Accelerating The Impact Of Care After Combat
Care After Combat was formed in 2014 by 2 ex-servicemen and a service supporter who wanted to make a difference to the lives of service men and women who are in the criminal justice system, enabling them to have access to additional support with the long term aim of preventing people reoffending when they leave prison.
Care After Combat are a small team of 6 full time, and 8 part time staff. It was important to ensure they had a system in place that could replace their use of spreadsheets, saving them time to enable them to grow the impact they are having on the lives of people who have served in the British Military.
We spoke with Amy Barnett, Executive Assistant at Care After Combat, and she explained to Cirrico that they had three different spreadsheets working across their projects and trying to marry-up all of the data when it came to reporting was a huge task. She spent much of her time doing things manually, as did her team.
Amy shared: “Before we had Salesforce I would spend a huge amount of my time sifting through Excel to get the answers to staff questions, reporting queries and general questions relating to our work. Now that we have Salesforce the team and I save a huge amount of time. We are able to run reports for each prison allowing us to report back to prison staff the number of veterans engaged with our service. We utilise reports to generate the addresses for our Well-being packs, using the CVS files generated by Salesforce, this saves our staff a day a month in time, and we can be sure that the data is up to date based on real- time information ensuring that the packs are sent to the correct place and saving money for the charity.”
Care After Combat have huge growth goals to help as many veterans in the Criminal Justice System as possible. It was key that Cirrico; future proofed the areas Care After Combat are working in, they wanted to track levels of support provided in each prison, track prison and community moves for veterans in custody, enable them to transfer veterans between regions and caseworkers. It was important that staff were given all of the information they needed to ensure continuity of care.
Amy explained to us after the project was live, that she was worried Cirrico wouldn’t be able to deliver exactly what Care After Combat needed, as it was so unique and specific to their needs. Cirrico prides itself on ensuring that every project hits the mark for every customer, enabling them to accelerate their own change and save huge amounts of time to free people up to do a lot more with their staff time.
Care After Combat started with a blank slate as they’d never had a CRM before so it was important for them to get it right, Amy explained that she was worried that Cirrico wouldn’t get all of the many requirements into the build, and when it went live it wouldn’t be exactly what she wanted. Luckily Amy went on to share with Cirrico that our Salesforce Consultant Will Dyer ,who built the system, built it perfectly and it was tailored exactly how she wanted it.
Amy went on to share “Working with Cirrico was really easy, and having daily catch-ups with Will was helpful, I’d thrash ideas about and he’d listen. The more suggestions we gave him as to the outcomes we needed from the system the more we got out of the build. Will would then come back to us with additional ideas helping us think long term, which was massively helpful too.”
Care After Combat knew that the project had to make a difference to the team’s time. At the beginning of the project Amy explained to Will that she needed a system that could automate a lot of her workload, and the Regional Coordinators time who manage various veterans support across the country.
Amy shared “We’ve sent out 3 monthly wellbeing packs since our Salesforce platform was launched which I estimate has saved us a day a month in sending out the packs as we are using one dataset. Over the past two years we have increased the number of veterans we are working with and we are now sending out 8 times the amount of packs we started with. Having a system in place supports the work we do in an effective and efficient way.
As veterans can’t ordinarily access computers or phones in prison it was important to us that we had a paper-based system that enabled our teams to remotely access anything the veterans sent us and track any correspondence with them. Application forms, letters, responses to wellbeing questions for future packs, or anything support needs identified are easily accessible to our teams via Salesforce. Allowing us to operate a remote support service allowing our Regional Coordinators to work remotely.”
The aim of Care After Combat is to ensure people feel supported, especially when leaving prison, as it’s a big transition for them. For Amy and her team it used to take huge amounts of time to look across the data to see who was coming up for release from the various prison locations.
Amy shared “Salesforce reporting has saved us a huge amount of time as we can pull reports which previously took an hour to see when people are due for release from prison and we can give them extra support, this means that we hope when we come to do impact-measurements in the future that fewer people are reoffending due to the support they are receiving from us. Our Regional Coordinators needed a system that was user friendly and cut down their time spent filling in paperwork. They are able to use Salesforce to easily pre-read case notes when someone has transferred into their region. It saves them all hours a month as previously I was their point of contact for reporting and now they can do it themselves. This has saved me countless hours, which I’d estimate to be about 15 hours a month.”
What would you tell yourself if you could go back in time?
Amy explained “If I could go back in time I’d have done this project as soon as I started at Care After Combat so we were saving hundreds of hours a year to enable us to help more people across more regions, I love the way Cirrico worked and I would have got them involved in conversations sooner also!”
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