Folks,

I’m new to Highrise, only testing the free account for now, but I was wondering if I could glean some input from y’all.

My church is large (some 3500 people) & we need something to better organize our counseling efforts, keeping counselor notes available to the counselor and the ministry overseer, and something that is simple enough for the average non-tech, part-time person to use.

There’s much about Highrise that I like for this, I’m hoping Highrise can be adapted to what we need… However, at first, I thought I could use “Cases” & “groups” in HR, but learned cases are only to group notes together, and groups are only of users (& of course, counselee’s will NOT be users). Was thinking about using tags, but wondered about people being able to see tags outside of their permission scope… I hope someone can offer some good ideas…

We want to follow this kind of flow of info:
1) the ministry admin person learns of a new counselee and starts the counselee record, adding files, notes, etc
2) admin & overseer can overview which new counselees have NOT yet been assigned
3) admin assigns a counselee to a counselor then turns over that record to the counselor, (effectively removing the admin from permissions to see ANY notes for that counselee(
4) counseling sessions begin
5) overseer can view/comment on ongoing effort for a counselee
6) counseling sessions end and counselee record is closed (but can be reviewed later)

Also, for the sake of confidentiality we want to:
1) set up counseling sessions such that several members of a family can be meeting with different counselors,
2) each of those counselors can ONLY see the notes for the counselee they meet with,
3) the ministry overseer can see all notes for that family.

For example:
Counselee #1 might be John Doe meeting with Counselor Peter Pepper
Counselee #2 might have Mom and Pop Doe meeting with Mr. & Mrs. Joe Counselor
and,
Counselee #3 might have The entire Doe family meeting with the pastor
(obviously these “cases” are fictional)

Anyone have any suggestions?

Hi Danno,

Thanks for checking out Highrise. Here are some quick suggestions.

You could make each of your counselors a user. Enter your counselees as contacts, and set the privacy of each counselee so that only the appropriate counselor can see them. You could also give the overseer permission to view each contact in addition to the counselor.

You can change the permissions of a contact any time, but you should know that previously-private records cannot be turned over to new people. Suppose Rachel is a counselor and she is the only one who can see John’s notes. If Rachel’s permission is taken away and instead Alice is given permission to view John’s info, Alice will not be able to see the old notes unless you edit them one-by-one.

In short, it sounds like Highrise can be useful to you, as long as it’s not critical for you to turn a bunch of notes over from one person to another.

Hope this helps,

Ryan

Thanks Ryan – that’s helpful.

I’ll try that. I just wish there was a way for the Highrise account owner at least to “transfer” the old notes to the new person. That would REALLY be helpful! If you don’t mind, just a couple quick questions…

1) per above – how about tags – do permissions block those from view/use? (ex. can a counselor (user) use tags to search by family name, or would that family name be in view/use of every user?)
2) And is there a limit to # of companies?
3) Please bear with me… on another post, the person says, “If I add a meeting task to the person, it doesn’t show in the case, if I add it to the case, it doesn’t show for the person…”
Are these true limitations, or was something misunderstood?

Hi Danno,

Tags don’t relate to permissions. They are a way to group the things you are allowed to see. Companies are contacts like people, they are included in that limit number depending on your plan. Yes, if you add a task to a person, it shows on the person. If you add it to a case, it shows on the case.

I recommend you play around with Highrise and decide for yourself if it feels good or not. Give it a week with one counselor and let experience be the judge.

Best of luck,

Ryan