Tenderloin Housing Clinic

Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC) is the largest provider of supportive housing to formerly homeless adults in San Francisco. Their 250+ employees provide a variety of services including property management, case management, transitional housing, rent payment, representative payee, legal services, and community organizing. The organization’s goal is to get and keep people housed.

In 2015 THC and Bigger Boat Consulting began a journey to transform the way THC staff work with one another and their clients. The scope of the project is to bring property management, facilities, support services, and housing services data into a single database.

While developing a multi-year plan to replace a legacy client database, Bigger Boat rolled out Salesforce to THC’s frontline staff. Bigger Boat worked with THC to streamline their client enrollment process, promote communication and collaboration, reduce paper and time between enrollment stages, and deliver easy and timely access to program and client data. This reduced errors and delays in enrollment, improved communication among frontline staff, and ultimately improved the chances of any client to stay housed.

Phase 2 focused on THC’s finance-related processes. This phase established strong internal and system controls while streamlining processes for monthly check day, disbursements on-demand, and reconciliation.

Project Details

Read more details about the first phase in our supportive housing case study.

We initially picked our implementation partner based on their skill set, communication skills, and size (we wanted a smaller company so that we could ensure the core team would remain the same).

I didn’t realize how important the PROCESS of implementation would be (i.e. ensuring we’re all communicating clearly every step of the way, knowing who’s in charge of what, etc.). Our consultants are great at both focusing on the task at hand, and also at stepping back and look at the bigger picture.

Kristin Dorage, Tenderloin Housing Clinic