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Penelope

Score6.7 out of 10

35 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Penelope?

Bonterra’s Penelope is a configurable and secure case management system designed to help social good organizations save time for their staff, improve data quality and reporting, and better serve and connect with their participants.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about Penelope.
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Not very happy

Andres Buritica
Support Worker in Professional Services at Junction Australia (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Integrates different systems
  • Keeps confidentiality
  • Helps you to identify who posted what
  • Collects information linked among families

Cons

  • The plus, ok, or accept buttons are not consistent. It is easy to forget it at the beginning.
  • Sometimes is unstable and it makes you lose all the work you did not save.
  • It does not have a "memory" of your previous answers, which is annoying for daily tasks.

Return on Investment

  • Friendly user system: not tons of reading, not hundreds of boxes to tick

Ideal for non-profit and community service agencies!

Incentivized
Shaeleen PowerView profile
Support Services Coordinator at Haley Street Adult Services Centre (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Provides time-saving features by automatically compiling data to an individual file from multiple areas.
  • Allows staff to be updated on important information in real time.
  • Provides a user-friendly experience and ease of access for staff with all levels of technical experience.

Cons

  • Accessibility for anyone with visual impairment.
  • Ability to adjust font size when printing.
  • Ability to send files as email from the program.

Return on Investment

  • Improved data quality providing much needed consistency.
  • Less management intervention because of the accountability for staff to follow through with tasks and reports.
  • Greater efficiency and better use of staff time due to fast data tracking.

Other Software Used

LinkedIn Jobs, Facebook Business Manager (formerly Pages Manager)

Usability

Database makes complex relationships simple to navigate

Incentivized
Rich NicholsView profile
Executive Diector in Corporate at United Advocacy Group (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Organization a network of relationships.
  • Integrating various projects.
  • Customized reporting.

Cons

  • Increased standardized reports and filter features.
  • Better training on the ODBC.
  • Mac support.
  • Better ability to report on individuals within the family.

Return on Investment

  • Improve data collection, quality and reporting.
  • Allows staff the space to capture all aspects of case.
  • Help keeps staff accountable to expected processes.
  • Brings uniformity of mission with various initiates.

Alternatives Considered

CiviCore, A Public Benefit Corporation, Salsa CRM, AwsQuality Salesforce Services, athenaClinicals, WordPress and Apricot by Social Solutions

Mixed Knowledge, Mixed Reviews

Incentivized
Karen McKinney
Program Manager at York Region Rose of Sharon SErvices for Young Moms (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Penelope [by Social Solutions] as our client data base, client information, clinical counselling notes, attendance tracker for individual and group program sessions,accumulating data for reports

Pros

  • is a powerful system that offers a lot
  • easy access to pulling the reports
  • Trigger warnings to share with and between manager and employee

Cons

  • There is more than we can use on this system
  • Some learners watch by video and others need to have a verbal walkthrough so providing a training or support package that is reasonable to a non-for-profit of 18 staff members and really only 12 using the Penelope by Social solutions system

Return on Investment

  • its a great system for pulling data if all staff use the system appropriately
  • essential for our data pulling and reporting

Might not be best for a small private pay company.

Incentivized
Christy Holland
Executive Director in Corporate at PLAN of PA (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to document services and invoice for social services and financial support we offer to individuals living with a mental illness or disability.

Pros

  • coding for different engagements rendering services and costs
  • storing demographic information
  • storing collateral contacts
  • assigning workers to people served

Cons

  • we are a private pay company - so we need invoices that make sense to private payers not managed care company's. Penelope by Social Solutions has been exceedingly difficult with this goal.
  • Too many logins our admin also has cases she /he supports so that's two log-ins right there. Then there are log-ins for tickets, online training sites for basic Penelope by Social Solutions functionality, sandbox instances, and training databases mocked up like our system. We are constantly stymied by this as it feels impossible to track.
  • Also, there are way too many contacts that "handle" our organization - we are never contacting the right person for whatever issue we are experiencing.

Return on Investment

  • Honestly, [I feel like] Penelope [by Social Solutions] makes our time less efficient. We are constantly getting bogged down in the critique I've already mentioned.
  • We are hopeful that the takeover by social solutions will improve things.

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