Stop Soldier Suicide Uses Online Forms to Help Save Lives

These services are accessed through the telephone and live chat services. Stop Soldier Suicide’s leadership team recognized many Veterans and active duty service members prefer to contact them, at least initially, through other avenues. Many would send their contact request through Facebook messages, which sometimes caused a delay in the time it took for case managers to respond to their request.

The need: Reach more active duty service members, Veterans, and their families by offering an intake method with which they are more comfortable accessing.

Stop Soldier Suicide’s leadership team wanted to increase the avenues for active duty service members, Veterans and their families to request intake into their services. They also needed to ensure these added channels of access would not add a bigger burden on their case managers. Specifically, they wanted the ability to:

• Offer a contact method that enables help-seekers to convey needs, while allowing them to maintain protective barriers until trust and rapport was built between the help-seeker and their case manager
• Identify requests quickly and have the ability to sort through the different types of requests submitted
• Have a follow-up activity scheduled automatically so that their case managers can easily identify when a request must be followed-up with
• Aggregate data and reporting, so that leadership can report on the types of requests received and the demographics of those submitting the requests

The solution: Incorporate Online Forms into their services life cycle.

Soon after iCarol released Online Forms, Stop Soldier Suicide subscribed to this helpful add-on feature. This feature allows them to offer a new avenue for active duty service members, Veterans and their families to request services in a confidential and less intensive method, while increasing their case managers’ ability to quickly respond to these requests, schedule and conduct follow-up activities, and report on data submitted with the requests.

Since an Online Form is essentially a public facing version of an iCarol call report form, staff are able to easily make changes and adjustments to the online intake form that meets their needs and provides them with important information and data about the request. Those requesting service see a simple to complete form with questions and possible answers to help them better express their needs. Form submissions go directly into Stop Soldier Suicide’s iCarol system, which triggers a notification to staff and an automatically scheduled follow-up. From there, staff is able to re-contact to the person requesting services and integrate them into their services life cycle.

Now with Online Forms, Stop Soldier Suicide reaches more help-seekers who may be hesitant to initially reach out to them through the phone or chat. As you can see in the image of their website homepage, they’ve linked directly to their online form and placed the link in two prominent locations on their site’s main page. They also have access points to the form on their Facebook page. These additional access points have allowed Stop Soldier Suicide to be able to let active duty service members, Veterans and their families begin the intake process from the places they are most comfortable. Since incorporating Online Forms, the Stop Soldier’s Suicide leadership team has noticed an increase in the number of clients requesting their services.

Leadership at Stop Soldier Suicide streamlined their intake process through their use of Online Forms. As a result, they have seen a decrease in the time it takes staff to respond to initial contact requests, as well as a sharp increase in the amount of reportable data regarding intake requests.