Problems with charity CRMs

Many case management systems for charities rely on staff actively checking dashboards, reports, and case records to spot problems. In busy homelessness services, this means missed appointments, safeguarding concerns, or incomplete records can go unnoticed until they become much harder to resolve. Proactive Alerts end this problem by automatically notifying the right people when something needs attention.

This takes time. Lots of time. And not only is time money, but that time can be used for other, more important things, especially when it comes to charities that support the most vulnerable people in our society. Dashboards and reports are useful, but they still rely on someone checking them.

By the time an issue is found, it may already have caused avoidable follow-up work. In the context of the homelessness sector, this could be a service user who stops attending a substance abuse course and hence disengages from support. A case worker should be able to identify this problem easily from their information system, but, under current systems, they may not notice a service user has disengaged from support until it becomes a much bigger problem. Earlier intervention takes fewer resources and ensures a higher standard of personalised support.

How does Harker support homelessness services?

Proactive Alerting is the Harker solution to this problem, helping teams identify important changes automatically, rather than relying on manual checking. Harker can monitor data in the background and highlight things that need attention. Alerts can be configured for any data that's stored in Harker easily and flexibly to work with how charities operate. These alerts can be setup with three simple criteria: what should be monitored, what condition matters and who needs to know.

Any field on a Log, Logbook or Entity (the core data structures in Harker), can be set up to be monitored. Along with monitoring we provide a custom filter builder to configure any kind of trigger condition for the alert to be activated, this could be a failed status, missing data, a value outside tolerance, or an overdue/missing record. Really anything a service would need. These alerts can then be scoped to targeted specific users or groups of users, so the right info can get to people that need to know.

Why does Proactive Alerting matter to charities?

Proactive Alerting has been designed to support the way charities operate in practice. Staff, volunteers, managers, and administrators may all be responsible for different areas of work, and not everyone needs to see every issue. Ensuring only the right people see alerts is also critical for ensuring a high standard of security and GPDR compliance.

We know that work, especially the work that charities do, is constantly evolving and changing, so we built proactive alerting with the same flexible data model in mind as the rest of Harker. This means that they can support a wide range of workflows, including maintenance, compliance, safeguarding, quality control, asset management, operational reporting, and frontline service delivery.

With Proactive Alerting, problems can be squashed before they arise, ensuring a smooth operation with less downtime and roadblocks. Most importantly, it ensures that more time can be devoted to the work that actually matters in this action-driven sector.

See the CRM built for homelessness services

Book a personalised demo today to see how Harker can support your charity with flexible case management software, proactive alerts, and tools designed specifically for frontline homelessness services.