Broadway Housing Communities

Broadway Housing Communities was founded in 1983 to redress homelessness by promoting hope, stability and opportunity through the provision of permanent housing. Since then, the organization has developed six residential projects providing permanent housing and support services for over 400 formerly homeless and at risk adults and children in Washington Heights and West Harlem. Over the course of the last twenty-five years, our housing and service programs have evolved to continually reflect the needs of these neighborhoods and our expanded understanding of the roles of community, family and education on the deep roots of poverty. The geographical distribution of Broadway Housing’s six buildings, coupled with a rapidly growing staff size, challenged our ability to communicate mission-critical information quickly and efficiently between sites and organizational units. Much of our work is paper-based, and that means that all clerical and administrative documentation needs to be couriered between sites, resulting in very slow response times and, not infrequently, lost paperwork. In answer to this challenge, Broadway Housing began developing a web-based Intranet to relieve our "sneaker-net", and to serve as a resource repository for information frequently requested by our staff. In order to build the Intranet, we selected Adobe CreativeSuite Web Bundle for its industry-standard web development tools complimented by our existing familiarity with the Adobe Photoshop and Acrobat applications. We used Dreamweaver to rapidly build the Intranet framework with the open-source PHP scripting language. Acrobat helped make our old paper documents easily distributable - and 100% accessible - via the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader program already installed on all of our workstations. We used Photoshop to clean up our photos, and Fireworks to help us make the user interface engaging and user-friendly. With Dreamweaver’s help we tied our fledgling intranet to a MySQL database, and were able to create unique login accounts for each employee. Once we were satisfied that the system was stable, we opened it up for the staff to use. The response was immediate and people were thrilled. As a supportive housing provider, we are responsible for capturing and responding to critical incidents that occur in the lives of our tenants. We were able to evolve our incident reporting system from a paper form to a prompt and icon-driven online form via our intranet. Many of the staff responsible for reporting incidents at our six buildings have limited educational backgrounds, and by making the online form interactive and more accessible, we have improved both the quality of reporting and the job satisfaction of the staff. Furthermore, we now have near real-time awareness of critical incidents across the agency, which has resulted in a revolutionary improvement in our ability to respond to these events. Developing our intranet with the Adobe CreativeSuite Web Bundle was the perfect solution to our needs. We’ve reduced costs, dramatically improved organizational efficiency and business intelligence, our staff are happy, and our executive team is delighted. We are grateful to TechSoup for being the conduit for this excellent resource, and to Adobe for developing such marvelous tools!