FamilyMetrics Blog

Attention Overwhelmed Service Coordinators! Attention Overwhelmed Service Coordinators!

Feeling overwhelmed by all the work that goes into running a successful resident services program?

Well, the National Resident Services Collaborative is here to offer help! They have recently added some exciting and helpful material to the Best Practices & Training section of their website! Be sure to check it out for information ranging from planning and executing resident services programs, peer network exchanges, and specifically, a revised and expanded practitioner’s manual.

Here’s a direct link to the practitioner’s manual to get you started right away:

Creating Opportunities for Families through Resident Services: A Practitioner's Manual, Revised and Expanded Edition, September 2009.

Help! How do I track my volunteers?? Help! How do I track my volunteers??

Has keeping track of your volunteers caused them to seem like more of a burden than a help? Well, with generous contributions from Affordable Housing Corporation and Citibank, a brand new feature has been added to FamilyMetrics to help you out! We are proud to announce the addition of the Volunteer Tracking module!

The Volunteer Tracking module can be used to manage volunteers and track the activities with which they assist. You can manage information about your volunteers including: name, start and end date, contact information, as well as background check and fee status. The Volunteer Activity Logs allow you to indicate which volunteers took part in activity, how long they spent assisting the residents and what kinds of services were provided or programs with which they worked.

And it gets even better… there are already multiple reports available in the Volunteer Service section of the Reporting areas. You can easily get out all of the information you put in with helpful statistics and links to detailed drilldowns so you can dive into that data! Easily show the impact that Volunteers are having at your site. Provide that recognition you know they deserve using the “Length of Service” report. With the new Volunteer Tracking module, it’s easy and pain-free!

We hope that this new feature will be a great tool for you and want to once again thank Affordable Housing Corporation and Citibank for making it possible!

Even *more* new features! Even *more* new features!

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Even more new features!

Seattle Housing once again provided generous support allowing for additional features to be available to all users of FamilyMetrics. The updates include:

• Household Makeup form – brand new form! This form is found in each resident’s profile, just below the Resident Intake form. It allows you to note the names and relationships of household members for each resident. Please note that this form is purely a notation tool and is not linked to or reported anywhere else.
• Barriers to Employment – found on the Employment Status form. You can now indicate whether one of the pre-defined barriers “applies” or was “overcome” by a resident at your property. Once the information has been documented, you can find a list of all residents with current barriers to employment on the Employment > Statistics Overview Report as well as all residents who overcame a barrier to employment on the Employment > Outcomes Report.

Feel free to contact us with any questions or feedback relating to this new functionality.

Features, features! Features, features!

New features, new features! With the generous support of Seattle Housing, some exciting new features have been added to the system including:

• The ability to mark financial goals (including amount!) that a resident sets instead of only those achieved (located on the Financial Status form in the “Financial Goals” section)
  • Please note that no accompanying report was designed or built. If this is something your organization is interested in funding, please contact us!
• New field for “Number of Months Employed” auto-calculates based on the resident’s Start Date for that job (located on the Employment Status form in the “Employment Details” section)
• Referral Sources have been enhanced on the Intake form:
  • “Self” changed to “Self/Walk-In”
  • “Incoming Call” was added
  • “Outgoing Call” was added
  • “Community Agency” now allows for the ability to select an Agency from the Resource Directory
• The Ethnicity for “African American” is now “African or African American” on the Intake form
• Housing Status options have been enhanced on the Housing Status form:
  • “Hope IV / Relocated” was added
  • “Living with a [Organization Name] Resident” was added (where your Organization’s name is auto-filled)
  • “Scattered Site” was added (including a text box to denote the name or further information)
  • “Other” now has a text box for denoting further information

We hope that you enjoy these enhancements. As always, give us a call or shoot us an email if you have any questions!

What’s a new home without a party? What’s a new home without a party?