The latest release to the iCarol web application includes a number of useful enhancements to Contact Forms!
Calculated Duration
One of the text-entry field types available on iCarol Contact Forms, used to document information about client interactions, is the Date field.
As part of the Contact Form editing tools, iCarol Admins and others with Contact Form Version editing permissions can now opt to have a calculated duration appear on the Contact Record, measured in their choice of Days, Weeks, Months, or Years, alongside the date that was entered.
While the most common use of the Date field is to record a person’s date of birth, there are a number of uses for this field, for example one could use it to note the date of a particular event related to the interaction or person’s need. Therefore, the calculated duration could refer to anything that may be of use to an organization—A person’s age in years, months spent without stable housing, weeks since a job loss, or days since someone was victimized in a crime, etc.
Calculated Duration allows Contact Specialists to quickly note the length of time passing since the entered date, which could influence the way they respond to the situation and provide helpful information that can be useful when providing support, referrals, safety planning, and more.
Area Median Income
iCarol Admins and others with Contact Form Version editing permissions can now edit their Contact Forms to include a table noting household sizes, and the corresponding local Area Median Income (AMI) amount for each household size. Once the local AMI table information is entered, related text entry fields can be added to the Contact Form. When documenting a client interaction, the specialist can enter the individual’s household size and annual income, which will result in a AMI% being calculated and shown on the form. This information is useful when determining an individual or family’s eligibility to participate in certain programs or receive assistance.
Contact Form History of Changes
Each time a change is made to a Contact Record, iCarol will automatically record who made the change, when this change was made, and information about what the change entailed. The History of Changes will be visible on the finished Contact Record, providing an audit trail for those who want to closely track these changes.
iCarol Customers can obtain setup and other instructions and information on these enhancements within the iCarol Help Center.
If you are not yet using iCarol but would like to learn more about these and other enhancements, please contact us.
Paper-based files of all sorts—bank statements, tax records, pay stubs, receipts—can typically be destroyed after a period of time when they will no longer be needed. Depending upon an organization’s internal policies and the laws and regulations by which they must abide, not-for-profit organizations may choose to shred some or all client files after a period of time as well.
With paper files now being digitized, and new data usually collected electronically, the concept of “shredding” takes on new meaning. Instead of literally shredding paper through a machine, electronic files are permanently deleted and erased from storage, whether they be on a hard drive or in the cloud.
One of the best practices seen highlighted within regulations such as GDPR is that an organization should only collect the data that is absolutely necessary for service delivery, especially if that data could be used to identify someone. So, unless it is essential for your organization to collect data such as a person’s name, phone number, social security number, etc. in order to carry our your work, it’s best to never collect it at all.
When you’re speaking over the phone with a person in need, you have control over whether or not to record information shared during the conversation inside your contact management system. However, if you’re communicating by Live Chat or SMS/Text Message, the person in need may share personal information with you that’d you’d prefer not be permanently documented, and if transcripts are automatically generated and stored, that private and personally identifying information may be stored whether you like it or not.
In iCarol, you have the choice whether or not your Live Chat and SMS/Texting transcripts are brought into your contact management system, or if they disappear immediately after the conversation ends, protecting personally identifiable data and allowing your organization to align such data collection and storage with your own internal policies. Further, organizations who wish to keep this information long enough for supervision purposes, but do not wish to retain it long term, have many options within the system to decide when to destroy the information. The capability to electronically “shred” potentially identifying information from your iCarol Contact Records is applied to any documentation recorded in your forms, whether it be data from calls, walk-in visits, chats, SMS/text conversations, public website intake forms, or any other interactions you document.
What gets “shredded?”
We understand that most organizations will wish to keep the data that isn’t classified as personally identifiable information, for instance demographics, issues or needs, and other non-identifying data that is important for reporting purposes. If you choose to utilize the automatic shredding function within iCarol, only certain areas of your Contact Records are effected. Text-entry fields where you might enter names, addresses, phone numbers, contact notes, etc. are deleted. Drop-down, check box, and other pick list type data is retained. For a full explanation of how to set these preferences, as well as more detailed information about what is deleted or retained, customers can sign in to iCarol, navigate to the “Help” section, and search for “Shred” within our help articles. If you’re not yet a customer and interested in learning more, please contact us!
Happy Pi Day! What’s that exactly? Remember geometry and learning about finding the area and perimeter (aka circumference) of circles? To get your calculation correct, you need Pi in your equation. You might also see pi as the Greek letter “π”. It’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is always approximately 3.14159… (it’s actually been calculated to over one trillion digits beyond the decimal point!).
In the US and some other countries we write our dates in a MM/DD/YY format so today, March 14th, is 3/14 — Pi Day! And even though most other countries write their dates in a DD/MM format, today is generally accepted as Pi Day worldwide since there are only 12 months. If you’re nerdy like me, you can read more about Pi Day here. Yes, it’s a real thing. Yes, it has its own website.
In honor of Pi Day, here are 3 interesting uses of pie charts in iCarol.
1. A Bird’s Eye View
Use Pie Charts to give you a sort of broad overview of how the numbers or percentages are shaping up for a certain sub-category of your contact form. Or, use it as an overview of your location breakdowns.
In the Analysis tab of Statistics, when selecting Chart Type, you have two Pie Charts to choose from, either Caller Issues and Demographics (which will start by showing you all the Categories on your contact form) or Caller Location.
The resulting charts are below. If you selected the Caller Issues and Demographics chart you get this broad overview of your contact form Categories.
And if you selected the Location pie chart you’ll see a high level look at the geographic location entries.
2. Drill down to get more detail
Once you’ve got that high level pie chart available, you can click on pieces of the pie to drill into the data below. Drilling into a Category will then show you the sub-categories that are available. These sub-categories are the Groups or questions asked within each category on your contact form. On a location chart, drilling into the State or Province piece of the pie will show you the county level information.
If we take our Caller Issues and Demographics chart above and drill into the mauve colored “Issues” category, we’ll see the Issue choices of sub-categories.
If we click on the “Mental Health/Counseling” piece of the pie, we’ll drill down to the lowest available level, which are the field choices or answer options within that sub-category. These are the items you may find in the drop-down or list of check box choices on the contact form.
As mentioned, if you drill further down into the location pie chart, you’d get the counties breakdown. So if I click on Nevada, I’ll see the Nevada counties chosen.
Clicking on Eureka county shows me how the city numbers shape up for that county.
3. Percentage vs. Count
Remember if percentages aren’t really your thing and you’d like to see a count instead, just click the “Total Count” option for any of the pie charts shown.
Now that I’ve told you a bit more about pie charts in iCarol, I suggest you go celebrate Pi Day in the truly best way possible — enjoy a piece of real, edible pie.
We’re getting ever so close to releasing the powerful enhancements to your Call Report Forms and Live Chat and Texting features in iCarol. Take a few minutes to watch our new video!
Happy Pi Day! What’s that exactly? Remember geometry and learning about finding the area and perimeter (aka circumference) of circles? To get your calculation correct, you need Pi in your equation. You might also see pi as the Greek letter “π”. It’s the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is always approximately 3.14159… (it’s actually been calculated to over one trillion digits beyond the decimal point!).
In the US and some other countries we write our dates in a MM/DD/YY format so today, March 14th, is 3/14. If you round Pi to it’s ten thousandth decimal place you get 3.1416 which means this year today is the ultimate Pi Day! And even though most other countries write their dates in a DD/MM format, today is generally accepted as Pi Day worldwide since we only have 12 months. If you’re nerdy like me, you can read more about Pi Day here. Yes, it’s a real thing. Yes, it has its own website.
In honor of Pi Day, here are 3 interesting uses of pie charts in iCarol.
1. A Bird’s Eye View
Use Pie Charts to give you a sort of broad overview of how the numbers or percentages are shaping up for a certain sub-category of your call form. Or, use it as an overview of your location breakdowns.
In the Analysis tab of Statistics, when selecting Chart Type, you have two Pie Charts to choose from, either Caller Issues and Demographics (which will start by showing you all the Categories on your call form) or Caller Location.
The resulting charts are below. If you selected the Caller Issues and Demographics chart you get this broad overview of your call form Categories.
And if you selected the Location pie chart you’ll see a high level look at the geographic location entries.
2. Drill down to get more detail
Once you’ve got that high level pie chart available, you can click on pieces of the pie to drill into the data below. Drilling into a Category will then show you the sub-categories that are available. These sub-categories are the Groups or questions asked within each category on your call form. On a location chart, drilling into the State or Province piece of the pie will show you the county level information.
If we take our Caller Issues and Demographics chart above and drill into the mauve colored “Issues” category, we’ll see the Issue choices of sub-categories.
If we click on the “Mental Health/Counseling” piece of the pie, we’ll drill down to the lowest available level, which are the field choices or answer options within that sub-category. These are the items you may find in the drop-down or list of check box choices on the call form.
As mentioned, if you drill further down into the location pie chart, you’d get the counties breakdown. So if I click on Nevada, I’ll see the Nevada counties chosen.
Clicking on Eureka county shows me how the city numbers shape up for that county.
3. Percentage vs. Count
Remember if percentages aren’t really your thing and you’d like to see a count instead, just click the “Total Count” option for any of the pie charts shown.
Now that I’ve told you a bit more about pie charts in iCarol, I suggest you go celebrate Pi Day in the truly best way possible — enjoy a piece of real, edible pie.
We’d like to introduce you to an extremely versatile new feature with tons of potential uses: Online Forms. Watch our short video for more information, and contact our support team with questions or to get started.
Our clients spoke and we listened! Many clients expressed a wish for iCarol to be able to leverage text messaging in new and different ways. Therefore, we added three new ways to use text messaging in iCarol. This article will outline how to send text notifications and text messages to other users in your iCarol system, and a future article will outline how to conduct follow-ups via text message. These new options carry no set-up fee, but you will be charged a monthly fee for the text messages sent, at a rate of $40/1000 messages/month.
The new SMS options will first need to be turned on by an Admin in your iCarol system. They can be found by clicking Admin Tools in the left hand menu, and then the “Messaging” tab. Doing so will take you to the page pictured below, where you will want to click the box next to the first two options to place a check mark there, then click the “Save all settings” button at the top of the screen.
Those individuals who would like to be able to receive SMS messages from other users or would like to receive notifications via SMS will need to edit their user profiles to include a mobile phone number, and to give permission for SMS messages to be sent to them. To do so, the user, or an Admin on their behalf, will click Vols-Staff in the left hand menu, then click on the name of the person whose profile they would like to edit. Next, click the Contacts tab, the click the Edit button at the top of the screen. Next, enter a phone number into the Mobile Phone field, and click the box next to “I permit SMS’s to be sent to this mobile phone” to place a check mark there. Finally, click the Save button at the top of the screen.
Please note the text in red. SMS messages from iCarol may be sent at any time. It is suggested that if you would not like to receive SMS messages during certain time frames, you explore your mobile phone options to determine if there is a setting you can use to delay delivery of SMS messages to certain time frames. Most mobile phones have this option so that, for example, it can be set so that SMS messages are not delivered between the hours of 11pm and 9am. Any message that might have been sent during that time frame is not delivered until after 9am. Alternately, most mobile phones also allow users to set their phone to silent, so that the notification sound that usually plays when a phone call or text message is received is not heard.
Once the option to send SMS notifications is turned on, additional options are displayed on the Notifications tab of user profiles as below.
Each individual, or an Admin on their behalf, can edit these options to indicate which notifications they would like sent via SMS.
To send a SMS message to another user, follow the steps below.
1. Click Vols-Staff in the left hand menu
2. Click on the name of the person you would like to send a message to
3. Click the Contact Info tab of the user profile
4. Click the mobile phone number
5. A new tab or window will open where you can type your message and send it
Non-Admin users can only send SMS messages to one user at a time. Admin users can send a SMS message to multiple users at once. They would do so by following these steps:
1. Click Vols-Staff in the left hand menu
2. Click the boxes next to the names of the people you would like to send a SMS message to, so there are check marks placed there
3. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the Send SMS link
4. The form to type your message and send it will appear
A new report has been added to the Statistics page of iCarol to help you track how many SMS messages are being sent from your system. Admins can access this report by clicking Statistics in the left hand menu, then the Messaging menu. This report contains several filters so you can determine from what area of iCarol the SMS messages are being sent. “Between Staff and Volunteers” is the option to choose if you would like to see how many notification messages and messages between users are being sent.
If you have any questions or need any clarification on this functionality, please do not hesitate to send a case to iCarol Support!
There are a plethora of reports available in the Statistics section of iCarol that can be used to illustrate many different facets of your service. Please see below for further information on some of the most commonly used reports.
One of the most basic reports is the call volume report. It shows how many call reports were submitted during the time frame specified.
This report, and any report found in the “Chart Type” menu on the Analysis tab, can be filtered in a number of different ways. The filters available are:
Location – If you enter a specific location or list of locations, the resulting call volume chart will just show the calls from callers located in those locations. If you have a geography based funder who is interested in how many calls you received from a specific area, this filter can assist you in creating a report for the funder.
Time frame – You can enter a very specific time frame for your reports to cover, and you can also change the interval to such options as daily, monthly, hour of the day, day of the week, etc. You can also limit the report to specific days or the week or hours of the day. In this way, you could build a report that showed your call volume during business hours (9am-5pm Monday to Friday), and compare it to the call volume during non-business hours (5pm-9am Monday to Friday plus weekends).
Call Reports and Phone Workers – The Phone Workers drop-down menu will list all the users in your iCarol system. In this way, you could see how many calls each user is submitting. If you use several different call reports in iCarol, you can also user this filter to run call volume reports on just one of your call reports, or any combination of them you wish.
The final filter available is the Call Content Filter. This filter enables you the filter the call volume chart by any piece of data you collect in any of the custom fields on your call reports. You can add up to 5 call content filters. In the chart below, I have filtered to show calls on the topic of Gambling where the caller appreciated the service they received.
Many clients have managers, board members or funders who are interested to see how many calls are being received in regards to a specific demographic or topic. A pie chart is a great way to illustrate this. When you first select the pie chart from the Chart Type menu on the Analysis tab of Statistics, the pieces of the pie will represent the categories on your call report. You will want to “drill down” into one of the categories to get to the more specific data by clicking on a piece of the pie. The pie chart will then show the groups in the category selected. You will want to “drill down” once more to get to the field level of your call report, where the most specific data is stored.
Here is an example. This pie chart shows the categories in the call report:
I clicked on the “Caller Issues” piece of the pie. This chart shows all the groups in the “Caller Issues” category:
Finally, I clicked on the “Addiction” piece of the pie. The chart below shows the specific addiction issues the callers spoke about:
Many iCarol clients track the needs of their callers via the AIRS taxonomy. With the “Needs by Taxonomy” report, these clients can see the most common needs of their callers. This information can be used to ensure call takers are trained appropriately, that appropriate resources to fill these needs are available in the resource database, and even to inform funders and policy makers about the needs of the community.
The “Count of referrals to resources” chart shows which resources have been referred to the most often. This chart is another way to illustrate the needs of the community and could even be used to illustrate the need for expanded programs and increased funding.
This is only a small number of the reports available in the Statistics section of iCarol. We encourage you to explore all the reports available and view the tutorial videos on Statistics to learn more. If you have any questions about Statistics in iCarol, please feel free to contact the Support Team at any time.
