Software for homeless shelter tracking

Elaine Tucker

We are searching for a homeless shelter tracking software. I did a quick search and found the following on Mission Tracker- is anyone familiar with the software, is it able to be integrated into RE? If you are familiar with any homeless shelter tracking software, please post here. Thanks in advance

Karen Diener

@Elaine Tucker I did a couple of quick searches and it doesn't appear that Mission Tracker has a supported integration with RE which did not surprise me. It doesn't appear to be listed in the Zapier library either, but you may want to investigate further because not everything is listed in their library. But it really depends on what datapoints you are hoping to integrate, if you want it to be bi-directional, etc.

I've reached out to my team internally to see if anyone has knowledge about other systems. My organization does a ton of software selection and ecosystem design projects, so somebody may have some experience I can share.

Karen Diener

I'm back with more info!

You probably already know this, but I'll share for others who are interested:

Agencies that receive federal funding to serve the homeless are required to enter data into their region's HMIS system. In Chicago, for instance, the regional agency in charge (All Chicago) chose WellSky, and everyone has to use it. No integration available with other systems - not even imports. So every agency has to manually enter their homeless shelter participants and services in WellSky (they just call it HMIS).

Of course, most agencies have other software programs where they put the homeless shelter data AND all their other programs, so they're doing double data entry.

Do you receive federal funding, and need to enter your data into your region's HMIS system? If so, it sounds like there are 3 systems you might need to manage.

Elaine Tucker

@Karen Diener - thank you for this - very helpful. This is an area brand new to me, so any additional information is appreciated. I'm not sure of how all funding is coming in, but will share this with the ED over the ministry. I look forward to hearing what others are doing in this space as well. I don't think integration with RE is a show-stopper; I was just curious on that front. This is a perfect example of the community members supporting one another.

Nicole Holt

@Elaine Tucker We use a different software (ClientTrack) along with our local HMIS database. These do not integrate with RENXT--and I'm not sure I'd want them to anyway, as we would not consider homeless clients to be donor prospects (and HIPAA concerns). We are actively working on creating a streamlined reporting process for aggregated service output/outcome statistics for grant reports, donor comms, etc, but this is all outside RENXT.

Elaine Tucker

@Nicole Holt - excellent point regarding the RE integration - does client track also provide volunteer tracking?

Nicole Holt

@Elaine Tucker No, it is just client work (casework notes, that sort of thing). We are using VolunteerHub for volunteer tracking now. We have a lot of food service volunteer opportunities, along with a smattering of other site-based volunteers. VH does have an integration with RENXT through database view, but it is not automatic--it needs periodic syncs, we now do weekly. While VH does work for us, I don't see a lot of development happening in the tool, so I don't imagine the integration will get any better….