Healthier Kids Foundation

Healthier Kids Foundation is bringing preventative healthcare and education to children across Santa Clara County in California. Working with local schools, the Foundation steps in to provide children with holistic dental, vision, and health screenings and in 2018 screened 65,000 children. With the help of Salesforce, the Foundation can manage every single child’s health record in a single system – and share impact results back to funders supporting this critical work.

In the beginning, the Foundation was focused on ensuring every child in Santa Clara County had health insurance. However, with 99% of the county’s kids covered by insurance, the organization recognized that the county’s needs were broader than healthcare coverage. In many schools, a shortage of school nurses meant regular health screenings weren’t keeping up with the schedule. Healthier Kids Foundation, a spinoff of Healthier Kids, stepped in to fill the void with scheduled screenings, providing connections to health services and health education for children and parents.

With this move, the need for a better case management system became clear. The Foundation needed a database to hold and manage a tremendous amount of data – up to 25 data points for each of the thousands of children screened – but needed it to be easy to use off the shelf without a lot of programming.

At the same time, the Foundation’s fundraising needs were evolving. Funding support had grown from a small, dedicated group of contributors to a much larger pool and the Foundation’s major fundraising event each fall had become more challenging. After a couple of years wading through an older fundraising solution that wasn’t able to scale with them, the Foundation decided to seek out a better option. Healthier Kids Foundation was able to update their technology strategy with the help of implementation partner Presence Product Group. 

The Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud provided a single and streamlined solution for both the Foundation’s case management and fundraising needs.

Now, the Foundation can easily create and manage a case for every child it screens within Salesforce. 

• Schools send rosters to the Foundation ahead of screenings so that background information is imported into the records by the time the child sits down in front of a doctor. 
• When kids need follow-up with additional services, Foundation staff use the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud to contact parents, manage referrals, help with insurance, and follow up until the child receives treatment. 
• Apps on the AppExchange that directly integrate with Salesforce help keep everything easily centralized: Apsona uploads details, diagnoses, and follow up needs from the health screenings straight into the pre-populated case records. 
• Using SMS Magic, staff can send SMS messages to parents directly from case records and automatically import any responses back into the case. 

Having all of the Foundation’s program and funder information on a single platform has made reporting easier. 

“One of the things that’s really important is we can provide the results of our work to our funders very easily. Having one platform where funders who donated money are also able to see results of their funding in a timely fashion is really important,” remarks Mark Stark, Systems Administrator at the Foundation. 

With Report Builder, the Foundation delivers automated reports to schools via an FTP server, which provides higher security for sensitive information included in student records. At the same time, staff can format reports for individuals inside the information, so that case managers, for example, receive daily, automated reports on open cases.

The Foundation is saving a tremendous amount of time and manpower with Salesforce. Preset filters and centralized information help streamline the roughly 3,000 reports and 300 dashboards staff prepare to fulfill reporting requirements.

According to Stark,
“I was able to do all 3,000 reports by myself in a few days.”

Keeping everything on a single platform also helps keep headcount lower. If the Foundation had one system for case management and a separate one for fundraising, the Foundation would need two full time people to manage both systems. Instead, Stark is able to manage Salesforce by himself.

Staff involved in fundraising are also seeing the benefits. Stark estimated that the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud saved staff two months worth of work heading into and during the annual fundraiser. It’s also helping staff connect with the Foundation’s supporters faster: “For our donors, it would sometimes take them a month to get an acknowledgement letter for what they donated or what they purchased. And now they get it the day of the event. We push a couple buttons and they get an email with everything they need for tax purposes,” remarks Stark.

Healthier Kids Foundation prides itself in providing direct services to children and families where they already are—in their neighborhoods and schools. With COVID-19 resulting in the closure of non-essential operations, Healthier Kids Foundation has had to place many primary program activities on hold and pivot to the needs of the community.

As an agency that uses high tech to maximize their work, Healthier Kids Foundation has utilized technology to enable them to take several steps to continue to serve the critical needs of their clients during the pandemic.
Healthier Kids Foundation has leveraged their case management team to assist families in safely accessing general support services during this time of crisis:

• Over 6,355 unique individuals asked for help with employment, housing, financial assistance, and food.
• They are supporting young families by providing and managing the inventory of essential supplies, running a 1-877 number to help enrollment of children in local child care, and by developing a pilot mental health screening/case management effort for 5th graders.
• Healthier Kids is also utilizing their data skills and knowledge of Customer Relationship Management systems to help 400 Home Care Providers receive needed PPE and funds to help the sites open again and allow small pods of children to be cared for.

The Foundation is planning to use the health data it collects for big change. The Foundation is working with the County’s Office of Education to build a database that paints a fuller picture of children’s lives. If a child is missing from school or having challenges in class, the Foundation’s health data can help illuminate if it’s because the child can’t see the board and needs glasses or stays home with dental problems.

Together, Healthier Kids Foundation and Santa Clara County educators are building a comprehensive view of children’s health from preschool through high school. By breaking down information silos, but making sure that all of its students’ data is secure, policymakers and administrators can better understand their students’ needs. With these insights, policymakers can put more resources to where the kids in Santa Clara County need them most. Healthier Kids Foundation is working through local schools to make sure that every child in the county gets the health care they need, giving every child a fair chance.