Childcare Resource and Referral

Curate a Database of Childcare Providers

Keeping information about available services up-to-date is a large task that can take hundreds of hours, or more, depending upon the size of your service area and number of available childcare services. iCarol provides many solutions to common data curation challenges experienced by childcare resource and referral centers. With iCarol, updating resource and referral information is quick and easy. You can build an inventory of providers to refer parents and caregivers to, in records containing standard and custom fields to store all the necessary information about the provider, services provided, rates, location, hours of operation, enrollee requirements, and more. Whether your childcare resource and referral center serves a small region or operates state or provincewide, iCarol can scale with your needs. Our platform is built with Alliance of Information and Referral (AIRS) standards in mind, helping all information and referral (I&R) specialists keep listings in line with I&R best practices, regardless of the type of I&R they engage in. Read more…  |  Read less.

Request Updates from Providers

Maintaining hundreds or thousands of resource records for childcare providers is a time-consuming task. Information and Referral standards suggest yearly updates, at a minimum, but we know that in today’s climate information about a provider may change rapidly. It’s your job to keep your records as up-to-date as possible, and with iCarol you can directly engage providers themselves in that process using iCarol’s Automated Verification tools. Automated Verification let’s you give providers a direct link to their live listing in your database, where they can suggest edits and updates to their record in the service directory. Once submitted, your specialists can review the update from the provider, and make changes or additions to the update if necessary, before accepting it. Once accepted, the database listing is automatically updated in your system along with a timestamp of when the change was made. Automated verification is perfect for one-off requests for an update, or scenarios where you need to send out batch requests. Keeping your records updated has never been easier, and since you’re engaging the provider directly you can assure accuracy of the information. Read more…  |  Read less.

Encourage Self-service

Many people prefer to explore services and options online instead of, or before, they talk to a specialist and request referrals. Allowing this self-service helps meet a client where they are and empowers them to consume information in the most comfortable way for them. The downside of self-service is that without expert guidance, these brave explorers risk misunderstanding or consuming incorrect information. Using iCarol, you can encourage self-service and rest assured that your website visitors are still getting the correct information curated by your specialists. With iCarol’s Public Resource Directory, place your entire database, or a subset of your database, on your website where visitors can search for, browse, and filter childcare provider listings using the same criteria your specialists use when searching for and making referrals. It’s the best of both worlds—the convenience of self-service and the quality assurance one gets when guided by a childcare referral specialist. Read more…  |  Read less.

Flexible Communication Options

Making a phone call is just one way of communicating, and it’s a method that declines in popularity each year. Parents and caregivers want to get information in a way that is quick, easy, and comfortable for them. Contact centers of all kinds are noticing a higher demand from clients to communicate through Live Chat, SMS/Texting, or self-service tools through an organization’s website. iCarol can equip your organization with new tools to communicate, all integrated within your iCarol system. Invite parents and caregivers in your community to engage with your organization and explore their childcare options through a live chat or SMS/text conversation with your childcare referral professionals. Offer online screenings or service requests that allow parents and caregivers to submit a service inquiry at their convenience and request a call back from you at a time that’s convenient for them. Use iCarol to manage all these types of contacts, document them, and attach referrals from your integrated database regardless of the communication channel the client uses to reach you. Read more…  |  Read less.

Track Capacity and Manage Waitlists

The childcare industry has been hit hard by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Thousands of workers were furloughed or laid off when child care centers closed, and now that they are reopen just a fraction of workers have returned, having far reaching effects on childcare centers’ capacity, hours of availability, costs, and more. iCarol provides ways for you to create and manage waitlists for childcare centers in your database. This tool, iCarol’s ReferralQ lets you assign parents and caregivers to a waitlist for a childcare center that may not currently be accepting new clients, but will in the future. When the center’s capacity increases, you can then refer the the waitlisted parents to the service. Capacity can be managed by your workers, or use our companion tool to ReferralQ, iCarol’s Provider Portal, and invite childcare centers secure access to a portal allowing them to directly update their center’s capacity to take new referrals, and access information for the families that have been referred to them by your agency. Read more…  |  Read less.

Westcoast Child Care Resource Centre

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

“Westcoast Child Care Resource Centre has been using the iCarol database for our child care referrals since 2017. iCarol’s flexibility and versatility allows us to adapt it in different ways to provide clients with exactly the resources they need. Such features like the postal code search works really well for families who live in between neighborhoods. We can search for centres that are within a certain number of kilometers from their location. The ease of calculating the monthly statistics is a huge asset. Generating a report with that information is fast and simple.

During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, we were required to generate a variety of reports and statistics that were different from our usual reporting. iCarol was so easy to adapt to during that time and then reverse the changes when needed, too, was simple. Reports are generated fast and are reliable. We are pleased that iCarol continues to build upon the features and improve performance. “
– Crystal Janes, Director of Programs

ParentLink

Missouri, USA

“All the iCarol staff have been so helpful and friendly and I really appreciate it. Some companies make you feel dumb for not knowing how to do things or they seem frustrated if you ask too many questions, but I never feel that way with iCarol! So thank you!! We just started using iCarol but already our staff love it because it is so easy to use and intuitive. We are excited about what iCarol can do for us!”
– Christina, Program Coordinator

Family and Children’s Service

Nashville, Tennessee, USA

“iCarol has continuously met and exceeded our expectations both technically and financially. iCarol combines service passion with technical expertise to empower high-impact collaborations between vendor and non-profit. After working with countless other data systems, there are no other vendors which match iCarol in their technical support, responsiveness, innovation, feedback utilization, and staff transition ease when needed. We have over a dozen different programs using iCarol, both helpline and non-helpline, and iCarol is flexible enough to work for all of them.”
– Katherine D., Data Manager

Kids Help Phone

Canada

“Our migration to iCarol was the result of a thorough and rigorous vendor selection process of 11 potential vendors. iCarol excelled with completeness of functionality, technology maturity and affordability. We strongly recommend that any distress or counselling contact centre look closely at iCarol – we doubt you’ll find a better match!”
– Ted K., VP of Information Technology

2-1-1 Norcal

California, USA

“I just want to express gratitude to the iCarol team for providing us with user-friendly features (especially in working with records and data collection for reports) and timely, attentive customer service. Even with the high number of clients you serve, we have always felt valued by you! I also appreciate your openness to new ideas, and your work on delivering new features (such as Folksonomy and PDF’s for PRD searches) in this ever-changing field. Thanks for all you do!”
– Hayley Huttenmaier, Resource Specialist