Many of our clients who are non-profit help lines devote some or all of their efforts towards suicide prevention. For those of you who do, you many be interested to learn more about enhancements to Facebook's suicide prevention efforts

Whether you only have a few hundred resource records, or have tens of thousands, iCarol is flexible enough to help you organize them in a hierarchical structure that makes the most sense for you. If your resource database is growing, or you just want to know about advanced options for structuring it, read our recent description of understanding Agency, Program and Site structure in iCarol.

In addition to searching for resources with time-tested ways (like those in one of your cateogries), don't forget about three other useful tools: Searching by name, searching in a particular field, and searching by the record's "unique identifier". 

If you use the 2-1-1 / AIRS Taxonomy, you might be aware that it is permissible to link taxonomy terms together to provide a more precise categorization of a service. iCarol fully supports categorizing resources in a linked fashion, and provides excellent tools to help you quickly find resources, linked or not, that will serve your clients.

When was the last time you updated your resources? Are all those phone numbers, hours of operation, and program descriptions still accurate?

Verifying resources can be a tall order when you've got a good-sized resource database.

Perhaps it's time to consider giving iCarol's handy Automated Resource Verification tool a try. With this optional upgrade to your iCarol system, you can have iCarol take much of the work of resource verification off your hands. Clients tell us this upgrade saves them weeks of painstaking work.

This week we successfully integrated with another telephony system at a non-profit help line with iCarol. The phone vendor is Five9, a cloud-based (hosted) telephony system.

For those of you using the AIRS Taxonomy for Information & Referral, you may know that iCarol keeps on you the current release automatically...not only is this a great convenience but it also ensures that you don't get out of date and conform with the AIRS standards.

Here are some reasons why Information and Referral software (I&R software) like iCarol is better than using a public search engine like Google, and also why those search engines are poorly suited for professional I&R work.

From time to time we like to step back and take a macro look at all the data collected by iCarol to look for bigger trends that might be of interest to our clients. One of those is to understand what day of the week tends to have the most calls logged.

Today we're excited to announce the ability to interact with your clients via 2-way text messaging / SMS from directly within iCarol. This means that people in the general public can text into your help line via a special phone number, and your counselors interact with them completely from within your iCarol system.

Our team ends 2011 double in size compared to the start of the year, and we continue adding new non-profit help lines at a brisk pace. We have awesome plans for 2012 and are excited to unveil them to you in the coming months.

Find local Information and Referral 2-1-1 providers across the USA.

This month iCarol has reached a notable milestone, as we now have over 25,000 people as users. From the start of 2011 until the end of the year, we will have doubled the staff of the iCarol team supporting you, our clients, as well as the underlying technology infrastructure on which iCarol runs.

When a resource is flagged for review by an I&R specialist, the resource specialist not only is notified of the change needed, but also can see the call from which the comment sprung.

Over time, the devices and systems used to access iCarol change. A recent study by our team shows growing usage by mobile devices like the iPad and iPhone, a high amount of Windows users, and for the first time, no one using Windows 98.

Ever wish your I&R software could track particular things in resource records, but didn't have a suitable field to do so?

Unless you're a one-person agency, you very likely conduct meetings - lots of them - to get your job done. Yet most managers view the majority of meetings to be a "waste of time". Learn they keys to conducting effective meetings. Even we on the iCarol team took heart to many of these lessons and are very happy with the results.

If you are planning to share resource databases with partners on a one-time or ongoing basis, there are a number of factors to consider and discuss with your partners to yield the best possible results. This is because each database has likely been built with different assumptions, policies and approaches that would make searching in a shared database inconvenient, inconsistent or even problematic. What follows is intended to help identify problematic areas and stimulate conversations on how to address them amongst the partners and with the iCarol team.

Listen to a recent BBC interview about the agency that contributed a great deal to the delivery of phone-based compassionate listening by volunteers.

By defining custom regions in iCarol, you can define colloquially known geographic areas and then work with them in a variety of areas, such as your referral database.