Galvin’s Favorite Functions for Nonprofits: Care Plan Templates and Action Plans

Your nonprofit just received a batch of new referrals. You’ve qualified the candidates, conducted the assessments, and enrolled them in your program. Now what? 

Every person is different and so are their needs. Luckily, Salesforce’s Nonprofit Cloud streamlines managing unique client requirements with care plans and the templates that help build them. By defining common goals, benefits, and tasks, serving constituents has never been simpler.

What Are Care Plans?

Meeting the needs of program participants takes work and requires managing many details and moving parts. Nonprofit Cloud makes tracking information and activities easier using care plans.

Care plan records offer case managers a single place to track the progress of  each program participant. Care plans include goals, services, benefits, tasks, notes, and more. The information connects to the individual case record to monitor progress and ongoing needs. In addition to making information and activities easy to access for staff, care plans also help nonprofits provide a uniform experience for clients with similar needs. Case managers do not need to create tasks for every process, manage service or program enrollments individually, or develop one-off plans. Care plans bring consistency without compromising customization.

Creating a care plan starts with a care plan template. Think of them like a map that includes the most common path for participants to achieve a goal, but capable of offering different routes as needed to meet a person’s unique needs. Care plan templates reduce data entry time and help standardize processes across constituents.

Care plan templates include three key elements:

• Goals – What does the client hope to achieve?
  Top goals detail a participant’s desired outcomes from working with your organization. Intermediate goals are the in-between steps to help them make progress.
• Benefits – What services are needed to achieve the goals?
  Benefits are the programs a client will participate in or the services they will receive to support the goals. This could include things like childcare, medical screenings, or education classes.
• Action Plan Templates – What steps are required to meet the goals?
  Action plan templates capture the internal repeatable tasks needed for a process in advance. Think of them like a consistent to-do list for offering each benefit.

How Do Care Plan and Action Plan Templates Work? 

Let’s start with action plans for fictitious nonprofit Employment Excellence. The nonprofit works with individuals to provide job training and support services to help participants achieve full-time employment. The primary benefits include resume writing, interview practice, skill training and certification, and job search assistance. 

A new client needs help writing a resume. The process is the same for all clients attached to that benefit. They must provide their information, a valid ID, and an employment authorization. The client also must upload their current resume or work history. These tasks become part of the “Resume Writing” action plan template. The template gets attached to the care plan providing a step-by-step guide of the to do’s needed for this service. Depending on the permissions of the action plan template, users can add or omit tasks to tailor the action plan to the participant’s exact needs.

With process tasks now defined, it’s time to create a care plan template. Building the template requires having standardized goals and benefits defined in Salesforce, in addition to the action plan template we just created. The appropriate goal(s), benefit(s), and action plan(s) are added to the care plan template. The template gets assigned to any cases associated with those care needs for a standardized process across all individuals with similar requirements. At Employment Excellence, the top goal for this client is gaining employment. The template also includes standardized intermediate goals and benefits to hit that target that apply to all clients with the same goal.

Care plans also can extend to family members. Perhaps as part of a job search process, a participant needs child care for her two-year-old daughter. Nonprofit Cloud supports a care plan for the daughter that attaches to the case of the mother. 

Each care plan template addresses different goals and/or benefits. Multiple templates can be attached to each care plan.

Care plans are managed inside Nonprofit Cloud providing better visibility and task management to improve participant outcomes. No sticky note reminders or messy spreadsheet tracking required.

Why Are Care Plan and Action Plan Templates a Galvin Favorite Function?

Here’s the top three reasons why we recommend these templates:

1. They create consistency. By defining common goals that apply across participants, care plan templates become a quick and easy way to build a participant strategy without having to start from scratch with each new client.
2. They are customizable. While the templates bring standardization to goals, benefits, and tasks, they also allow for easy customization. If a particular piece of the plan doesn’t apply to an individual, staff can simply omit it. With the right permission settings, they can also add to the plan to meet an individual’s unique needs.
3. They save time. Action plan templates prevent staff from having to add a series of tasks to each goal as part of a care plan. Building the plan involves just selecting the appropriate action plan template and the predefined tasks get added to the case. This means less manual work for staff and ensures no task falls through the cracks that could negatively impact a participant outcome. Pre-built templates also aid scalability allowing the organization to serve more people with less tedious administrative work.

Make Galvin Part of Your Action Plan

Care plan templates and action plans are available in Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. Consider them the first step toward automating common tasks. By capturing the repeatable elements of a care plan within these templates, nonprofits can better define and manage the steps needed to support constituents collectively and individually.

For help putting care plan and action plan templates to work in your organization, get with Galvin. We’re experts at capturing processes and customizing the platform to each organization’s needs. We’ve seen the power of this functionality on nonprofits of all sizes. Less work. More impact. 

Learn more and decide how your nonprofit wants to “take action” on improving its care for those who need it most.

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