Empowering health and human services helplines
We’re honored to work with CharityLogic, makers of iCarol, a helpline software management system. iCarol empowers health and human services organizations that provide helpline, information, and referral services to help more people in their community. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with the co-founders of iCarol, its Chief Technology Officer Neil McKechnie and Chief Executive Officer Jacqueline (Morgan) McKechnie to learn more about how their clients and their clients’ communities are benefiting from the iCarol system.
What types of clients use your software and who are the people they serve?
Neil: Our clients are health and human services organizations that provide frontline support to help seekers in the general public. They provide helpline, information and referral, crisis, hotline, and warmline services to people who are facing poverty, malnutrition, homelessness, suicidal thoughts, disaster, addiction, and more. It’s a vast spectrum of challenges that humans face. Our clients put up a sign and say we’re here to help you.
Jacqueline: Well said, Neil. The only thing I can add is that our customers are part of a fabric in the community that serves as a safety net to those in need of help.
How can iCarol serve such diverse health and human services organizations?
Neil: Because the workflows in our iCarol system are flexible and customizable, it can support very different organizations serving people with different needs in different geographies.
Jacqueline: We can offer robust, scalable solutions that work for our smaller clients that have one helpline service taking a few hundred to thousands of calls per year—like Paws to Listen in the United Kingdom, which helps grieving cat owners deal with their loss or a local crisis line like Illinois Domestic Violence Hotline—to larger clients that have a network of helplines located across a state or throughout the country, taking millions of calls per year—like the state of Texas, which addresses a range of health and human services needs.
How does your software improve your customers’ service delivery?
Neil: Three key ways are:
- Immediate service delivery to the help seeker. The public can reach the helpline via phone, texting, or online chat and online intake forms. And our clients’ staff can look up historic requests for the person in need and find very targeted resources to help him or her.
- Ongoing operational management. Our clients can use reporting capabilities to tune operations, which could include better staffing on shifts, better training for the most relevant topics and challenges that are coming up, and special handling for chronic callers and help seekers.
- Proving their value. Our customers can also use reporting and analytics to track outcomes and demonstrate their impact in the community, which can help them get funding.
What’s a recent example of how you’ve helped one of your clients help more people?
Neil: As Hurricane Irma was bearing down on Florida, our client The Crisis Center of Tampa Bay needed another organization to assist them in handling the high volume of calls. iCarol brokered an agreement with 211 of Sacramento, which had volunteered to help, and in a matter of minutes set up a sharing relationship between the two organizations for their data. So when The Crisis Center of Tampa Bay lost its power, phone, and Internet for about 36 hours during the storm, the 211 call center hosted at Goodwill in Sacramento answered about 1700 calls to help people affected by the hurricane—providing information on where to go for shelter, find resources, and more. We are very proud to be able to play this small part in assisting those affected by an active disaster – and this is only feasible because iCarol is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, offered via the Azure cloud platform, and because iCarol has such a robust, generous and capable customer base. To learn more about the impact our clients are making, I highly recommend following the iCarol blog.
What’s an example of a customer’s return on investment?
Jacqueline: A client that serves individuals affected by domestic violence reported that after it implemented iCarol, the time saved on reporting alone was the equivalent of one full-time employee. Imagine being able to direct the efforts of one full-time employee towards other programs and organizational initiatives.
This is just one of many examples, of course. For more, check out our case studies and testimonials.
Why did you choose Microsoft Azure to support your cloud-based solution?
Neil: We’ve reveled in the benefits of being on the Microsoft stack for the 12 years we’ve been doing this. And since Azure arrived on the scene, we’re more excited about it every week. We’re enamored with the possibilities its constant innovation offers us and our clients. Plus, our small company’s IT staff can spend more time on strategic work and less time on mundane infrastructure tasks such as availability, redundancy, scalability, security, load-balancing, and more—because they know all that’s being handled by the Azure services.
We’re also very excited about the built-in Power BI capabilities, which are helping clients like Ontario 211—winner of the Microsoft Canada 2017 Citizen and Community Global Impact Award. Ontario 211 gains valuable insight from its customized Power BI dashboards to help run its operations more efficiently. It’s also using the powerful analytics to demonstrate its impact in the community to funders.
Azure is helping to fuel our company’s growth because it enables us to help such a wide range of clients.
To learn more, visit iCarol.com
