Featherfist helps the homeless

"ProntoForms is helping us take people off the street."
Stacey Anewishki
Chief Program Officer
- Move homeless clients into housing as quickly as possible
- Streamline collection of crucial client data
- Reduce delays in data entrys and submission duties
- 50% less time required to place clients into housing
- Increased efficiency and reduced paper
- Real-time form submission eliminates data entry lags
The Challenge
Featherfist is a not-for-profit social services agency on the south side of Chicago with 62 employees that provides supportive and housing services to the homeless.
Prior to placing a client in a housing unit, the agency has to collect information on that client and conduct property inspections.
"If we met someone on the street, we'd have to sit on the street corner and do all that paperwork by hand," says Stacey Anewishki, chief program officer. The forms would then have to be returned to the main office for data entry. Project manager Kari Williams describes a day in her life before ProntoForms as being inundated with paper, which lead to substantial lags in data entry. "It was very slow, very time-consuming, very tedious because every piece of information does need to be entered into our databases for multiple tracking reasons," she says.
"So it was a very long day." Williams would receive forms at the end of each day, but if there was a backlog, the data may not have been entered until the following day.
The Solution
Featherfist has replaced its manual processes with ProntoForms, a smartphone and tablet mobile form application that allows users to collect, receive and submit data in the field.
"We are using ProntoForms in pretty much every aspect of our day-to-day business," says Williams.
Featherfist can now electronically capture and store information on all its programs and clients. Data can be sent back to the office as soon as it is captured. The agency can also track rent structures for different income levels and conduct media-rich housing inspections. Case managers can take photos of housing units and seamlessly integrate those photos onto mobile forms.
The Benefits
"It allows us to go from taking maybe 6 months to find a unit for a client to 3 months to find a unit for a client."
"Our main goal is getting people housed as quickly as possible," says Williams. The ability to swiftly capture, track and retrieve data has allowed Featherfist to significantly speed up the process of housing clients.
A homeless person in need of shelter can't be left waiting, says Anewishki. Featherfist has to respond immediately. "ProntoForms are helping us take people off the street."
Ready to unleash productivity?
Get a demo and start a trial today.
or call us 1-888-282-4184
Past & upcoming events
Join us at the Canadian Elevator Contractors Association conference in Halifax

EMPOWER'23 is coming to Europe and we're bringing insightful customer panels, networking opportunities, and executive insights from the biggest and best field organizations.

Europe's best event for service leaders to gather to discuss the major transformations due to globalization, digitization and changing customer behaviours.
Join a KONE executive, business analyst, and field service engineer as they dive into the impacts of rapid automation.
Join ProntoForms, the Service Council, and a packed panel of subject matter experts and industry leaders, as we explore what best-in-class organizations are prioritizing in building a Mental Health, Wellness & Safety driven culture.
This stacked panel brings together field service leaders from GOJO/Purell, Orthoclinal Diagnostics, and Elekta to talk top priorities as they head into 2022. This free virtual event will give you a front-row seat as you gain insights and listen to a few predictions about what lies ahead for organizations with field service teams.

Digital transformation is no longer a nice-to-have for field organizations—it's table stakes. Ditching paper or outdated processes and moving towards rich data collection and visibility has never been more important. Join our session to understand the fundamentals of digital transformation, the macroeconomic factors driving it in field service, and how you can accelerate your organization's digital transformation journey today.

Data is everything when it comes to staying compliant and agile. Shawna Zitrick, Alcon's Business Operations Manager and Mark Scott, ProntoForms' VP of Marketing discuss how low-code apps along with a killer FSM platform streamlines admin work, makes compliance easier, and keeps medical device manufacturing organizations agile.

Our EMPOWER21 User Conference was a huge sucess! If you work in field service, it's the perfect blend of Fortune 500 thought leadership from stellar companies like KONE, Philips, PG&E, and Shell, product best practices, and insider tips. Don't miss out!

Exploring New & Expanded Revenue Opportunities for Future Growth Abstract Blurb: The pandemic taught field service professionals a lot about their field force's resilience, speed and agility. Find out how service leaders pivoted their business models to capture revenue through new/different business sectors, and improved processes for onboarding and training technicians in these new sectors to maximize this revenue.

Field technicians are the customers' face of the company and techs' job processes—for good or bad—influence their happiness and job satisfaction. But what happens when many technicians are debating their future in field service? Join a stacked field panel that brings together executives and technicians from Schneider Electric, Trane Technologies, and Cummins to talk shop on improving satisfaction across the board.

At Phillips Healthcare, low-code apps are part of their solution for ensuring technicians automatically complete work in-compliance and that potential audits are painless. Join us as we dive deep into exactly how Philips uses ProntoForms to service some of the most stringently regulated assets on the planet.

SUEZ, a global water expert in the water and waste sectors, was looking to improve operational efficiency and put the right tools in technicians' hands. Watch this webinar for a deep dive into how digital transformation in asset management is possible with custom field apps and agile technology.

Gain valuable insights from a squad with numerous years of field service experience working at Fortune 500 companies. Pat Foley, ProntoForms' Client Director will be joined by Dominique Vaes, Founder and Senior Partner at Field Service in Motion, and Johan Franck, Associate Partner at Field Service in Motion, to discuss their lessons learned with digital transformation trends. Come learn how to hit targets no matter how agile and fast digital goals are becoming.

Don't make rush digital transformation decisions or implementation mistakes. Chris Bade, VP Field Service & Customer Support at Analogic Corporation and David B. Bishop, Director of Service Operations, Building Solutions North America at Johnson Controls discuss how to ensure internal buy-in and business goal alignment in your organization and that tech you invest in today will delivers value to your customers in the long-run.

Service Council and ProntoForms get together for a fluffy talk on lofty dreams of achieving digital transformation nirvana, but for actionable and meaningful takeaways to help you build out your bulletproof digital transformation strategy for 2021.
This virtual town hall brings together field service expertise and learnings from ProntoForms, an organization that has helped deploy countless COVID-related and 2020 response apps in the past year, and one of their prominent customers who will discuss strategies and actions that has helped their organization stay agile and accelerate digital transformation to meet new and unique service requirements and health and safety guidelines

Field and tech executives join Alvaro Pombo, CEO of ProntoForms, to discuss how their organizations have accelerated their digital transformation and tackled the growing demands and evolving requirements of this new business climate.

Learn, innovate, and network. Whether you're a seasoned ProntoForms guru or just getting started with digital transformation and field automation, get ready to become a field efficiency and safety hero at the EMPOWER'20 virtual conference.
Hear from inspiring keynote speaker Jon Barr, CIO of KONE Americas, and watch virtual panels with Ryan Tidd, the Engine Operations Capability and Innovation Director at Cummins, and ProntoForms' VP of Operations and scaling expert, Aly Mawani.
Discover how Service Council, ServiceMax, and ProntoForms explored what Philips Healthcare and Medtronic are doing to empower their service business through digital transformation.