This month our organization, Grounded Solutions Network, held its annual Intersections conference in Oakland from October 9-12. 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 attended the conference and had a few highlights from the conference:
1. HomeKeeper training day and user meeting
The Monday of the conference, we held an 8-hour HomeKeeper training with current and prospective users. This training included the basics of how to enter homeownership files as well as some more advanced training on how to create reports, workflows and dashboards. At the training, we also debuted our newest release of HomeKeeper (version 2.1) and showcased our new group session and housing counseling features. At the end of the training, we held our annual User meeting to update users on what the HomeKeeper team has been working on the past year.
We distributed HomeKeeper mousepads at our training, printed with reminders of how to access our Support Forum. For programs that didn’t attend the Intersections conference, keep an eye on your
mail!
2. Session on Using Data to Demonstrate Impact Beyond Outputs
Our very own HomeKeeper Director, Tiffany Eng, and HomeKeeper Super User from Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco, Lauren Shaughnessy, provided a data session at the conference. The session focused on how organizations can communicate their local impact with data, focusing not only on program outputs, but also on the human impact of working with homeownership families. This session discussed strategies to craft data-driven narratives to measure outcomes and influence decision-makers.
3. Meeting with Users and doing live demos
At Intersections this year, we ran into several HomeKeeper users, and provided in-person demos to groups looking at HomeKeeper.
We always love getting to meet with our current users in person to talk about their user stories, but also to troubleshoot any questions their organizations have about HomeKeeper.
We do have HomeKeeperĀ events and trainings each year at our Annual Intersections conference, so be sure to check us out at Intersections 2018 in Pittsburgh the first week of October!
