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Did I get you? Sorry about the clickbait title, I couldn’t resist. Because it is a weird trick!

Most people don’t know that you can add a plus sign and a tag to your email address and have it go to the same place. For example:

• ali@acreconsulting.ca

• ali+personal@acreconsulting.ca

• ali+newsletter@acreconsulting.ca

• ali+ads@acreconsulting.ca

All of the above all go to the same place!

This approach is called sub-addressing or plus-addressing, and is supported by most (but not all) email services, including G…

There are, at the time of writing, 115 look-up tables in HIFIS that you can customize. For a new HIFIS community, this can be overwhelming!

I've seen some communities go through every single table and want to make careful decisions about each and every option in each table, which takes so much time! There are roughly 1,400 options in these tables, combined (roughly 10 per table). So if you spent only 30 seconds on each option deciding whether you want it or not, you're still spending 10 hours goi…

So you've got a plan to train your staff on how to use HIFIS. That's great!

But now you're coming across a trickier question: when do staff need to revisit their training? You want your plan to include a thoughtful approach to refresher training, but there simply isn't a standard for HIFIS training. Well, never fear, we're here to help!

The forgetting curve

In some industries, particularly when we're talking about health and safety, there's a very rigorous requirement that staff get re-certified pe…

So long, Ottawa! Here are my highlights for the year:

1. @Geoffrey Messier, as always, had a really accessible presentation about why you shouldn't spend lots of money on a fancy AI model, when humans are awesome, and it's not that hard to do the same thing in an Excel spreadsheet. You can actually watch a recording of his presentation, and he recorded a tutorial about building a spreadsheet that would predict who will become chronically homeless, too.

2. Blue Door, a homeless-serving organi…

This blog post is part of a series about Reaching Home HIFIS requirements:

1. Reaching Home: Including the right clients

2. Reaching Home: Collecting the right data (this post)

For Reaching Home communities, there are a number of reporting requirements that come attached to the program. While it’s not explicitly in your agreements that you have to put data into specific modules, it is required that you provide Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada (HICC) with some data. Further, there are offici…

For Reaching Home Designated Communities, a major task is to utilize HIFIS to manage client-level data and use it for Coordinated Access.

One of the components of this is to have a By-Name List / Prioritization List / Unique Identifier List that takes your data in HIFIS and converts that into a list of people that you can use to make prioritization decisions about housing resources.

Anther component of this is to be able to determine how many people are becoming homeless and how many are exiting h…

One of the remaining gaps in HIFIS is for housing programs. The Housing Placement module works reasonably well for programs like Housing First and Rapid Re-Housing, in which a caseworker:

1. Starts searching for housing with a client

2. Secures housing

3. Helps them move in

4. Provides assistance after move-in

5. Follows up to ensure they remain housed

However, many housing programs start with the client moving in. Their workflow looks like this:

1. Help the client move in

2. Support them while they are moved in (the defini…

And that's a wrap on #CAEH23. Here's the highlights of what I learned this year:

1. The proportion of people experiencing chronic homelessness, nationally, rose from 60% of respondents in 2018 to 70% of respondents in 2020-2022, according to national PIT Count data. @Sajidul Quayum Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-nY6n8p28 
2. Every $1 investment in indigenous housing annually results in a 740% social return on investment @Margaret Pfoh Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DypXY3gdB7Y 
…

From time to time, people ask me about how a report handles bed-nights. Unless otherwise specified, a bed-night is counted if a client is booked in at exactly midnight.

That means that there is no minimum stay length. If a client books in at 11:59pm and then books out at 12:01am (2 minutes later), that counts as a bed-night.

That means that if someone books in at 1am and stays the entire rest of the night, that does not count as a bed-night.

That means if someone is there at check-in and slee…

Have you ever had a client that didn't have a cell phone number and couldn't reliably access the internet to check their email?

...

That was rhetorical. Of course you have!

Typically, we use the Contact Info tab on the Client Vitals screen to record the way we can contact our client, but the default options are out-of-date and fairly limited. Like, who has a pager or a fax machine these days?

What if I told you that instead you could make this tab way more useful?

The first thing that you'd…