Since 1905, Water Street Mission of Lancaster, Pennsylvania has been caring for the most vulnerable members of their community. They offer emergency shelter, a community health clinic, food distribution, educational services, teen mentoring, and residential programs. Reading through the powerful Impact Stories on their website, one can see the myriad ways Water Street Mission’s programs have impacted lives, giving their guests hope for a better future.
Water Street Mission needed more streamlined processes for their shelter program.
With so many complicated programs to manage, Water Street Mission needed to replace their legacy system with a nimbler one that would allow them to streamline many of their paper-based processes. That solution was a custom application built upon Salesforce’s NPSP application. Here are a few of the automations that WSM can now use, saving staff time and simplifying their workflow.
Scanning: Guests’ badges can easily be scanned and logged for classes, one-day events, and nightly bed check-ins. WSM can view real-time bed availability and keep track of nightly bed census reports.
Staff Assignments: Staff are automatically assigned tasks based on certain events, like guests missing classes, guests’ approval into the residential program or starting a new job.
Custom Button to Close a Guest’s Program Engagement: This powerful button allows WSM to simultaneously remove guests from their bed assignments, end their class and event registrations, close out their program engagements, end program fee tracking, and set the guest status to “Outcycle.”
Automated processes and nimble software make a difference.
Before implementing Salesforce, Water Street Mission kept long case notes for each of their guests. With their new system, they have individual record types for their various wrap-around services making it much easier to track services provided. They can also better protect guests’ privacy because they can set parameters around who can view specific sensitive information.
Water Street Missions’ Life Coaches now save 30 minutes per day because of their new functionality and streamlined processes. That’s an extra 3,132 hours per year! With this extra time, they can increase the number of people they serve. Since WSM’s mission is to dedicate a significant amount of time to all their guests, to walk their paths with them, investing in a timesaving software solution was imperative to their growth and success.
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.