We are excited to share the latest enhancements to Binti! This month’s updates bring a range of enhancements aimed at improving the way we capture data about applicant demographics, reducing load times, and other improvements to Binti. Refer to our full release notes for additional detail and screenshots where applicable.

📊 Race & Ethnicity Data Collection Improvements

To simplify demographic reporting for your agency, Binti is updating how race and ethnicity data is collected to align with federal standards. Previously, race and ethnicity were combined into a single question. Moving forward, this information will be gathered through two separate questions:

1. Are you/Is this person of Hispanic or Latino origin?
2. What is your/this person’s race?

These updated questions will appear throughout Binti wherever race and ethnicity are collected, including for both children and adults. The images below depict the existing and new interface. Additional sub-selections (i.e. additional ancestry information) are available under each option. 

Your historical data has been automatically migrated as of today, Wednesday, April 9, 2025. For more details, please visit our Help Center, or contact support@binti.com with any questions. 

Existing Interface

New Interface

🚀 Enhancements

• Family Finding & Engagement The Family Finding Searches dashboard now loads faster, ensuring a smooth user experience.
• Family Finding & Engagement Placement Options within Family Finding’s relationship details now support enhanced detail to improve clarity and decision-making. Agency workers can now specify whether a child’s connection is recommended for placement or for placement consideration. Additionally, several sections now include open-text fields, allowing workers to provide additional context about placement options.
  
  
  
   
• Caregiver Management "Emergency Placement" has been added as a placement search reason, allowing agency workers to indicate the reason for their search with greater specificity.  
• Caregiver Management "Transitional Housing Program and Foster Care" has been added as placement option, allowing agency workers to indicate the reason for the placement of a child.  

🔧 Fixes

• When a supporting document expires, notifications will only be sent for requirements on the currently active template. Previously, email notifications were sent for old templates no longer in use.

The fixes listed below apply only to customers with Caregiver Documents 2.0.

• All available case notes now display when accessed via the Universal Search page for caregivers with a household role switch. Previously, not all case notes would display. 
• When changing an application to Out-of-County (sending), the Documents page loads as expected. Previously, agencies could encounter an error.
• In instances where an applicants' role is changed twice, case notes remain editable. Previously, case notes could become uneditable in certain circumstances. 

Tell Us What You Think!

We want to hear from you. Use the emojis and feedback box beneath this announcement to share your thoughts. Your feedback helps shape the future of Binti! 

Want to know about the latest updates as soon as they go out? Bookmark our Release Notes.

When a child is in out-of-home care, tracking ongoing requirements is essential to ensuring their safety and stability. However, managing documentation from multiple sources can be challenging. We are excited to announce the release of Child Document Uploads—a new feature designed to streamline the collection of required documentation. This feature introduces a dedicated requirements upload page in the Caregiver Portal, making it easier for caregivers to submit necessary documents while helping agencies stay compliant with out-of-home placement requirements more efficiently.

With this new functionality, it is easy to stay organized:

• Familiar Portal: Caregivers use the same Binti portal they already know for licensing, while agency workers access the existing child requirements page.
• Enhanced Collaboration: Agency workers and caregivers can easily see which requirements have been submitted by the other, ensuring transparency and streamlined collaboration.
• Real-Time Updates: Both agency workers and caregivers can see upcoming and overdue documentation requirements.
• Easy Document Uploads: Caregivers can easily upload essential records, like medical appointments, to support safe and stable placements.

Agencies can determine which child requirements caregivers can submit and which remain the agency’s responsibility, ensuring a flexible approach to documentation management. By centralizing the collection of child requirements, this feature reduces administrative burden and ensures that children receive the care they need.

Learn more about the experience for caregivers in our Help Center. To enable this feature, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. 

Note: If you participated in the pilot program, no action is necessary to continue using this feature.

Since the beginning of 2024, we have introduced over 180 feature enhancements to help you work more efficiently and stay connected with the children and families you support. We also launched our latest product, the Family Finding & Engagement module, designed to improve outcomes in locating kin and developing supportive networks for children. Stay up-to-date with our latest enhancements by subscribing to our Release Notes.

Read on to discover our top 10 enhancements so far this year. If you have any questions, feel free to contact to your Customer Success Manager or our Customer Support team.

Licensing

• Targeted Email Campaigns: Reach caregivers more effectively with targeted email campaigns based on Family Tags or specific application templates. This enhancement ensures your communications are highly relevant, saving you time and increasing engagement.

• Insightful Reporting: Gain critical insights with our new Barriers to Licensing and Recruitment Sources reports. These tools streamline your application process, speed up licensing, and optimize recruitment strategies with graphs, data tables, and CSV download options.

• Child Turning 18 Notification: Ensure your licensing files are compliant by receiving timely email notifications when the child of a licensed caregiver turns 18. This ensures you can promptly handle necessary documentation.

• Automatic Status Change Notifications: Keep caregivers informed with custom notifications for status changes such as approvals or denials. This improvement streamlines communication and enhances the caregiver experience. For setup assistance, please contact your Customer Success Manager.
• HEIC to JPEG Conversion: Photos uploaded in HEIC format (iPhone default) are automatically converted to JPEG, ensuring you can view any photo that is uploaded by a caregiver.

Caregiver Management

• Respite Placement Tracking: Placement searches can now be conducted for respite without disrupting the active placement. When closing a respite search, you are redirected to the Add Respite page, streamlining the process and ensuring accurate placement records.

• Provider Not in Binti: A new placement type lets agencies manually enter information for providers not listed in Binti, such as unlicensed kin, simplifying the placement process.

• Multiple Case Workers Assignment: Multiple permanency/case workers can now be assigned to a child, offering greater flexibility and support.

• Improved Ordering of Child Requirements Page: Quickly access the most critical tasks with our updated child Requirements page, now sorted to display the most recently generated requirements at the top.

Family Finding & Engagement

• New Module Launch: Our Family Finding & Engagement Module streamlines family finding workflows, helping you track and identify supportive relationships, and engage key individuals in a child’s life to assist with placement decisions and build strong support networks. With integrated Thomson Reuters CLEAR search capabilities, Binti offers a comprehensive solution for conducting thorough family finding efforts. Connect with your Customer Success Manager to learn more!

Last Wednesday, our team successfully completed 30 updates aimed at refining the user interface, improving data management and display, as well as enhancing documentation and record keeping features. These updates will roll out to all Binti users this week and next.

We will highlight a few of our favorite enhancements below. We also encourage you to visit our Release Notes Hub to learn about all of the improvements in detail as they are released. If you have any questions or want additional information, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.

User Interface

Easier to understand background check information on the Caregiver Applications dashboard
Release Date: 10/05/23

In the past, you may have seen "0/?" in the background checks column of the Caregiver Applications dashboard and wondered what it meant. We have replaced this with clearer messaging that describes the necessary action to calculate a total number of required background checks.

Documentation & Record Keeping

Record date of birth for applicants and co-applicants
Release Date: 10/05/23

We now allow agency workers to record a crucial piece of information: the date of birth for applicants and co-applicants. This information will auto-populate to caregiver and agency forms, saving time in data entry. Additionally, we have included this data point in our API, which ensures that the information remains consistent across your systems.

Data Management & Display

Family Tags in the Placements module
Release Date: 09/27/23

At the beginning of this year, we introduced Family Tags, enabling agencies to assign customized labels to caregivers. Since then, you have been using this feature to categorize families based on various criteria such as their location, participation in programs, specific characteristics, and more. We are thrilled to let you know that these tags are now accessible within the Placements module, and you can utilize them to on the Placements Options and View Matching Families pages.

Clickable Time to Approval Report
Release Date: 09/27/23

We have made an exciting improvement to our most popular report, Time to Approval. Now, every dot on the plot graph is interactive, allowing you to click on it. When you click on a dot, it will take you directly to the Applicant Data page for the respective caregiver. This enhancement is designed to streamline the process of uncovering applications with approval times that deviate from the usual or expected timeframe, making it quicker and more straightforward for you.

See which filters you have applied to the Caregiver Applications dashboard
Release Date: 10/05/23

We provide many robust filters on the Caregivers Applications dashboard that enable you to organize your data. Now, when you apply select filters, we will indicate the criteria you have chosen to filter by. This enhancement is aimed at making it simpler for you to understand precisely what you are viewing.

Ensuring accurate availability is crucial for a successful placement search. We have redesigned the availability interface on the Edit Placement Information and Call Log pages to make it easier to understand. The new design displays a clear formula that shows capacity, the number of children in the home, beds that are temporarily unavailable, and overall availability.

Please note that the "Availability/Capacity" column on the Placements dashboard remains unchanged, and Binti has automatically updated your data to adapt to the new interface. Let's look at an example:

• Old interface: 2 beds available out of a total capacity of 2
• New interface: 0 beds temporarily unavailable out of a total capacity of 2

With this improvement, managing availability information will be more transparent and straightforward.

Learn more in our Help Center

Tracking placement outcomes is crucial. We have received valuable feedback regarding the situations you encounter on a daily basis when it comes to placing children. In response, we have revamped the process of ending a placement to capture three specific data points:

1. Where did the child move?
2. Who requested the change of placement?
3. Why was the change requested?

With the introduction of this new interface, we have expanded the list of options for why a placement is ending. This allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the circumstances surrounding the placement change. Additionally, we now offer the capability to keep a child within the "In Care" tab, regardless of their placement location. For instance, a child can be marked as "In Care" even while they are at a hospital. Lastly, we have enhanced the interface to provide a clearer and more intuitive way of recording these additional details.

By implementing these changes, we aim to improve the tracking and analysis of outcomes, enabling you to better support the children in your care.

Families can now indicate placement preferences including gender, age range, and behavioral characteristics directly via the Caregiver Portal!

Our Caregiver Management platform automates the matching process by utilizing the preferences and characteristics of children and families. Agency workers can review and override child preferences that families enter. Our goal is to get excellent and up-to-date preference data into Binti, so that workers can make informed decisions during the search process.

Check out the Binti Homepage to see family preferences which need attention and visit the Placements dashboard to view, approve, or modify preferences.

We understand how critical it is to properly manage payments as a private agency. Our Payments Report saves time by reducing manual staff hours needed to calculate payments. You let us know there were a variety of reasons a payment rate may differ within a single reporting period. This includes scenarios like a modified level of care, a change in age, or new rates from public agencies.

Today, we've enhanced the ability for our report to track changes mid-report cycle. Now, when a payment rate changes, a separate line will be generated in the report. This makes it clear which days of placement should be billed at the previous rate and which should be billed at the new rate.

Check it out today by visiting the Payments Report under the Reports tab!

Centralizing placement communications into one system allows robust tracking of outreach efforts and reduces time to placement. Knowing this, one of our first priorities was developing a outreach platform to contact caregivers via email regarding the placement of a child. Today, we're releasing a serious upgrade!

Now, when conducting outreach to caregivers about a potential placement, you can send an SMS in addition to email. Making things even better, the email and SMS are both fully customizable! All communications continue to be automatically saved in the Call Log for the caregiver.

Check it out today by visiting the View Matching Families page and selecting 'Send Availability Message' for a family.

The Child Requirements page in our Caregiver Management module has been completely redesigned based on your feedback!

• Requirements are now automatically sorted across six tabs: All, Overdue, Due Next 30 Days, Due More Than 30 Days, Waived, and Completed. This keeps your dashboard looking much cleaner and easier to understand.
• We've added a search functionality for when you're looking for something specific.
• A new date filter lets you narrow down the range of requirements you're viewing.
• A 'Waive' button allows you to override requirements.

Try it out today by navigating to the Children/Youth Page and selecting Actions > Child Requirements for a child in care.