Serving Clients with Dignity
Proviso Partners, a dedicated Salesforce consultancy focused on Human Services, recognizes the importance of enrolling clients smoothly and efficiently and sharing client data across departments, programs, and centers. A seamless process ensures that clients won’t have to repeat their traumatic stories and can start receiving services as soon as possible.
Matching Clients with Services
The onboarding process means helping clients understand how they fit into your organization and what services you can provide to meet their specific needs.
Salesforce Communities enable SNAP, a leading voice on poverty in the Spokane region, to proactively identify clients’ needs during the application process. Clients can answer a series of questions online, and based on criteria in the database, learn what services they are eligible for. Or, a resource team member can listen to a client’s story, gather information, and discern the highest need and the best way to serve that particular client.
For more on delivering trauma-informed services, read this article.
Providing Clients’ Access to their Data
The platform also makes it easy for healthcare organizations to comply with the Cures Act, the Federal law that requires healthcare providers to give patients access to all of the health information in their electronic medical records without delay and without charge through their client portal. In addition to getting their data, clients can talk to their treatment team and share their information outside of the organization.
“Making that communication really easy and having technology be a key part of that is pretty important,” says Dr. Eleanor Castillo-Sumi, SVP of Strategy, Innovation, and Growth at Pacific Clinics, California’s largest community-based nonprofit provider of behavioral and mental health services and supports.
The Future: Productivity, Efficiency, and Cost Savings
Looking ahead, technology is critical in decreasing administrative costs. Revenue previously lost on time-consuming administrative tasks can now be redirected to assist in other business needs, such as implementing a new program or growing services to support stakeholders even more.
“Technology addresses a lot of the inefficiencies in processes. Allowing people to do self-referrals through the website, giving the links to schools so they can make a referral, and tracking who they’ve referred and what the status is without needing to call us has increased productivity,” Dr. Castillo-Sumi adds.
Salesforce also gives administrators a window into activity within their departments and throughout their organizations. For instance, one housing program collects and views their inventory through Salesforce to determine if they have enough food for the next day and the following week. When they did manual inventory of items like toiletries, towels, and sheets, it was easy to make mistakes. Then they felt like they missed opportunities to communicate dignity to their guests in the way they we wanted to; this is why inventory data collection is a critical piece for them.
Through Salesforce, everyone can access the same data, creating transparency, uniformity, and efficiency. But, perhaps most importantly, staff, clients, funders – everyone involved – can genuinely see the significance of the social services mission.
“We always use the buzzword that we want to show impact, but it wasn’t proven in a scientific way that we could articulate,” says Dio Gica, EdD, Chief Operating Officer at Institute for Career Development. “Now we can show the effectiveness and make a much more compelling story about what we do and how we’ve impacted the client.”
Understanding that enrolling and supporting your clients with dignity is critical to your mission, Proviso will listen and provide a custom implementation for your organization. For more information, please visit provisiopartners.com or fill out this form.
About the Series
Provisio Partners wanted to examine how their clients are faring with their Salesforce implementations and if the technology was keeping pace with their customers’ needs in these evolving times. They enlisted several partners to participate in deep conversations about how Salesforce is helping to maximize their missions, how their data needs are changing, and what wisdom they would impart to other nonprofits. The result is the blog series entitled Perspectives: Nonprofit Leaders of Change.
Marjorie lives in Saint Louis, Missouri. She received her Master’s degree in English from Truman State University. Her responsibilities at Provisio Partners include content creation and technical writing.