Tracking your Community Programs with Field & Community Services

Shelterluv's map-based Field & Community Services module is an easy-to use, essential tool for any animal welfare organization that provides community services for pet owner support and intake prevention.

Now you’re able to track and report both efforts and results seamlessly within your shelter software. No more standalone spreadsheets or paper notebooks needed.

Distributing pet food and supplies to families in need? Offering behavior or medical advice? Rehoming support? Read on to learn how Shelterluv supports you in collecting and reporting on programs like these.

Tips

If your shelter or rescue has a Community Cat Program, review a few pointers for how to use this functionality for your TNR purposes specifically here.
Use custom applications to manage your incoming requests for assistance!

Introduction

In Field & Community Services, you can create two types of records:

An activity is the main way that you will track community services provided - there will be a separate activity for each type of service provided (food assistance is separate from medical assistance, for example)
A case is optional for linking together multiple activities for a family and can be created under the "Assist > Assist Owner" case type/subtype - it is mainly useful for a few different scenarios outlined in the When to Create a Case section below
Learn more about using cases vs. activities

Here is an example of an activity. It is assigned to Kristina and in the "Open" status, which indicates that Punky is on track for receiving these medical services for her two cats.

Learn more about creating an activity.

Title: Use any descriptive keywords here that will help you bring it up via search later! This could be the pet owner's name and a description of the services they need.
- Pro tip: If you're going through a lot of voicemails, use the title field to include quick notes like caller name, phone number, summary of message. After creating an activity for each voicemail listened to, you'll have a to-do list of people to call back and can add memos or other information during the live conversation.
- For food pantry recipients, you can also include for quick reference how much food they qualify for and their current eligibility status (if applicable to your program).
Priority Level: This helps indicate where your team should focus your efforts first.
- The highest priority levels (P1 and P2) can be used to indicate the families at high risk of losing their animals or most in need of urgent services.
- Lower priority levels (P3, P4, and P5) can be used for families at low risk of losing their animals or services that are less urgent.
Location: This is typically the family's address. If they are homeless or you do not collect this information, you can use your organization's address instead.
Status:
- "New" status can be used when a service is first requested but has not been scheduled or provided yet.
- "Open" status can be used to indicate that a service has been scheduled or is otherwise in progress.
- "Completed" and "Closed" statuses can be used to indicate when a service is completed, or when a family no longer needs assistance for the time being. (Please note that "Closed" activities can be re-opened but "Closed" cases cannot. If there is a chance that you will be assisting the same family in the future, we recommend keeping their case as "Completed" instead of closing it out completely.)
Assigned to: This is the point person for the service and/or the case manager for the family.
Incident Date: The date that assistance was first requested or the date that the service is actually provided, depending on how your organization wants to report on them.
Due Date: The next date that you have action items due. On the due date, the "Due Today" filter will bring all action items to the top of your dashboard. Examples of action items:
- The next general check-in with the family
- Prior to food pickup so you can prepare the food and/or send the family a reminder with pickup instructions
- Prior to a medical appointment to make sure they are scheduled with the vet and/or to send the family a reminder with instructions for the day of the appointment
Metrics: The number of animals/people assisted, services provided, hours spent, etc.
Reference Numbers: Not normally used for community programs unless there is a separate identifier for the family in an external database.
Zone: Your configured neighbors/areas of your city.
Jurisdiction: Your configured cities/counties that you serve.
Associated Partner: This could be a clinic, training facility, human food bank, or other organization you are partnering with to provide the service.
- Please note that these must first be added to your partner list through the main Shelterluv Configuration page.
Associated People: The person/family requesting services, normally under the role of "Animal Owner."
- This is always optional, so if you are running a large scale food distribution event where you do not collect owner information, you do not need to add any associated people.
Associated Animals: The animal(s) receiving services.
- This is also optional, in case you do not collect animal information.
Memos: Open text field to record notes from conversations with the family or anything else that doesn't quite fit into the other fields.
Attachments: Any documentation, photos, etc. that you may need to save.

Trackable Activity Types & Subtypes

If there are any activity types/subtypes that you do not plan to use, we recommend hiding them from Configuration to reduce data entry errors by your team.

Activity type: Community Services - Medical

Most requests for individual medical assistance will be categorized under the "Basic Veterinary Care" subtype which covers basic wellness and preventatives, or the "Spay/Neuter" subtype if a S/N surgery needs to be scheduled. If you are running a vaccine or microchip clinic where many people are served on the same day, those subtypes can be used for large-scale tracking of the event.

Spay/Neuter
Vaccinations
Microchipping
Basic Veterinary Care
Advanced Veterinary Care
Owner Intended Euthanasia
Nail Trim
General Grooming

Activity type: Community Services - Pet Food/Supply Pantry

Community Cat Program Pick-Up
Community Cat Program Delivery
Retention Pick-Up
Retention Delivery
Retention Distribution Event
Partner Distribution

Activity type: Community Services - Behavioral

Behavior Consultation
Group Training
Private Training
Behavior Modification Program

Activity type: Community Services - Lost & Found

Lost Pet Report
Found Pet Report

Activity type: Community Services - Outreach

Community Meeting
Humane Education
Field Trip
Partner Collaboration

Activity type: Community Services - Other

Fencing Assistance
Other Pet Retention Assistance
Rehoming Support
Temporary Housing
Disaster Response

You are able to use the menu on the left to filter by activity types and subtypes.

Trackable Metric Types

We currently support tracking of over 70 metric types. They are broken down into four categories:

Universal (available to use for any service including behavior training, fencing assistance, etc.)
Community Cat Program
Community Services - Medical
Community Services - Pet Food/Supply Pantry

To streamline the data entry experience for your team, we highly recommend reviewing your Field & Community Services Configuration page first and hiding any metric types you won't need to track (by clicking on the eye icon).

When creating or editing an activity in Field & Community Services, you will be able to quickly enter metrics in one of two ways:

Typing in larger numbers directly
Using the plus and minus buttons to increase/decrease by one

When to Create a Case

Normally, just creating an activity for each service request is sufficient. In certain scenarios, however, it will make sense to create a case for a family (think of like a folder) for organizing all their activities into. A few examples:

On a larger team where there is a dedicated case manager who is separate from the departments actually providing certain services (e.g. medical), as the case manager would be assigned the case while the separate activities would be assigned to other teammates (in this scenario, the case manager can easily check in on the status of those activities because they're linked to the case)
To manage recurring participants of a monthly food pantry program (the case would remain open as long as they are active participants)
More complicated, longer-term cases where you anticipate having to check in regularly and provide more support than usual for a family

Learn more about creating a case.

If a case has been created for a family, the easiest way to create a new activity for them is to start from their main case record and using the Quick Add button found in the top right corner as seen here. This will automatically link the two records together.

If you create the activity from the main dashboard instead, you will still be able to link it to the case record manually.

Text Notifications for Staff or Volunteers

Officers, staff members, or volunteers working in your communities can receive real-time text notifications when they are assigned a new case or activity in Field & Community Services.

Learn more about setting up text notifications.

Creating Animal/People Records and Intaking Animals

Field & Community Services and your main Shelterluv account share one database of animal and people records. That means you will be able to search for existing animals or people to associate them with a case/activity, or you can create them through Field & Community Services (while adding the association), which will then make them available in your main Shelterluv account as well. From there, you can process a service intake for the animal from the person record if needed.

Learn more about creating and intaking animal records.