Lake County’s National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) office is located in Painesville and is one of 63 such offices throughout the state of Ohio.
NAMI’s mission is to improve the quality of life for individuals living with disabling brain disorders or mental illness and to assist their family and friends by providing educational opportunities, support groups, and advocacy in the public arena.
Lake County’s NAMI receives more than 1,000 requests for help annually, three times more than they received 10 years ago.
The Challenge: Keeping Track of Incoming Calls to Ensure Good Service
While helping families with mental illness challenges is their first priority, keeping track of such families’ inquiries is a vital component function. Because NAMI relies on donations and grants, they must be able to both demonstrate their effectiveness and outline their future needs.
A concern with their prior tracking system was that they could not differentiate each individual case (client) separately from each new communication (email, web inquiry, or call for assistance).
Reporting was time-consuming and of questionable accuracy, so their performance metrics were unreliable, and their success in requesting additional outside funds was not optimized.
The Solution: Adatasol’s System for Non-Profit Organizations
The system installed by Adatasol tracks each incoming call by source – phone call vs. email vs. web site inquiry. But the calls can now be further indexed by the nature of the mental illness and the assistance program that was recommended.
For example, a phone call received concerning a patient with schizophrenia who needs temporary housing could be entered into the Adatasol system, respecting all privacy laws.
Now, when a metric – total phone calls, total clients with a particular illness, or total housing referrals – needs to be reported, the data is readily retrieved and described by date.
Conclusions
NAMI Lake County is now able to improve their service because they can tailor their programs to the right needs based on the nature of incoming requests for help. Their service statistics are now being mirrored back to them in real time.
NAMI Lake County is better able to reach their service goals because they can monitor trends throughout each year and make any required service adjustments.
NAMI Lake County has improved their success with grant applications because they are able to clearly describe their successes and where they could improve if grant funds were provided – and then report those successes when funds are received.
NAMI Lake County is pleased with the user-friendly features of their custom Filemaker database installed by Adatasol, and they can operate the system and generate reports without outside assistance.
