Intersections 2018: Hands-On Training and Skill Building

This month our organization, Grounded Solutions Network, held its annual Intersections conference in Pittsburgh, PA from October 1-4. This conference brought together policy makers, residents, community land trusts, Habitat for Humanity affiliates and cities from across the country to learn and speak about long-term affordable housing.

Our HomeKeeper team was busy at the conference – here are a few highlights:

HomeKeeper Basics and Beyond Training Institute

Institute training attendees worked with staff and also in small groups to learn new skills.

Staff shared some of the many ways you can extend your use of HomeKeeper.

Every year at our conference, we host a full-day in-person training for our current user organizations, so staff can brush up on how to input program data into HomeKeeper as well learn new tips and tricks for using our app and Salesforce. This year, we had over 20 users in attendance and we focused on data entry flow and specific tasks highlighted by our user groups. We love getting the chance to work with users in person and seeing users share their customizations and tips.

Training Institute on Using Data for Program Improvement and Advocacy

Session participants share their most compelling ideas for stories based on data.

HomeKeeper staff members, Tiffany Eng and Cheryl Curry, led an interactive session to help organizations think about how they are telling their impact stories. More often than not, organizations communicate impact by sharing outputs, such as number of homes built or families served, but fall short of demonstrating the human impact. This session helped organizations to create data-driven narratives to measure outcomes and influence decision-makers. Attendees of the session were able to create and present impact stories with examples of what data they would use to back up the narrative and also drew out what the impact chart would look like once created.

Meeting users (and potential users) at our table

Our favorite part of Intersections each year is to meet with our current users in person. We often speak with our users via email and webinar and it’s always nice to have a face to face conversation with users. Intersections also gives us the change to provide in-person one-on-one assistance to numerous HomeKeeper users.

We had an exhibitor booth at the conference to show potential users the benefits of HomeKeeper, provide quick demos of the program and highlight HomeKeeper feature. Adding more HomeKeeper users allows us to keep overall pricing down for all of our user organizations.

We look forward to the next Intersections!