Frequently Asked Questions

Certified B Corporations are businesses that balance purpose and profit. We are legally required to consider the impact of our decisions on our workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment.

This means that everything we do is in service of our mission of connecting people and programs with dignity and ease. We measure our success as a company in terms of our mission and our impact at every level, and not just our bottom line.

findhelp.org is Aunt Bertha’s free search tool enabling anyone with access to the Internet to quickly and easily find programs and resources in their area by simply typing in their ZIP Code. The search results are powered by Aunt Bertha’s growing network of half a million vetted and up-to-date social services and programs nationwide – by far the largest and most reliable network of its kind in the country. Our network lists 1,280+ programs in every ZIP Code in the U.S.

No, findhelp.org is open to everyone. There are no strings attached to the use of our platform. At Aunt Bertha, the social care network that powers findhelp.org, we work closely with Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) to explore ways to improve social care. Tools like findhelp.org are part of how we support helpers serving their communities. 

People seeking help come first, and we put their interests, privacy, and safety above all else. We’re protective of their data and take extraordinary measures to secure all their information. People who use our network to connect directly with programs also have control over which organizations they trust with their personal information.

Aunt Bertha is HITRUST certified, which incorporates HIPAA and NIST 800-53 security controls, validating that we’re committed to meeting the most stringent regulations for protecting sensitive information to guarantee privacy for users and patients across  our network.

Our public benefit site (findhelp.org) is for non-commercial use. Anyone can use findhelp.org to search for programs, whether seeking help for themselves or for others.

Our paying customers need features for commercial use such as branded sites, needs assessments, reports on how they’re helping people, and workflow integration. Check out a comparison of our paid plans below.

They are. We’ve invested in a Community Engagement team to build lasting relationships with nonprofits in communities across America. Long-term investments like this increase the likelihood that they are engaged and responsive to people who reach out from our platform.

Social care providers that are not equipped to take on more clients can indicate so on their Aunt Bertha listing, or opt out when we verify their program details before they are published.

We focus on building long-term relationships between Aunt Bertha, referring organizations, and the social care providers you refer people to. We have a Community Engagement team with boots on the ground across the U.S. Using their local expertise, they build lasting relationships with nonprofits in communities across America through outreach, customer training, and education. This approach supports long-term partnerships between referrers and people being referred.

Some vendors may “guarantee” responses — often, this is a short-term guarantee, requires contracts, and medicalizes the referral process. Unfortunately, this creates social care networks that are very small and unsustainable, reaching fewer people. We’ve learned there are no shortcuts to building partnerships with nonprofits. They require trust, privacy, and relationships.

There are some projects that may involve social care reimbursement for services. We support these efforts — in those cases, social care providers guarantee services or responses.

Yes! We define “closing the loop” as the ability to demonstrate whether someone referred on our platform got help successfully, the ability to notify the referring party that they got help, and providing metrics along the journey. Aunt Bertha’s platform supports all these measures and features easy to use dashboard tools to refer, track and measure impact. But networked tracking, referral and reporting capabilities are just the beginning of our work to advance closed-loop referrals.

Our industry-leading technology is a direct result of how we engage with all three groups involved in networked social care referrals. We enable people  seeking help to freely use our secure network to easily access programs. We support CBOs dedicated to helping their communities with a dedicated team and free tools and systems that benefit CBOs who participate. And we partner with customers dedicated to doing their part, creating solutions that support connections between their organizations and CBOs in their communities. 

Aunt Bertha’s platform effectively “closes the loop” on all counts. Please request a demo to learn how we do it.

Program search results powered by Aunt Bertha–including findhelp.org– show the most relevant programs for someone’s unique situation without excluding programs that can help. Because we know the coverage area of each program, we’re able to display only the programs that truly serve a ZIP Code.

We’ve designed our platform so that people can search from a wide base, with the ability to filter on multiple dimensions, like veteran programs — empowering users to tailor results to their liking. Instead of making assumptions about a best fit, we match people based on their unique coverage and criteria.

Yes! Our Enterprise plan allows you to focus and feature the most important listings for the specific population you serve, ranking them highest in search results. Aunt Bertha has  the largest network of its kind in place already (with at least 1,283 programs in every single ZIP Code), so your organization can begin selecting programs right away. 

For example, if there are 50 programs you’d like to feature, we’ll work with you to identify them and make sure that your user base sees those results first. As part of your subscription, we also provide data enhancements to add new, relevant listings for your population’s specific needs.

We have spent a decade building our network of referring organizations and social care providers (CBOs). Newly added CBOs join an active network of CBOs  that are already sending and receiving high volumes of referrals, so they can start helping others right away.

Organizations interested in building a focused network for their community can also skip the lengthy onboarding of other “pay us and we’ll build it” network models. Check out our founder’s blog post on our approach to sourcing data.

We provide CBOs a free, customizable screener that populates in our platform at the start of the application process. They can use it to specify their program’s requirements, and we make sure to include that information on their listing

Because requirements vary from program to program, we empower social care providers to design their own eligibility screeners according to their needs.

Yes. More choice puts people in need first, so communities are better off when multiple platforms to access help are available to them. We believe that more platforms increase access to social services, improving the quality of the navigation experience for people in need. If only one software platform were available, it would limit the services people are able to see to just the network assembled by that platform’s vendor. 

At Aunt Bertha, we’re committed to building a system that puts people seeking help first — and that means we’re committed to ensuring our network works well with other platforms so technology is never a barrier to helping people. Our API technology enables Care Coordinators to see referral history on our platform regardless of which system was used to make the referral.

Intake Coordinators using Aunt Bertha are able to see the referral history for a person in need, regardless of the originating system. This enables CBOs, for example, to get referrals from third parties like state agencies or Health Information Exchanges (with customer permission) right on the platform, without toggling different programs or dashboards. This means intake coordinators and CBOs get a complete picture of a person’s navigation and care coordination history, enabling them to respond to referrals with the most appropriate care. 

Aunt Bertha also integrates with care coordination platforms and CRMs used by nonprofits, so the flow of referral history information flows both ways. In other words, referrals received or made using Aunt Bertha can be recorded to an organization’s system of record. With fewer information gaps and more continuity in a person’s referral history, CBOs are better equipped to close the loop and provide people with care they need. 

Aunt Bertha is a social care network that connects people and programs — we are not a referring organization ourselves. But we work closely with referring organizations who may want to offer reimbursement, and request that we handle them. In those cases we can accommodate reimbursements as a pass-through process.

While this is a process we can offer, we recommend building long-term relationships between Aunt Bertha, referring organizations, and social care providers as well so that referrals continue beyond the payment period.

People calling 2-1-1/United Way and searching findhelp.org are accessing help in different ways. 2-1-1 provides an accessible option to call for people in an urgent situation who need to speak to someone immediately, a service which is critically important. However, a growing number of individuals facing difficult circumstances are comfortable using a computer or mobile device to find help on their own, and findhelp.org (or any other search and referral platform powered by Aunt Bertha) provides people with that option.

Therefore, Aunt Bertha and 2-1-1/United Way are actually complementary services — check out this blog post to read how we partner with United Way of Greater Austin.

We’re proud to say that our platform has provided efficiencies in referral and follow-up processes for every single one of our customers. Whether an organization is moving from manual, paper-based directories or directing high utilizers to preventive services, our customers’ cost and time savings are immediate and measurable.

The return on investment (ROI) varies by organization, but because metrics and tracking are easily accessed in our reporting, every organization gets a clear picture of their ROI tailored to the metrics useful to them. Metrics such as referral activity and outcomes tracking can also be used to measure ROI for your organization’s initiatives. 

Our definition of a successful outcome involves the number of lives we are able to touch. Our approach to helping people is to empower them to get the information they need through an intuitive search platform — first and foremost. If people can find programs themselves, we increase the probability of them getting the help they need.

Our next most important success metric is the evidence of a connection being made between someone in need and a program that can serve them. We also measure when a service supplier responds to a referral — our goal is to give individuals the dignity of a response. If we can build software that ensures that people get the dignity of a “yes” or a “no,” we are happy with our place in the ecosystem.

Yes. Our permissions-based model only allows people who are party to a referral or part of an approved organization to view information. Each and every referral requires consent, which protects the person seeking services and their information from inappropriate sharing.

We believe that CBOs should be able to receive and respond to referrals from within their own case management system. This is an attainable goal, and we are fully committed to it. As an organization, we’re committed to providing a first-class home for users without an existing system.

And we meet our users where they are. As standards emerge from other standards bodies, such as the Gravity Project, HIMSS, and others, we commit to active participation with these bodies.

Yes we do! In what we call an open program network, everyone has access to all available nonprofits — thousands of programs in a region that can help. We do not cherry pick programs for people in need but rather provide the widest lens of available resources.

In addition to our open program network, we allow customers to create their own focused network within our system. Our customers can feature, rank, and score programs (not just programs in the network, but also their own internal programs). Combining an open network with the flexibility to design a tailored search experience creates the most value for our users.