A Senior Retreat Shares Major System Update Thanks to a CFMC Capacity Grant

CFMC offers three types of grants, one for nonprofit organization capacity. These grants specifically help organizations become more efficient and effective. In a nutshell, these grants help an organization do the work they are already doing. Grant funding is considered for materials, equipment, technology, transportation expenses, training costs, and expenditures that provide for growing needs. These grants are not however for ongoing operating support.

A Senior Retreat was grateful to receive a Capacity Grant from the Community Foundation of Morgan County to purchase and put in place a visitor management system called Greetly. The previous manual method was time-consuming, and many of our senior clients with dementia didn’t understand the process, resulting in a less favorable entry to our center.

Utilizing the Greetly system for checking in/out each day has created more time for the staff to spend with the clients versus documenting all results with the pen-to-paper process previously used. It has helped with the accuracy of billing and payroll while minimizing the time spent entering the data each month. Logging the daily COVID screening questions and daily temperatures of each client, visitor, and staff has been helpful in data readily available for local health department personnel, etc.

Often, the clients don’t understand the COVID questions correctly, and the families answer for them, or they cannot write any longer. Unfortunately, the current pen-to-paper process creates a negative experience that can poorly affect the seniors’ mental health and upset the day’s programming upon arrival.

We have also learned that, with Greetly, we can document the transports of our clients to and from our program. Through our mobile devices, we can easily simplify this process, remove another manual system, and create a more pleasant experience for our Friends.

Creating a more positive first impression each day for the client to ensure the best possible outcome for their mental health when dealing with dementia or physical challenges of aging is incredibly important to us. Success will be measured with the efficiency of the Greetly system in minimizing the time a client and their families have with the sign-in/out process each visit.  This will allow the client to begin programming and directly engage with peers and activities upon arrival.

CFMC’s Capacity Grants are available at the beginning of each year as our budget allows.  Please read more information about Capacity Grants, including our Grant Guidelines document, here: https://cfmconline.org/capacity-grants/.

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