All Chicago is the Continuum of Care lead for homelessness prevention in Chicago. They work with over 90 partner agencies. During the May 2023 meeting of the New York Salesforce Nonprofit User Group, Megan Lutz (Director of Technology Operations at All Chicago) demonstrated the organization’s Salesforce system for managing their Chicago Rents program. Bigger Boat partnered with All Chicago to set up and tailor this solution to program needs. Watch the demo below.
Background
Early in the pandemic, All Chicago started a program called Chicago Rents to help make more rental units available to people experiencing homelessness. They chose Salesforce as their system of record to manage this program, including tracking available properties and approving payments to hundreds of clients (using the Outbound Funds Module). You can learn more in our case study on managing a rapid re-housing program with Salesforce.
The Chicago Rents program holds Accelerated Moving Events, where the partner agencies meet participants at shelters or encampments. First, case managers attend an accelerated moving event and sit down with their participants. Then, using All Chicago’s recently launched Experience Cloud portal, together they look at a list of the available units, filter them based on criteria, and apply for an apartment. This starts the leasing process of getting the person approved and paying deposits or move-in fees, getting documents signed, and collecting those documents. The portal has made the process of matching participants to housing more efficient.
Demo
Here’s Megan’s demo:
Note: The demo Q&A includes a question about how Bigger Boat customized out-of-the-box elements of Experience Cloud to provide a Zappos-like search experience. Please read our post on Optimizing Experience Cloud Search for External Users to learn how this was done.