I recently had the opportunity to connect with Brian Eisenkraft. Brian is the Program Manager of Community Case Management with Volunteers of America Western Washington (www.voaww.org). He is the ClientTrack Administrator for both intake support staff and housing providers of emergency housing. His primary responsibilities are to maintain a centralized wait list in Snohomish County for homeless households, supervise intake staff and ensure quality assurance, provide data to the community as requested, and supervise staff of housing intake specialists.

 First, tell us about your organization.

Community Case Management is a program that works alongside the local 2-1-1 to provide a centralized intake staff for households experiencing homelessness and requesting emergency housing.  We work with a coalition of seven active housing providers to provide them with a potential client pool.

What are the biggest obstacles that community organizations face when it comes to managing their clients’ information?

Ensuring client confidentiality and negotiating the different policies and interpretations of all involved organizations while providing customer service.  For example, the different opinions of what should require written consent are always a difficult policy decision to deal with in a phone-based, web-based system.

Technology changes fairly quickly. How do you manage the balance between meeting today’s technology needs in your organization and preparing for the future? 

I rely on ClientTrack software updates to better design our system to meet the changing needs of our community.  I also take some outside classes for training.  We also try to offer simple changes to our program, such as introducing an electronic intake form for providers that we designed and email check-in for clients.

Your organization works with various stakeholders, including funders, the community at large, board members, or political representatives. Each of these groups may need different types of information about your organization. What recommendations or suggestions do you have for other system administrators about how to best meet these various information needs? 

Create a standard system of reporting that you can easily duplicate upon demand. We also found that creating our own website and uploading our reports is much more efficient than responding to individual requests in general.  Also understanding what data the various stakeholders are looking for is important to highlighting the value of your program.  For example, political reps are generally very interested in their direct constituency so creating reports based on state representative areas would be very valuable to a political entity but not so much to a community organization.

Do you have any lessons learned or stories that you could share with others about effectively meeting the technology needs of a community organization?

I learned that you really need to have a detailed plan written down when starting to design a database to meet your client service needs as well as the organizations involved with the program.  We did not have much of anything documented (data sharing agreements, scripts, access to assessments) when I took over the role of program manager in May of 2009 and as a result it made things difficult at times to understand how decisions were made.  As we move forward with designing a new system based on a new partnership with HMIS, we are trying to start things off the correct way to avoid replicating some of the issues I have run into due to the lack of documentation.

Finally, are you using ClientTrack in any particularly innovative ways in your organization? 

      Sam Taylor really helped when I went through the training last winter on CT 2010.  We designed some Data Explorer tools to allow me to provide greater quality assurance in a much more efficient way then my predecessors were able to do.  As I have become more confident in using the database to better respond to providers needs in finding appropriate clients, I find the ability to customize ClientTrack very beneficial to resolving these differences and better serving our mutual clients.

 HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced today that she was "disturbed" by an upcoming report that will highlight some "fraud and abuse" to which LIHEAP is vulnerable. The content of the news release implies that the use of Social Security Numbers to "verify the identity of applicants" seems to be a part of that fraud and abuse. To address these issues, she's will be encouraging state LIHEAP programs to add "mechanisms they will use to prevent wast, fraud and abuse" to their plans for the approaching fiscal year.

I've been holding off on blogging about this piece until my article was officially published. Well, that happened. The Spring 2010 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly includes my full article, titled "Nonprofits and Metaphors: Using Language to Create Better Outcomes," (pp. 58-62). I encourage you to read the full text, and to also take advantage of NPQ's other articles. What attracted me to NPQ for this article is its reputation for providing thought-provoking, relevant, down-to-earth discussions about topics that matter to nonprofit leaders. [Incidentally, if you are interested in subscribing to NPQ, you can receive a 20% discount by registering for our ClientTrack newsletter.]

 The Buffalo news ran an article today about Erie County's Social Services department, claiming that 1,100 children from 700 families were given 10 days (later changed to 30) to find an alternative to their county-funded day care. The accusation being made is that the county was aware that state funding cuts were imminent, but had not taken adequate steps to cut expenses to compensate for the approaching shortfalls.

Monday May 17, 2010 is the due date to file yearly returns for nonprofit organizations on the January 1- December 31^st fiscal year. This year, however, is the first year a new law will be enforced stipulating that

if an [tax-exempt] organization does not file as required for three consecutive years, the law provides that it automatically loses its tax-exempt status. Loss of exempt status means an organization must file income tax returns and pay income tax, and its contributors will not be able to deduct their donations (see http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=217087,00.html).