Hi everyone! So, I'm looking to potentially change our processes regarding community support case management/data collection and I'm looking for input as to what other professionals in this space are doing/using to do that.
I'm currently the only employee at a relatively small rescue overseeing our community support programming (primarily our pet pantry program and our community wellness clinics - but I have my my hands in many other buckets as well). Being that I'm the only employee, I'm trying to optimize and streamline any process I'm able to.
Right now, we're currently using ShelterLuv to create cases/activities for things like supply pickups, lost pet inquiries, referrals to other organizations for assistance, etc. We're essentially using it for case management as they have a community services module, it seemed like the best option at the time as we're able to create individuals, assign cases/activities to them, attach metrics to those cases/activities and pull those metrics later.
However, I find the process to do that via ShelterLuv rather tedious, cumbersome, and slow and considering so much of my work happens very quickly, I'm often finding myself quickly taking notes in the moment and then having to quite a lot of dedicated time to go through and logging all of the cases/activities for the last week or so. Add to this the fact that ShelterLuv's community services module is extremely rigid, doesn't allow the creation of custom metrics, has very minimal reporting (e.g. isn't able to pull reports that distinguish between numbers of cats/dogs receiving supplies, versus those receiving food for the purposes of our monthly Shelter Animals Count report, etc.) and some of their core functionality is consistently broken (e.g. I receive an error when attempting to download the detailed "Metrics" report in the community services module since early 2023, have reached out to the ShelterLuv team and confirmed this is a reproduceable error, and it remains unfixed to this day).
All of that being said, I'm looking to streamline this process a little bit and I'm wondering what other organizations/individuals are using to track various aspects of their community support work, whether it be through a specific program suite or another methodology you've created for this purpose. There's obviously a lot of variables within this work, and I'm unsure of a software system that tackles it effectively and would love to hear what others are doing/using. We're a small organization where employees wear a lot of hats and the data we collect from this program is important for the purposes of grant reporting as it funds quite a bit of this work.
Feel free to discuss solutions here, however I'm also happy to exchange more information over email if people have systems/documents they'd like to share.
Thanks everyone and I look forward to hearing your input!
#CaseManagement*
#DataandTechnology
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Dylan Shaffer
Community Support Specialist
Seattle Area Feline Rescue
Seattle WA
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