apps was a great step for the organization in terms of providing better email and collaborative tools, there still seemed to be a missing link.
Tracking action points and delegated tasks via email is an enormous problem for many of our leaders. With an organization as big as Cru, there are many moving parts and it is really important for each individual to keep track of their own communications. Due to the nature of our work, most of our staff have incredibly relational positions which require a lot of meetings and scheduling. Naturally, having a high-functioning email solution is a must-have for our organization. When things that need to be remembered end up forgotten, it can really hurt our progress as a whole.
Luckily, it didn't take long for us to learn about Boomerang for Gmail and add the extension to my Gmail account. Boomerang was recommended to me by one of my fellow early adopters who could quickly see how helpful it is. Within a couple months, we had set up a small group account and people in Cru were quickly understanding just what had been missing from their email. Boomerang greatly expands the power of Google Apps email with a few simple yet powerful features.
As soon as I understood what Boomerang brought to the table, I didn't waste any time making sure my colleagues knew about it. I even wrote a blog post describing several reasons why every Cru employee should hop on the Boomerang train. I think the partnership we have with Boomerang can easily be classified as a win-win.
Since we started using Boomerang just shy of 2 years ago, there has been mass adoption of this tool across the organization. We now have over 250 active users! Boomerang has spread from my region to Cru departments all over the world. It's amazing how quickly the tool has been adopted in our organization over such a short period of time. This is truly a testament to how effective Boomerang is when nested inside of your Google Apps account.
As Boomerang has become more popular throughout Cru, each user has felt less and less chained to their email, and spends less time searching for messages and items to follow-up on that they used to forget. The nature of our jobs require a lot of appointments and confirmations, so making sure recipients have replied when they are supposed to is of paramount importance.
By far the best feature is scheduling a Boomerang reminder if there is no reply. This acts as crucial trigger for follow up. I know for me, it's gotten to the point where I don't even remember what email was like before this feature, but I can't imagine going back to that time.
The "send later' feature is another favorite because it enables a more strategic timing of email to accomplish key outcomes. When you send a message to your recipient at the time they'll be checking email, there is a higher chance you'll get a response. Because we also have a lot of one-on-one appointments, scheduling meeting reminders ahead of time has become an asset to my email workflow.
I use Boomerang multiple times a day and would recommend it to anyone who has a Gmail or Google Apps account. I believe any of our 250 users who rely on Boomerang would say the exact same thing. Boomerang has helped increase our execution and follow through on a mass scale because it is easy to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
"By far the best feature is scheduling a boomerang if there is no reply. This acts as crucial trigger to follow through."
"Boomerang has helped increase our execution and follow through on a mass scale because it is easy to make sure nothing falls through the cracks."
