January 15, 2025 – As Acivilate celebrates its tenth birthday, we’re proud to announce the general availability of Pokket 5.0. We are so excited about being able to serve families and youth together through Guardianship.
Welcoming Dependents and Guardians so Everyone is On The Same Page
Pokket is now built for Parents and Kids, too! These new roles are designed to keep the parent and justice-involved youth on the same page as their counselor and treatment providers. It gives both the young persons and their guardian – parent, grandparent, foster parent, sibling, social worker - a voice in their case plan. It’s an easy way to ask questions when they don’t know what’s happening or how to do what they are supposed to do. Pokket is also designed to support a foster parent taking care of foster kids so they can communicate with the case manager about the child or children and manage all the paperwork. It can work as an instant family health portal for schools, too.
For the first time, Pokket gives justice-involved youth and their guardian a fighting chance to keep up with their obligations, and the family’s development plan. With Pokket, agencies can share everything the family needs to know, in real-time, to avoid the excuses of not knowing or forgetting that staff are tired of hearing. The family can share updates, too!
More powerful than that, when communications happen – in a secure, private, confidential, and compliant manner, without the history trapped on a former employee’s old cellphone – smoothly and consistently, even across staff changes, the staff has better context for interactions, the family is less frustrated and worried, trust can be built, and the relationship can improve.
Our research revealed it’s often hard for parents to make it to court meetings because taking time off from work means not being able to afford groceries or the rent. Equally, young people haven’t yet developed the executive function skills to manage their own affairs properly. Pokket keeps that parent in the loop and helps the youth remember what to do to manage their affairs. It can help build the skills needed to become an independent adult.
We are excited about how the Pokket Guardianship functionality supports Agencies in implementing APPA’s 10 Core Principles of Juvenile Probation, to change one life and a whole family at a time.
Helping People Helping People
Pokket 5.0 continues Acivilate’s focus of “Helping People Helping People.” Early on, we realized that if we wanted to support justice-involved individuals by Transforming Second Chances, then we needed to reach them through their care team. When we help staff and volunteers, we multiply our ability to reach and serve returning citizens, their families, and anyone on the continuum of criminal justice, pre-trial or post-release.
Pokket Analytics for Efficient Workflows
Our AWS QuickSight-powered Analytics solution is now available. Pokket reporting has always included visualization. Now, we are moving beyond showing what was, to reveal, at a client-by-client level, what steps staff need to take to move the people on their caseload forward. Workflow analytics can drive efficiency by helping staff to prioritize and focus on what’s important today. Each Agency’s solution is custom configured, because every need is different.
“Pokket’s configurable information-sharing and privacy management backbone is explicitly designed to bridge the gaps across agencies in a compliant and secure manner,” said Louise Wasilewski, Acivilate’s CEO. “Our novel application of Analytics helps drive inter-agency dependent workflows and outcomes more efficiently and transparently.”
While each system’s problems may be different, short staffing is widespread. Staff are overwhelmed making it hard to decide what to do. When the pertinent information is scattered across different systems, or different parts of the same system, or dependent on someone else in another role, or even another agency, it’s hard for staff to keep up with status and who to prioritize for meaningful results. Pokket Analytics can solve that problem.
Our technical assistance team includes business consulting experience at world-class companies such as KPMG Consulting, Coca-Cola, and Verizon, and can help you think through where cracks are in your information systems and processes and quickly provide an easy-to-use, functional implementation to provide quick improvements. This approach also allows us to iterate together when new needs come to light, or when legislative, regulatory, or policy changes come into play. Solutions have launched in only three months, including training and documentation!
On Training, Pokket’s popular Help Videos for staff and participants are now complemented by Pokket Help Chat for staff. Staff shortages result in a lot of new hires, who need to learn all parts of the job at once. Staff can ask the chatbot how to do something and it points them to the different options.
These expansions of the scope of Pokket emphasize the unique values that Pokket provides: Giving people a fighting chance to own their success, supporting staff in addressing needs promptly and efficiently, and enabling inter-agency communication, information-sharing, and workflows.