VI Organizational Infrastructure

Communications

It was a relateively short time ago when people bid farewell to missionaries and others who served in remote parts of the world not knowing if they would ever be heard from again. In many places, telephones and mail services simply did not exist, or were so slow and unreliable that it could take several months to hear any news.

Today, in this internet age, most areas are hooked up somehow to the outside world. Still, there are some isolated and under developed areas where many of the poorest people in the world live. It is these people that VI seeks to help.

As development workers helping the poor in these remote areas, it is critical to develop a solid communications infrastructure for the following reasons:

• Enlisting resources throughout the world to transfer knowledge
• The emotional and spiritual well being of our staff and interns
• Communications between interns and professors at educational institutions in the United States
• Communications with central government officials and other development organizations
• Reporting to and maintaining good relations with donors
• Communications with VI Board members who live throughout the United States
• Support of VI as a decentralized organization
• Coordination of staff evacuation from a region due to medical emergencies or political or civil unrest

VI's uses the following modern technologies in its communications infrastructure:

• Conference Call - The Board of Directors uses Bigfoot teleconferences to conduct board meetings when Board members are unable to be in the same place at the same time.
• Email - All Board Members and Staff have access to email to allow VI to communicate quickly and effectively.
• Satellite Communications System - VI uses satellite phones and satellite internet devices as necessary to communicate with field staff in regions where there is no other communication available.
• Networking - VI staff can share documents anywhere in the world directly from its primary server in New York over a secured network (VPN) via the internet.

Data Storage

VI relies upon documents that are retained in digital form. Its research database contains over 75,000 documents. This allows field staff to take a large amount of technical research material to the field without paying high shipping costs. Also, with documents in digital form, any staff can easily update existing VI publications or reuse publication data to quickly create new documents.

It is of critical importance to guard and protect digital information from computer failure or computer theft. VI uses multiple systems to safeguard their files:

• Each staff member is equipped with a laptop for the temporary storage of data that they are currently working on.
• All permanent data is stored on VI's primary server in New York, which performs incremental backups at the end of every day to an external storage device.
• Staff members receive their own directories on the server to which they can save their own work.
• There is a shared access folder that is also backed up daily.
• Documents on the server are further protected from accidental overwriting and deletion. One staff member is given authority as the "librarian" who is permitted to place and organize files in our "library" after receiving them in a special folder called a "dropbox" from other staff. The librarian adheres to a strict filing system.

Document Numbering System

With the difficult task of keeping track of many documents and research material, VI, like many other organizations, uses a specific document numbering system. To see a further explanation of this system and a list of "official" documents click DocumentNumbers (This explanation is mainly for VI Staff reference).

Financial Infrastructure

VI currently keeps its assets in a business bank account in Michigan and also in a bank account in the capital of Burkina Faso. VI uses fixed cost wire transfers to move money between the these two bank accounts. Wire transfers result in currency exchanges at the time the wire transfer is made. VI takes care to ensure that wire transfers occur at times when the exchange rate is in VI's favor. This is especially important when budgets are proposed in USD using implementation costs based on the foreign currency of a targetted country.

More details about our financial controls are documented in our Financial Controls Policy available under policies of VerbreeInternational.