With the flexibility of iCarol, you have the tools to collect data in multiple ways to best meet your desired process flows and to also support your reporting needs. As in all reporting, there are four main items to consider to ensure data collected on your submitted contact reports supports outcome requirements:
- What do you need to report?
- What data is needed to support that report?
- Are you collecting that data now, or do you need to start collecting it?
- How is the data being collected or going to be collected so that you can repeatedly retrieve it to meet your reporting needs?
Determining the number of unduplicated people that contact your services within a given time-period can be accomplished in many ways. This document describes three processes, depending on how you record people that contact you in iCarol. There are other possibilities that what is described here, based on your organization’s individual needs. You can also use the iCarol Community to ask questions of other iCarol users for additional ideas and inspiration.
People are documented in iCarol using Profiles or anonymously on contact reports. You can collect identifying data on contact reports, such as the contact’s name, but unless you create a Profile, iCarol will not track that person as a unique individual and they are considered an anonymous person. Understanding this will help you to determine the process that will best meet your needs for reporting unduplicated people that contact your organization or program.
To begin, answer the first two questions posed above and then talk about the processes you are following.
What do you need to report?
Unduplicated people to your organization or program during a specific reporting period. Said another way, the count of people that at least one contact report was submitted on behalf of, during a specified time period.
What data is needed to support the report?
A record of each person that contacted your organization or program that includes the date of the contact and enough identifying information on the contact report to connect any other contact reports that may have been submitted from previous contacts by that person.
Each contact report submitted is either manually connected to an existing Profile or iCarol creates a new Profile record for you if one is not selected when you submit the contact report. You do not record in iCarol anonymous people or if you do, then these people are not ones that you need to include when reporting unduplicated people.
This process is suggested if you have one or more reporting periods that you may need to report unduplicated people to your organization or program for and identifying each person is important for your organization or program.
Steps to generate report:
- Log into iCarol
- Click Admin Tools in the left-hand menu
- Click the Tools tab
- Click ‘Extract all of your data’
- In the “Request exports within date ranges” box, under “Call Reports” select
- The date ranges your need data for the reporting period
- The contact reports that includes the data needed to support your report
- Click “Export Call reports per options above” button
- You will receive an email when your export is ready, if you have notifications enabled in your vols-staff profile
- When you receive this notification, return to this page in your iCarol system to download your export
- If you do not have notifications enabled, check this page periodically to see if your export is ready for download
- Click the link in the Queued or ready for download box to download your export to your computer
- Each export contains several CSV files. The CSV file that contains the data to support this report has the name ‘CallReports’ as part of its name. Open this CSV file by double clicking the file name.
- Once you open the CSV file that you wish to work with, and prepare the file to make it easier to work with:
- Delete the first two rows of data. This is just header data to identify the report
- Click ‘Save As…’ to save the file as an Excel document so that any formatting changes you make are saved for further analysis if needed
- Click in the cell A1 then Click ‘Insert’ in the top menu and click ‘Table’ to change the format of the data in your Excel worksheet. This will allow easier analysis of the data. Search Overview of Excel tables in your Microsoft Help box for more information and benefits of working using a Table in excel.
- Filter your data to display only those contact records that were submitted during the desired time frame.
- If you have the need to do further reporting on the export, copy the results to another sheet in your Excel workbook.
- Select all of the data in the Excel worksheet
- Click ‘Data’ in the top menu and click ‘Remove Duplicates’
- In the pop-up box, ensure the ‘My data has headers’ is selected
- Select only the ‘CallerNum’ column to indicate that this is the column that has duplicates. The CallerNum column contains the unique number assigned to each of your Profiles.
- If you do record anonymous people in iCarol, meaning you may add their name to a contact report, but you do not create a Profile for them, then the data you will see in the CallerNum column is ‘-1’
- If you do record anonymous people, you will need to decide to omit these from your report or to include them based on your reporting needs. Most times, we have seen that they would be omitted for this Process, with an explanation of how many contacts were recorded (or total number of submitted contact reports) by anonymous people. See Process 2 if you record anonymous people and need to report in this way.
- Click ok. The result will be the number of unduplicated people that a contact report was submitted for during the time period.
- To save the data you used to create your report, click ok on the pop-up box and save your Excel workbook.
You may or may not add the person’s name to a contact form, and you may or may not create a Profile for them. Each person that contacts you self-identifies (by your vols-staff asking appropriate questions) if they have contacted you previously. Their answers are recorded by the vols-staff on the associated contact form by choosing from a custom question.
This process is suggested if you have one or more reporting periods that you may need to report unduplicated people that contact your organization or program and you prefer to keep contacts to your organization anonymous.
Steps to generate report:
- Log into iCarol
- This report can be run in the Statistics section of iCarol or by using an export of your data. The steps below describe how to generate these reports using the Statistics section of iCarol.
- Click Statistics in the left-hand menu
- Click Time Frame under Apply Filters and select the time frame for your report
- Click Update Chart
- Add Call Content filters, and when finished, click Update chart
- Click Update Chart
- The results will be the total unduplicated people that contacted your organization or program during the month
Process 3: You of course, can choose to do a combination of Process 1 and Process 2.
In this situation, you will have the ability to report unduplicated contacts by known people, those you create a Profile for, and unduplicated contacts by anonymous people, those you do NOT create a Profile for, that self-identify that it is their first contact to the program during a specified time period. Multiple reporting periods also work with this process depending on the custom questions you add to your contact forms. Follow the steps described in Process 1 to generate the number of unduplicated people that you create a Profile for. Follow the steps described in Process 2 to generate the number of unduplicated people that are anonymous. Add the numbers together for the total number of unduplicated people.