How We’re Investing in Frontline Workers as Social Solutions Continues as Bonterra  

Last year, we shared the exciting news that Social Solutions became Bonterra. Bonterra is the leading social good software company that brings together innovative technology, unmatched expertise, and strategic partnerships from CyberGrants, EveryAction, Network for Good, Social Solutions, and their respective entities, with a purpose to power those who power social impact.   

One of the reasons Social Solutions was selected to join Bonterra is its powerful origin story. Twenty years ago, Steve Butz was working in Baltimore as a social worker. He had a strong passion for helping people but found he spent most of his time buried in paperwork. He knew there had to be a better way, and when he saw technology transforming businesses all around him in the 2000 tech boom, he found a solution. He learned to code, wrote one of the first case management software packages, and started Social Solutions. 

Over the decades, more than 90,000 nonprofit and public agency workers have used Social Solutions technology. Inspired by the mission to provide the industry’s best technology and data solutions to measure and impact outcomes and social change and to enable communities to drive greater impact together, some of those workers even started working at Social Solutions and continue to work at Bonterra to this day! 

While there are exciting changes coming as Social Solutions continues as Bonterra, the frontline workers have been at the center of Social Solutions’ technology since the beginning, and Bonterra is continuing that investment holistically. 

Your work inspires us and, as always, we will continue to listen to you so that we know how to invest in the products you rely on to make a difference in your community. Below, we’ve outlined some questions you may have as Social Solutions continues as Bonterra and how we’re making strides to address your needs through innovative feature updates and product launches. 

Why Should I Be Excited That Social Solutions Joined Bonterra? 

We know that you want to help drive outcomes in your community, and that was the end goal in bringing together Social Solutions and our other brands to become Bonterra. Our goal is to fundamentally change the way social good is delivered by empowering the doers of good to advance their missions through a connective, comprehensive technology ecosystem. That ecosystem is dedicated to achieving unprecedented outcomes that drive sustainable impact across entire communities. Nonprofits, public agencies, corporations, and philanthropists and foundations make up the social good ecosystem we’re investing in.  

That ecosystem will better support you by providing you with a bird’s eye view of best practices provided by other parts of our platform that you may not have considered in the past. We are able to gain a better understanding of what led to outcomes or changes across communities, and we’re going to share that understanding with you in meaningful ways. It’s all in an effort to further power you to power social impact. 

How is Bonterra Investing in its Case Management Products to Better Help Frontline Workers? 

We believe that relationships are how things get done. That’s why we put them at the heart of our solutions. Across our case management products, we continue to seek your feedback on how we can make our technology stronger and what tools we can build to make your life easier. That commitment is directly reflected in our 2023 case management roadmap we unveiled in February. We are making many improvements aimed at delivering on your most-requested key features. 

Recently, we delivered a highly anticipated feature: Time-Based Alerts! The latest evolution of our Rules & Alerts feature, Time-Based Alerts allows our Apricot 360 customers to tap into the power of automation by scheduling alert triggers for events bound in time. This means organizations are now able to schedule alerts to notify staff about key deadlines, follow-ups, and other time-based milestones, freeing up even more time in a worker’s day.    

Another highly requested feature we’re rolling out this year is Inventory | Bed Management, a game changer for our customers in the human services sector. We heard from feedback that our organizations need to better track their inventory, particularly bed inventory, in Apricot. If a participant comes to them for help, organizations need to be able to see what is available for that individual or family in real time. These organizations also need to be able to immediately schedule people for check-in and, if needed, schedule check-ins over time, as well. This is something we’ve been building toward for a long time, and we’re excited to open this feature up to some early testers this year to provide feedback as we look to build out the longer-term functionality within the tool. 

This year, we are completely rebuilding our Penelope Billing service from the ground up. We are making improvements to this service so that it can stand up to the performance needs of our larger Penelope customers who are using Penelope Billing today. Our Penelope customers will see more accurate calculations and better performance for larger invoices.   

For our ETO customers, we have exciting upgrades that have already rolled out or are coming, which will help with reporting, adding attachments, and the general user experience. We’ll dive into that in the next section. 

Moving forward, we will continue to keep an open line of communication with you so we can intentionally tweak our solutions and build additional features that empower you to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time serving your participants and driving outcomes in your community. And we sincerely hope that our product roadmap makes good on that promise to you. 

How Will Social Solutions’ Modernization Upgrades Create Efficiencies in Workflows? 

Strengthening the foundations of our case management products is a key focus of ours this year. As our industry and technology continue to evolve, we have been focused on ensuring we provide the best possible platform that is modern and drives efficiency. This year, we are doing that with several upgrades. 

We have made general reporting enhancements this year to better enable you to gain insights and show your program’s impact while setting you up for the long-term visibility we know you will need as you continue to grow. Specifically, we brought the latest Results Reporting Engine Upgrade to our ETO customers by upgrading our Business Objects service to the newest version (4.3 SP02). That brought our customers a refreshed interface and several features and fixes we know they’ve been looking forward to. That includes increasing the stability of Webi Processors and enabling Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) functionality for scheduling. 

We wanted to give you time back and modernize our system by adding attachments to our Batch Upload process. After we rolled out attachments in Batch Upload, your team can now spend less time performing repetitive tasks and more time driving your mission forward. Previously, if our customers wanted to add an attachment to a touchpoint, they had to manually go into their instance, find that area within ETO, and add each attachment one at a time. That took a lot of time, especially for our more complex customers who want to be able to do this more effectively across many different touchpoints within the system. Adding attachments to individual touchpoints is now a breeze with attachments in Batch Upload.   

We are also working to improve navigation for our ETO customers to better streamline their user experience with our product. 

Another way we’re making our foundation better is by introducing Smart Fields | Smart List, a feature we just released to elevate our product’s performance and help our Apricot Core and 360 customers who have complex forms and assessments. When dealing with forms and assessments, our customers want a list of selectable information that came from another form within their site, as opposed to static information. The dynamic nature of Smart Fields | Smart List is bringing efficiency to organizations that want to better streamline and scale their data entry. 

Discover Why We’re Better Together 

We know what made each of our case management products successful before becoming Bonterra, and we’re continuing to invest in the areas that made them successful. We also know that we came together for a reason: to make more social impact happen, together. To learn more about how Bonterra is working to empower stakeholders across the social good ecosystem with innovative technology, unmatched expertise, and strategic partnerships, read Bonterra’s latest blog. We are better together through collaboration and innovation, and we’re so excited to continue this journey with you.