Contact Phone number for your club

Our club is experimenting with Google Voice, a free service from Google we are basically using as a call forwarding system. The benefit is we can promote a single phone number for the club and change the number to which calls are forwarded, much in the same way as the Club E-mail Addresses system works.

If there is no answer callers are redirected to a voicemail box. Google sends an email with the message. We set the email to send to contact@dunedintoastmasters.com.

If you are interested you can learn more here: support.google.com/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115073

There seems to be a problem with iPhones but, I dont have one so no problem for me.

I set my club up with Google Voice about a year ago.

Most of the time it is fine, but you need to be aware of some of its "hiccups".

1. Google issues the numbers initially to you... you have a choice of phone numbers, but you will not know if the number was recently recycled. In our case, apparently the number we recieved was previously associated with someone who was called a lot by collection agencies. Google will allow you to change numbers, but they will charge you for the number change.

2. You cannot set up the number to be totally voicemail. It must have at least one physical number to forward to. Someone has to receive the calls. (at least one)

3. Anyone that already has a google voice number cannot have the club's phone calls forwarded to them. In my case, I already had a google voice number, so I cannot get the club's phone calls other than just having the voicemail transcripts forwarded to me.

4. In FTH 1.0, I had to set up a dummy member record (a member called Google Voice) to allow the Google Voicemail transcripts to be forwarded to our club officers via the officer email list. It worked, but now our Google voice is not working, and I am not sure if the prior kludge will work again.

Regards,

Steve, VPE/Webmaster, #1966 Mindful Communicators