Social Program Management in Public Sector

Programs and Benefits

Programs and benefits are the cornerstone of Social Program Management. Define the high-level programs that your agency provides to support the social, physical, and emotional well-being of your constituents. For example, create programs for job readiness, youth development, refugee settlement, housing services, or child welfare. For each program, create related benefits. Benefits are the specific services, such as counseling sessions, workshops, and training courses, that support the program’s mandate. Enroll eligible constituents in programs and assign them benefits to help them reach specific goals and achieve positive outcomes.

For more information, see Program Management.

Case Referral Intake

A parent loses a job. A family gets evicted. A spouse dies. For many people, a number of life events trigger their need for social support programs and benefits.

With Case Referral Intake, intake agents can quickly and easily screen referral requests from other public sector agencies or from provider or partner organizations and create a case. Case managers prioritize cases and hand off the cases to caseworkers for assessment. Depending on the findings from the assessment, caseworkers assign the appropriate benefits to individuals.

Use Case Referral Intake to:

• Screen unemployed individuals for job training programs
• Identify unhoused adults who need shelter or temporary housing
• Connect new parents with playgroups and nutrition education programs
• Match older adults with meal delivery and transportation services

For more information, see Case Referral Intake.

Complaint Management and Incident Tracking

Support vulnerable members of your community by using guided flows and dynamic assessments to respond to reports of health, safety, and well-being concerns.

Constituents can file complaints online when they have concerns about someone in their community. Legally mandated reporters who are responsible for identifying concerns in a specific environment, such as primary school teachers, can also file complaints online. Intake agents can capture complaints on the phone or at the agency office. In all scenarios, the complaint intake guided flow quickly captures critical details, such as the people involved, their role, and the nature of the issue.

When caseworkers review the complaint, they can conduct a dynamic assessment into the incident or concern. They evaluate the allegations and the complaint severity, and determine follow-up actions.

If necessary, after screening, the complaint reviewer can create an investigative case to inquire further, or a standard case to provide support, care plans, and benefits to improve the constituents’ circumstances.

Use Complaint Management and Incident Tracking to respond when:

• A teacher or coach reports a child welfare concern
• A resident realizes that they haven’t seen their elderly neighbor for a few days
• Someone repeatedly hears loud and aggressive arguing through their apartment wall
• A dog walker sees a disheveled person sitting alone on a park bench every day

For more information, see Complaint Management and Incident Tracking and Dynamic Assessments in Public Sector.

Care Plans

Caseworkers use care plans to actually deliver social program benefits to their clients. Based on an intake officer’s screening and the caseworker or other investigator’s findings in a dynamic assessment, caseworkers create a personalized care plan to help individuals get the support services and benefits that they need. Care plans include comprehensive long-term or intermediary goals and concrete action plans to help the client achieve long-term positive outcomes. Create care plans from templates that provide a standardized approach based on certain circumstances.

Caseworkers use the care plan to enroll clients in programs and benefits that alleviate hardship.

Use care plans to:

• Enroll unemployed individuals in job training programs
• Assign unhoused adults to shelters or transitional housing
• Enroll new parents in playgroups and nutrition education programs
• Assign individuals to drug and alcohol treatment
• Sign up older adults for meal delivery and transportation services, and enroll them in afternoon activity programs

For more information, see Care Plans for Program and Case Management.

Child Welfare: Social Program Management in Action

Here’s how the pieces of Social Program Management come together to support safe and healthy families.

Program

Create a program named Child Welfare, and enter Make sure that children have safe, permanent homes and promote the well-being of children and families as the summary.

Goal Definitions

Create a hierarchy of goal definitions for achieving a unified family environment that’s financially stable and physically and emotionally safe for everyone.

For the first goal definition, select Top Goal as the type. Name it Unified Household, and enter Reunite the family within six months as the description.

Create two other goal definitions with Intermediate Goal as the type. Name one Emotional Safety and name the other Financial Stability.

Benefits and Benefit Types

Create a benefit type named Parenting with Love. Select Public Sector as the process type, Service as the type, and Child Welfare as the category.

Note For information on how to create Category picklist values, see Add or Edit Picklist Values.

After you create the benefit type, create a benefit named Family Counseling, and another benefit named Positive Parenting Workshop. For both benefits, use these values:

• Parenting with Love as the benefit type
• Child Welfare as the program
• Unified Household as the goal definition

Benefit Schedules and Sessions

Define occurrences for your benefits. For example, create a benefit schedule for family counseling that consists of eight 50-minute sessions (Default Benefit Quantity is 8), specifying when the first session starts and ends. Then, create the remaining seven benefit sessions.

Create a benefit schedule for the positive parenting workshop that consists of one 8-hour session: the Default Benefit Quantity is 1, and the first session start and end times are 8 hours apart.

Care Plan Template

Create a care plan template named Child-Friendly Household. Use the Care Plan Template Benefit and Care Plan Template Goal related lists to add your child welfare benefits and goals to the template.

After you configure the programs, benefits, goals, and care plan templates, you’re ready to respond when someone contacts your agency with a concern, or when another agency contacts you for a referral.

For example, a teacher calls to report that a student falls asleep in class every morning and has stopped bringing lunch from home. Here’s the workflow.

• The intake officer uses the complaint intake guided flow to collect information from the teacher and to create a case.
• The caseworker follows up by conducting a dynamic assessment to learn what’s going on at the child’s home.
• The caseworker creates a care plan from the Child-Friendly Household template for the family.
• The caseworker assigns the child welfare goals and benefits to the case participants, and enrolls them in the child welfare program.
• Caseworkers edit the care plan to add or remove benefits and goals as appropriate for the family’s unique situation.