Why iCarol?
We care for you the way you care for your clients. iCarol was founded by helpline volunteers and is staffed by people who have worked at not-for-profit organizations just like you! These are just some of the reasons why the iCarol solution is a great choice for your organization.
Save Lives
Creating suicide-safer communities is challenging work. It takes skilled and compassionate listeners, knowledgeable supervisors, and specialized tools. iCarol offers risk assessment mechanisms developed by industry experts, best practice follow-up support, and much more in an effort to support you in your life-saving work.
Foster Loyal Volunteers
Helpline and Crisis Center service is arguably one of the most intensive types of volunteering one can do. You invest a lot of time and resources into the screening and training process, so you want to ensure volunteers stick around for a long time. Providing convenient shift sign up, integrated supervisory feedback, connectivity to your organization, accessibility of supervisors, and ease of data collection when working with clients all help reduce stress and burnout, foster loyalty, and decrease turnover.
Get More Funding
What’s the key to getting funded? Proving your value by reporting on outcomes. Funding sources of all types, whether internally at your organization or externally like grant opportunities, need to see data that shows the positive impact you’re having on your community. iCarol makes this easier than ever, through customized data collection and real-time reports and exports, and supporting follow-up activities and surveys with your help-seekers to collect outcome data.
Protect Confidentiality
Clients trust you with their private information. In the process of reaching you and getting assistance, they provide you with highly sensitive information about themselves. With state-of-the-art encryption and highly secure data storage, you’ll never worry about violations or non-compliance with privacy laws.
Boost the quality of your people
You provide excellent training to your volunteers and staff before they ever take their first call, text, or chat. But what happens next? Even the most talented and dedicated volunteers need supervision, feedback, communication, and ongoing training from their supervisors. Our solution helps you support your volunteers and ensure they’re providing the highest quality service to your help-seekers.
Manage Fewer Systems
Your day is filled with a variety of tasks. One minute you may be checking to see who’s coming in for the next shift, the next minute it’s time produce a report for a grant you received. Hopping between various software systems, binders, memos, and email is a hassle and wastes valuable time. When theses tasks coexist in a central location you’ll find yourself saving loads of time, allowing you to accomplish even more with your day.
Improve Service Delivery
People rely on you to provide assistance in their time of need. Whether your service provides active listening, crisis intervention, suicide prevention, or connects people with helpful information and referrals to needed services, you’re always looking for ways to boost the quality with which you provide those services. From providing reliable information and referrals with speed and accuracy, to promptly responding to all your chat and text conversations, to enhanced follow-up with clients experiencing thoughts of suicide, iCarol will help you serve your community better than ever.
Respond to Changing Communication Needs
Over the last several years we’ve seen a major shift in the way people prefer to communicate. A Pew Internet research study found that in a given week, the most-used function of smartphones wasn’t voice calling, it was texting. In fact, using the smartphone to make phone calls didn’t even come in second place — it came in third! For a myriad of reasons, people want to reach out for help through live chat, texting, or use self-service tools online. Non-profit organizations that don’t adapt to this demand can quickly find themselves left behind. Even if these organizations wish to embrace new channels like live chat or SMS/texting, they can often struggle to find affordable solutions that don’t overburden their workers with too many additional tools and processes to learn, while providing the security they need to uphold their obligations to protect sensitive data. In order to reach the most people possible, including people who don’t want to make a phone call, you need a way to accept communications on these channels, without the added stress of additional systems to manage or new software to learn and train your staff to use.
Strengthen Your Collaborative Relationships
When independently operating services join together as part of a network or work on a collaborative project, they can reach more people across wider areas, or provided extended service hours. These partnerships require seamless response from a system like iCarol, so that differences in service delivery from one center to the next are transparent to the help seeker, while allowing for integrated communication, reporting, and more for managers and staff.
Diffuse Client Stress
People reach out to you when they’re most vulnerable, feeling worried or even trapped. You want to do all you can to reduce their stress and anxiety. Making sure they feel at ease with your service and that they leave a conversation feeling better is of the utmost importance. With the right tools, such as speedy and accurate referral searching, eligibility screening, safety assessments, and more, and you can make sure your interactions are more successful and your clients feel supported.
Integrate With Other Systems
In a world that is data-driven, the ability to share data with your partners in the way they want (exports, password protected PDFs, or near-real time APIs), is a valuable tool that can be leveraged for revenue growth of your organization, which will ultimately improve the overall health, availability and quality of services in your community.
