Spectrum Child & Family Services (SCFS) is a nonprofit organization concentrated on serving children and teens that are delinquent, have been neglected/abused or abandoned, are medically fragile, multiple handicapped, dually diagnosed, and behaviorally and/or emotionally impaired. As an affiliate of Spectrum Human Services, SCFS provides an all-encompassing continuum of child welfare and community-based services for adolescents and adults with the overall goal of improving the lives of children through making family units self-sufficient, stable, and competent.
Working with Cloud for Good, SCFS transitioned from a homegrown system to a combination of the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) and Nonprofit Cloud Case Management and Program Management to create a single source of truth and strengthen support efforts organization-wide.
Building Self-Sufficiency Through Salesforce
Stacie Bowens is the Executive Director of SCFS and oversees all operations, programming, budgets, and staff. After several years of utilizing SongPro, a system created in-house, Bowens noted the motivation to transition to Salesforce arrived due to challenges of configurability and accessibility. “SongPro was never used robustly across our programs. Only certain people had access to the system. It never developed into what we really needed, which was a case management system that allowed our workers, supervisors, program managers, and directors to have access to relevant client information,” revealed Bowens.
Using Salesforce NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud Case Management, Cloud for Good was able to transition four of the organization’s biggest programs off of SongPro and onto Salesforce. These programs handle adoption, foster care, foster home licensing, and family preservation programs, with a whole host of additional subprograms falling underneath the umbrella of family preservation. “Salesforce really fit in with our strategic plan to grow technology responsiveness in the organization,” said Bowens, “Salesforce helps us make sure that our staff has the technology and the tools they need to be able to be more responsive to our consumers.”
What was once beholden to manual, paper-laden business processes and data spread across disparate spreadsheets have now been consolidated into more automated processes through the Salesforce case management solution. This includes intake, program enrollment, program engagement, and case closeouts, helping to make the jobs of SCFS staff easier so they can be more strategic and responsive.
Mobile Optimization For An On-The-Go Organization
One of the most illuminating aspects of case management’s benefit to SCFS staff is the mobile optimization of the solution for SCFS program managers. When SCFS staff is on-site, in the home, and helping children and their families directly, the new Salesforce technology allows for greater ease of access to critical information. These program managers routinely travel up to four hundred miles round trip to visit households. Before Salesforce, the managers would have to wait to enter their case notes until after they had left the location and returned to the office. With such a wide service area, it could be several hours before the managers were back in a position to enter data, which could result in manual data entry errors, misinterpreted information, or loss of critical context to each respective case. Now, program managers can access cases, create intake assessments, upload files, and maintain current, accurate data on the go through their mobile devices.
All of these advances made possible through Salesforce have enabled SCFS with transparent, standard business processes that save valuable time with outcome reporting and effective KPI measurement for each program. “We’ve been able to re-envision our intake processes and improve outcomes tracking,” Bowens explained. “Previously, our intake processes went through multiple people, but now we’re able to assign cases to the appropriate worker and ensure the cases don’t pass through as many people’s hands.” A sophisticated, distilled system of information sharing ensures data is clean and reliable throughout every step of the case management process, with only the most relevant staff interacting with the data coming in, thus preventing loss of critical data or cases getting bogged down by too many cooks in the kitchen.
Reimagining SCFS Business Processes
A custom billing solution has also been developed through Salesforce to help SCFS bill, payout to foster families, and track the mileage and hours case workers are putting in while on the job. “The goal has always been to track our outcomes and generate reports efficiently,” said Bowens, but hand-counting critically important accounting information was causing significant pain points for the organization. And with their programs connecting to contracts and programs associated with the state, SCFS often had to connect to the state’s respective systems, which created challenges associated with duplicate data entries.
With the Salesforce billing solution in place, SCFS handles its data and harmonizes with the state’s data much more efficiently. “This solution gives us a good barometer of our information and provides us easier access than relying on paper files. We’ve already gotten back promising feedback about the ease of use of this system and the tracking of information needed for our billing. We never had that ability in our prior system.”
A Continued Commitment to Change
With the immediate success, SCFS has found on the Salesforce platform, the organization is already looking ahead to future phases where additional residential programs and community-based programs, including independent living and juvenile justice programming, are incorporated into the Salesforce case management system. And it’s because of a rich, collaborative partnership between SCFS and Cloud for Good that the future of the organization’s technology looks so bright.
“Working with Cloud for Good has been very positive. Everyone has been responsive, engaging, and personable. They asked questions and understood what we do and what we wanted from our technology. Our staff felt comfortable approaching the team with questions or when looking for help; it all felt like a team approach,” said Bowens in closing.
Every day, more than 1,450 children, teens, and adults who deal with mental, physical, emotional, and/or behavioral challenges find help through SCFS programs. This critical organization sought a solution that could maximize their efforts and efficiencies, and ultimately found what they were looking for with Salesforce NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud case management. From intake to case notes, case closures, and uploading documents via mobile, the new Salesforce technology in place is empowering SCFS to provide greater care to those in need of their help.
For more information on Spectrum Child & Family Services, including how you can support their mission, visit spectrumhuman.org/SCFS.
Written by Blake Becker
You May Also Enjoy:
- Success Story: Creating An Omnichannel Marketing Experience with Teach For America and Salesforce Interaction Studio
- Success Story: Helping Children Heal With Riley Children’s Foundation +Salesforce
- Success Story: The University of Alabama at Birmingham: Transforming Student Journeys Through Salesforce
