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Refuge for Women is a faith-based nonprofit that provides care for women who have escaped human trafficking or sexual exploitation. It opened its first home in 2010 and now serves women in eleven homes across five metropolitan areas: Chicago, Kentucky, Las Vegas, North Texas and the Texas Gulf Coast.
Nikki Instone, Ph.D., is the organization’s Vice President of Programs. She works fully remote, away from the homes she supports, and decides what the organization tracks in Sumac. She also trains the frontline staff who enter that information and pulls the reports that go to funders and to leadership.
Most of that has run smoothly. The exceptions were a few reporting tasks where she wasn’t sure of the best way to get them done in Sumac, so she had built workarounds of her own in the meantime.
Reporting requirements
Refuge for Women reports against VOCA grant requirements, which means accounting for who the organization served, where, and for how long. With eleven homes and several programs, Instone assembles those numbers out of records created by staff across five regions.
She sets the system up for that work: deciding which fields the homes capture, keeping their meaning consistent from Chicago to North Texas, and training the staff who fill them in. The shelter module holds each stay; the contact record holds the client information attached to it.
Cross-module reporting
The two sit in different places, and Instone wasn’t sure how to bring them together in one report. Running a report from the shelter module returned the stays but not the fields on the linked contact records.
So she ran it twice, once for shelter data and once for contact data, then matched the two by hand in a spreadsheet every time a funder report came due. She called that “a total hassle.”
On a call with Sumac’s product team, she learned a simpler way to do it. In Quick Count, the Client ID field carries an expansion arrow. Clicking it opens every field on the linked contact record, so shelter data and client data come out of one report. The same expansion works in Export and in column views.
When she saw it, Instone said: “Well, then I don’t have any problems with SUMAC if I can do that — it’s a 10 now!”
“That was my only struggle,” she said. “Everything else has been fine.”
Saved reports and search groups
The same call turned up easier ways to handle two other parts of her monthly routine.
She had been rebuilding the same searches from scratch each month. Quick Count and Outcome Reports both have a Save Report Settings button, so a report can be set up once and reused. A saved report joins the reports list, where it can be starred for quick access.
Her North Texas region is three separate homes, so every monthly regional report started with an OR chain of six or more search entries to gather them. Search Builder replaces that with a saved North Texas group that can be applied to any search as a single criterion. Instone is setting those groups up now, along with ones for funder eligibility and for current residents in a given month.
The same groups answer a question she had been asking a different way. She wanted counts of therapy sessions and medical appointments for the women staying at particular homes. Case notes are filed under the client rather than under a shelter record, so building the group first and then searching case notes within it gets her the number. She is also working through Outcome Reports, where the field in the outer position sets the primary grouping and the inner one breaks it down.
Support
Much of the configuration behind this was done with Judith, Instone’s contact on the Sumac customer success team, who has been involved since setup. Instone calls her “amazing.”
Most of the other items on Instone’s list were similar: tasks Sumac could already handle, where the open question was the best way to set them up for an organization with eleven homes.
