Commitments Transformation Highlights
Even through the disruption of a pandemic, the employees, and partners of Aventiv stayed focused on successfully advancing commitments integral to our transformation – commitments that only became more important to our consumers precisely because of the pandemic’s impact on their day-to-day experiences.
25%
reduction in call rates
15%
additional call rate
reduction than projected
~200
contracts negotiated
to eliminate outlier rates
50%
savings in third-party
financial service fees
439.7M
free minutes provided
7.4M
free video connections
provided
74%
reduction in rates
following launch of
subscription plan pilots
10
new senior
executives hired
12
experienced voices
on the Advisory Board
Progress Report: 2021 Commitments
To continue our multi-year transformation and to hold ourselves and our partners accountable to a high standard of excellence, we made specific commitments in five critical areas:
Access and Affordability
We will include at least one free communication per week for every incarcerated account holder.
As standard business practice, Aventiv offers zero commission and taxpayer funded options as alternatives to site-commission-based funding for corrections and implore state and local legislators to fully fund facilities.
We will continue to deliver on our three-year commitment to a 15% reduction in the average price of a telephone call.
By mid-2021, we achieved an average cost per call of $0.12/minute – completing our commitment a year ahead of schedule, before reduced FCC rate caps kicked in.
We achieved this by renegotiating close to 200 contracts and removed high-first minute rates in addition to instituting 45 cost-saving initiatives including discounted stamp packages, free-reply-Wednesdays, $1,000 giveaway, free ecards and discounted games and movies.
We will empower people to connect with loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic.
To ensure we were aiding in the connection to loved ones, we were able to provide 53 million free calls since the beginning of COVID, and 18 million calls just in 2021.
We have provided almost 34 million free stamps since the beginning of COVID and over 14 million stamps in 2021, alone.
We were also able to give 7 million free video connects since the beginning of 2020, and almost 1.5 million in 2021.
We will work with the FCC to secure approval of, and expand, monthly pricing models alongside traditional pay per minute models.
Since then, more than one third of calls in these facilities have been made using subscription plans – reducing the per-minute cost of calls by over 50 percent.
We have found that people who use the subscription plan used 75% of the maximum call time allowed by facilities, a 60% increase from before they switched to a subscription.
As part of this pilot program, communication time increased by 25% while costs to consumers decreased by more than 50%.
We will continue collaborating with the FCC to modify and improve these programs. We are still determined to work with the FCC to bring this pilot nationwide.
We will not use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology to bypass regulations.
In states where our telecommunications are not subject to state regulatory caps by use of VoIP, we made a commitment to work with agencies to honor the state regulatory price caps.
In response to this, we worked with our institutional partners in tandem with the development of cutting-edge technologies and services, to rework pricing to align with traditional telecom caps where needed, and honor requirements for federal and state assistance.
Transparency
We will publish an annual report of product performance and service levels.
To be able to ultimately make this a reality, we decided that we first needed to initiate product innovation on a large scale to add executive ownership to the issue. The first step was to elevate an inaugural Chief Product Officer and General manager, Alex Yeo, to oversee all Aventiv product offerings across Technology, Media & Communications; Payment Services; Monitoring Solutions; and Post-Incarceration Services.
Through a cross-functional approach involving sales and operations teams, Alex is using real-time measurement and transparency as guiding tools to improve consumer and customer service, and tracking progress through a targeted reporting program.
We will publish updated product performance and service level reports as part of our ongoing transformation reporting to ensure we are consistently accessing accurate and actionable data to accelerate progress, from a better baseline.
Education, Reentry, and Recidivism
We will improve and diversify our educational offerings by inviting community college and minority-serving institutions to join our platforms with the goal of increasing registration of individuals participating in post-secondary educational endeavors.
We have developed new partnerships with programs such as Google for certifications and skills courses and our upcoming Edovo partnership that will provide extensive, self-paced GED prep, literacy, and certification programs with incentive-based learning.
We have also developed new and upcoming partnerships with community colleges Ozark Technical College and Rio Solado College, along with a new contract with Dallas Leadership Foundation, an organization serving minority communities, utilizing educational tools.
As a result, we have witnessed a 23 percent increase in student enrollment in post-secondary Pell Grant programs and more than 1,000 Lantern students earned a college degree since program inception.
Beyond partnerships externally, we brought on an expert in Second Chance education, Brian Walsh, as the Director of Product Management-Education. Walsh has committed his career to educational technology in the U.S. prison system, providing technical assistance at the Vera Institute of Justice to dozens of colleges in the US Second Chance Pell Grant Experimental Initiative and leading the Washington College in Prisons program for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges.
We will partner with proven, outcomes-based programs to make literacy tools available on all of our tablets.
This includes free video connect sessions for parents and children who are enrolled in the program, which are held at the LeRoy Collins Leon County Main Library to create a warmer, more friendly environment for children.
We will further structure our hiring processes to actively seek second chance and other underserved populations for roles throughout the organization.
As part of this new program, we “banned the box” on the application process and enhanced our Aventiv Careers website to welcome and encourage candidates with criminal records to apply.
In just the Second Half of 2021, after we revamped our HR practices, 6% of our new workforce hiring has been Second Chance hires and 60% of our contact center support is now supporting currently incarcerated women to develop their skills at elevated wages and expand their career potential for re-entry job opportunities.
We will expand our contracting standards to include second chance hiring expectations for our partners and suppliers.
We have since created differentiators to use Second Chance Hiring as a value add when selecting partners for contracts and have encouraged our existing partners to consider Second Change Hiring.
In partnership with the Regional Black Contractors association, we have conducted meetings and facilitated working groups to share out on best practices in Second Chance Hiring.
Listening and Responsiveness
In 2021, we said we would establish a formal advisory board of major stakeholders to provide actionable feedback and guidance directly to our management teams, a board that represented incarcerated individuals; justice involved families, with a particular focus on the matriarchal family lead who is often the primary consumer of our services; community champions; and facility customers.
We spent 2021 creating and launching our formal advisory board has been especially insightful and active in contributing to our new commitments in 2022 and beyond, with a clear message about priorities.
Our Independent Advisory Board made up of leading experts in rehabilitation, reentry, and education is led by Teresa Hodge, who was once incarcerated and now dedicates her life to reentry through her powerful non-profit, Mission Launch. The board has been absolutely catalytic in Aventiv’s efforts to listen and respond to concerns, criticism, and constructive counsel of a range of stakeholders, with the first full meeting taking place in February 2022.
As part of this, we conducted three listening sessions with incarcerated groups to gain pre-release perspective for our reentry apps, our onsite workforce development programs, job search challenges, and barriers to employment success.
We also launched Sec2nd Acts podcasts with Andre Norman, also an Advisory Board member, providing incarcerated individuals inspiration from those who were previously incarcerated and created a successful second chance for themselves.
Technology and Innovation
In 2021, we said we would launch a platform for returned citizens in three constituent communities focused on improving re-entry success rates by addressing education, jobs, and other core needs.
We plan to continue to resource existing community groups to reach individuals from at least fifteen locations to enrich and scale programs that make a demonstrable, lasting impact on re-entry and recidivism.
In 2021, we pledged to resource existing community groups by reaching individuals from at least fifteen locations to enrich and scale programs that make a demonstrable, lasting impact on re-entry and recidivism.
In 2021, we said we would have 400,000 tablet devices deployed for use by the end of the year to facilitate broader access to communications, education, re-entry programs and other support services.
To make tablet usage more accessible, we also enhanced tablet user-experience with self-service capabilities through Amelia – a digital, AI-based tool that offers real-time digital solutions to incarcerated individuals.
We have also deployed machine-learning consumer support, a digital assistant, to provide incarcerated individuals with real-time customer support to address hardware and product questions and concerns.
