2-1-1 Taxonomy

One of the key decisions you’ll make in creating and curating a database of community resources is deciding how to categorize them. Assigning the right categories, or keywords, to your records helps ensure that you’ll find appropriate referrals and then connect your callers and other help-seekers with the organizations that can help them and fulfill their needs. Categorizing these resources according to what they do and the types of services they provide means you can successfully connect your clients with the programs that can help them.

All organizations using iCarol can create or import their own custom categorization schema to employ in their referral database. Another option is to use the 2-1-1 Taxonomy. The Taxonomy is a key component of an information and referral call center, and essential if you are a 2-1-1 center or plan to seek an AIRS accreditation. This is a 9,000+ term standardized categorization scheme which is highly detailed. iCarol gives you access to it and also takes care of regular maintenance and updates, periodically putting into place the updates made to the Taxonomy. iCarol fully supports the Taxonomy to keep you in step with the standards put forth by AIRS. In addition, we give you access to additional tools that help you assign resources to taxonomy terms, find terms that are not yet assigned, and migrate resources from terms that have been retired to active ones.

Keep in mind that even if you use the 2-1-1 Taxonomy, you can still also use your own categorization scheme in iCarol as well, though many of our users find that double-categorization becomes overly complex.

Want to learn more about using iCarol to give resource and referral information to your help seekers? Join a webinar! Or to learn more about this or any other iCarol feature, feel free to connect with us.