Penelope

Penelope by Social Solutions is our case management system. We use it for case notes, for calendars, and even for reporting incidents and hazards, or any change in clients' profiles. It lets us interact with medical, legal, behavioral, and other reports, and keeps the team updated, always promoting confidentiality. Penelope by Social Solutions is structured in an understandable way, letting us set our daily tasks as a to-do list in the handover.

Even if Penelope by Social Solutions is useful for case noting and any other file management, coordination and reports, it is not user-friendly. It does not let you delete your mistakes easily, it does not let you go back, and all the other issues mentioned, which are minor, added too much for a system that is supposed to support your work. However, some of the characteristics have been chosen by the system administrator and are not Penelope by Social Solutions's fault.

Penelope is used in our organization to replace all daily documentation, scheduling and booking, and intake management of participants in our programs. We have approximately 80 participants and 30 staff with 7 departments and it allows us to easily manage staffing ratios, attendance, and programming at three separate locations. Penelope allows us to easily track data on individuals or as a group and generate reports to send to our funders, etc. It allows us to track progress and regression for individuals which is essential to our mission as an organization. Penelope provides us with an easily accessible bluebook of all of our contacts and resources. It is a one-stop-shop for all of our documentation needs. Penelope offers a direct connection to staff individually or in groups through a messaging system within the program. Staff can easily log in and see any relevant information for the day. It saves us so much time as an organization and avoids a lot of running around and daily meetings that we had in the past. Before Penelope, finding participant reports, data, and information meant time spent searching through files in different departments and talking to multiple staff to track down what we were looking for.

Penelope would be ideal for a clinic setting or an organization providing individual or group support to many individuals and from multiple staff members. It is perfect for the service field to track bookings and schedules. It allows for easy reporting and tracking changes for an individual. As a non-profit service agency, it is the perfect database for us, from individual and group service to informal and anonymous services, the features allow for easy tracking of data.

Manage data and track client services.

Industry specific reports designed to meet the requirements of our specific funding entity. Addition of tracking tools to better understand our clients and measure marketing tools.

We are a small-midrange size non-profit organization that uses Penelope for our client database. We use it for 1:1 in-home caseloads, group-based parent education, and group-based child and youth programming. Penelope is a user-friendly system that provides clarity, ease, and simple processes for our frontline staff to use the system in a clear and efficient way.

Penelope is well designed for casework. We find it is well suited for staff who have caseloads of families or individuals and are doing one-to-one work with them. I find that Penelope is not as well suited for registered programming in a group fashion. The reporting for groups is almost non-existent and the Groups List page is unwieldy and difficult to navigate efficiently.

We switched to using the Penelope database a few years ago because we realized our current platform was ineffective at tracking and producing needed outcome metrics. We needed a system that had the capability to track a network of client relationships, allowed for the exchange of multiple initiatives, and had tools for team members to work collaboratively on cases. Our organization helps families create action plans to accomplish their goals. We believe strongly in the power of community and finding solutions through generating informal supports. This system is designed to understand and capture the dynamic of how family members, community stakeholders, and professional resources work together to empower wellbeing. Penelope's default platform provided customization that allowed the database to align with our service model, specific strategies, and language. Penelope's form and reports are flexible enough to meet the requests and reporting demands of both foundation and government funders.

Penelope is well suited for social service case management operations. It also looks at whole families as a unit but realizes each member has different needs and brings something unique to the solution. It manages client relationships and resources well. If you need to monitor service units, time with clients, and interventions, it has various tools for this. I think the system is too complex for donor management and not needed for client interactions that are one and done.

We use Penelope as our main case management system. It addresses our need to go paperless and have one central system for all of our case notes. It also allows us to work from home or in the office and always be able to update our calendars. We use this system for every case that we see.

We have used some terrible software in the past. Penelope is a breath of fresh air. The counselors can easily input their notes and reschedule a client. They don't leave sections blank because the system tells them what is missing. The "are you sure" reminders are a nice feature just double checking things for you. We have not found a scenario where it is less appropriate to use Penelope.

We are a nonprofit agency that case manages Families in the community while we work to help them achieve goals and solve problems. We use Penelope as our case management system. We use Penelope for everything in our agency. It is where we store our data, write case plans, schedule meetings, run reports, and collect resources. Penelope was a serious upgrade from the previous Susy that we were using. It is very detailed and not overwhelming.

We looked at lots of systems before we signed on with Penelope. For the price, we didn’t find anything better. Overall we have been very happy with our choice to use Penelope for our case management system. Our staff has been happy with it as well. I would recommend this product.

Client database, client data, program data.

[In my experience] I find that information gets lost or else there are too many places where it can be stored. For a client, you can store their pregnancy information in their individual file or case file, or service file.

We use it as a case management tool for digital and remote service delivery.

Although I like some of the functionality of the program, it is archaic in development, lacks inclusion for persons with a disability. Lip service has been paid for addressing AODA accessibility rules and access. Product is exclusionary towards persons with a disability. It is designed for an American medical model and false promises have been made. No one is addressing Canadian concerns about default information collection that is against our privacy legislation and compliance with our accessibility legislation both federal and provincial. I would not recommend it to any service provider based on the lack of accessibility.

We use this product to track clients in our organization and their participation in programs and the services they access through us. We use the program to track case notes for clients, counseling sessions, and check-ins. We also use the product to track the practical supports that clients receive from us so that we have a better idea of who has received what from our organization.

I think Penelope is appropriate for tracking appointments and interactions with clients. However, it can be difficult if we are not able to see our appointments on a larger scale (i.e. a calendar). If we were offered a calendar, it would help to track our days with various appointments with clients. It would be nice to have an overview to see which clients we are seeing more of and which clients we aren't seeing as much. I think it's easy to track information about clients, but sometimes accessing this information can be difficult once it's been input. We have intake forms that we fill out with clients and it can be difficult to recover these attachments if you don't know exactly where to look in their "Case".