Version 3 | Last updated October 2021
Why a By-Name List?
A by-name list allows you to know everyone in your community experiencing homelessness in real time. Without this information, you cannot:
• Understand the scope of homelessness in your community
• Understand how people move in and out of your system on an ongoing basis
• Have accurate information to set goals to reduce homelessness
• Have accurate information to understand if you are making progress in ending homelessness
The key components of a quality by-name list include ensuring that your system is touching everyone who is homeless in your community; that you can accurately assess who is entering your homeless system on an ongoing basis; and that you can accurately track their progress through the system, including how successful you are in implementing prioritization and providing permanent housing to those who need it.
This scorecard addresses the components of a quality by-name list for single adults over 25, with specific requirements related to tracking homeless veterans and chronically homeless individuals. Tracking these subpopulations is necessary for implementing prioritization in alignment with the HUD Notice CPD 16-11 on prioritizing chronically homeless and other vulnerable people for Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) and for measuring progress towards ending veteran and chronic homelessness.
This scorecard also sets out an ambitious framework for building the necessary data management practices and systems coordination to track the movement of everyone experiencing homelessness in your community with the ultimate goal of ending all homelessness. It is critical to note that a by-name list is useful only to the extent that it is operationalized as a driver of your community’s efforts to reduce and end homelessness. Developing and maintaining a by-name list for all single adults can be time consuming and needs to happen in the context of your community’s efforts to prioritize your list, optimize your system, assess and maximize your resources and advocate for and think creatively about addressing resource gaps.
In addition to ending homelessness for single adults, ending homelessness for youth and families is essential to ending homelessness in your community. Scorecards to guide and assess progress for building the data management practices and systems coordination to end homelessness for those populations are addressed in separate tools in development by Community Solutions.
What Does Your Score Mean?
Your score is a baseline, not a judgment. It should help you create action plans and measure improvement toward a comprehensive by-name list. This tool is for your benefit and is not required by any funder or government agency. If you have a fully functional BNL, you will be confident that the list includes every single adult experiencing homelessness in your community AND you will be able to easily access the information in real time that you need to prioritize and track progress towards ending homelessness.
This scorecard is intended to:
• provide guidance on how to develop a by-name list for all homeless, single adults in your community
• provide a means to assess whether the data on your by-name list is of sufficient quality to track progress in ending homelessness in your community
It should be noted that prioritizing which components of the scorecard to address first should take into consideration:
1. The current capacity of your system;
2. The time / effort involved in implementation of the necessary changes; AND
3. The relative impact the change will have on improving the accuracy and usefulness of your data relative to ending homelessness
If you would like guidance on how to develop the portions of your community’s by-name list that address unaccompanied youth and family households, please contact Community Solutions for information about our other scorecards and tracking tools.
Part I: Community Participation and Coverage
This section is focused on ensuring that you are capturing all single adults experiencing homelessness, so that you can make sure your list includes everyone it should, implement prioritization, and have an accurate, real-time actively homeless number.
OUTREACH
The regularity of outreach and street engagement should reflect the unique nature of your geography and the places where people experiencing homelessness are likely to go in your community. Every member of all outreach teams should be clear on where and when outreach should take place. The following questions pertain to your outreach.
 QUESTION 1.A Is the geographic coverage of your outreach clearly mapped out, informed by your data and regularly assessed, to ensure you are able to reach all unsheltered individuals within your community? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 1.B Have you coordinated your outreach, ensuring that your outreach teams are deployed at the locations and the times that they are mostly likely to effectively engage with unsheltered homeless individuals, while minimizing duplication between providers? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 1.C Do you have a documented outreach policy that clearly states how your outreach teams will be deployed and how they work with each other to swiftly connect individuals to their self-determined needs? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 1.D Do you have consistent, coordinated and reliable outreach and in-reach efforts across your geographic coverage area that gives you confidence that at least 90% of the unsheltered population is captured on your BNL? [Yes / No] |
HOMELESS SERVICE PROVIDER PARTICIPATION
Answer the questions below to describe the level of participation of homeless service providers in your community in reporting data into the by-name list, using a common assessment tool. Responses should take into account outreach providers, emergency shelters, transitional housing programs (including VA-funded transitional housing), domestic violence providers, day / drop-in centers, seasonal overflow beds, hotels paid for by a homeless provider, permanent housing providers and VA medical centers.
QUESTION 2.A Are 90% of CoC-funded and non-CoC-funded providers reporting data into your by-name list? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 2.B Are approximately 90-100% of currently homeless single adult individuals served by the providers reporting into your by-name list? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 3.A Is your by-name list able to collect data on all currently homeless single adults in your community, including unsheltered individuals living in a place not meant for human habitation (e.g. street, cars, campsites, beaches, deserts or riverbeds)? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 3.B Is your by-name list able to collect data on all currently homeless single adults in your community, including individuals in shelters, safe havens, season overflow beds, hotels paid for by homeless providers or Health Care for Homeless Veterans (HCHV) beds? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 3.C Is your by-name list able to collect data on all currently homeless single adults in your community, including individuals in transitional housing, including VA-funded Transitional Housing? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 3.D Is your by-name list able to collect data on all currently homeless single adults in your community, including individuals fleeing domestic violence? [Yes / No] |
Part II: Policies and Procedures
This section is focused on ensuring that you have policies and procedures in place to accurately capture movement on and off your list and to maintain timely and accurate data.
QUESTION 4.A Has your community established a written policy that specifies the number of days of inactivity (i.e. the person cannot be located) after which a person’s status will be changed to “inactive,” and which includes protocols to attempt to locate an individual before they are moved to inactive status? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 4.B Does that written policy account for changing an individual’s status to ‘inactive’ based on a client’s verified absence from the community before the specified number of days has elapsed? (e.g. reunited with family in a different community, death etc.) [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 4.C Does that written policy account for individuals on your list who are entering an institution (e.g. jail or hospital) where they are expected to remain for 90 days or fewer? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 5 Does your community have a way to track actively homeless individuals who have not consented to services and/or assessment at this time? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 6 Does your community have policies and protocols in place for keeping your by-name list up to date and accurate, including timelines for provider data submission and ongoing quality assurance protocol?Note: In other words, has your community established and documented a process to set standards for participating providers (for example, monthly deadlines for having all client data necessary for the BNL up to date) and to ensure that errors and discrepancies are caught (for example, required periodic data reconciliation with providers or regular spot checks)? You can answer “yes” even if you are still working to enforce / implement these processes. [Yes / No] |
Part III: Data Infrastructure
This section is focused on ensuring that you have developed a data infrastructure that accurately captures and tracks all movement on and off of your list, avoids duplication, and facilitates coordination between providers. In particular, these questions focus on accurately tracking data points related to inflow and outflow. This section also is focused on ensuring that your list has the capacity to track critical population-based statuses in real time, including chronic homeless status, veteran status, and single and adult status.
QUESTION 7 Does your community’s by-name list track the ‘homeless / housed status’ of all individuals, including the date each status was last changed and the previous status? Homeless status fields should include at minimum: homeless, inactive and permanently housed.Note: Other homeless / housed status fields commonly tracked include unsheltered, sheltered, transitional housing, and matched to resources. However, you only need to track the statuses of “homeless”, “inactive”, and “permanently housed” to answer “yes” to this question. [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 8 Does your community’s by-name list include a unique identifier (e.g. an HMIS ID) for each individual to prevent duplication of client records and facilitate coordination between providers? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 9 Does your by-name list track the total number of newly identified (not necessarily assessed) individuals experiencing homelessness every month? This figure represents a portion of your monthly inflow. [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 10 Does your community’s by-name list track individuals returning to active homelessness within the past month? Note: For example, an individual was previously designated as “housed” and has become homeless again or an individual was previously designated as “inactive” and is back in contact with your community’s homeless system again in the past month. This figure represents a portion of your monthly inflow. [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 11.A Does your community’s by-name list track individuals as they move out of active homeless status, including those who move into permanent housing? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 11.B Does your community’s by-name list track individuals as they move out of active homeless status, including those who become inactive, per your inactive policy? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 11.C Does your community’s by-name list track individuals as they move out of active homeless status, including those who no longer meet the population criteria of single adult? For instance, if an individual forms or re-joins a family household, can you change their status to indicate that they are no longer “single” while ensuring they are accounted for and appropriately prioritized in your system? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 12.A Does your community’s by-name list track population-based statuses, including: veteran, chronic, youth, and family with minor children? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 12.B Can your by-name list track people with multiple population-based statuses (e.g. chronic homeless status AND veteran status)? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 12.C Can your by-name list track historical changes in activity status (e.g. Active to Inactive, Active to Housed, etc.)? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 12.D Can your by-name list track individuals who become chronically homeless after they are added to your all singles list? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 12.E Can your by-name list track individuals who are initially assigned chronic or veteran status when they enter your system but later do not meet the criteria for these population statuses? Note: For example, if someone is added to your system and believed to be chronically homeless but later turns out not to be or no longer meets the criteria, are you able to change their population status on your list from “chronic” to “not chronic” while ensuring that they stay on the all singles list? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 13.A Does your community have a way to report race and ethnicity data on the individuals on the by-name list for the purpose of analyzing system outcomes? [Yes / No] |
| QUESTION 13.B Does your data collection policy and process around race and ethnicity respect the self-identification of clients? [Yes / No] |
Additional Resources
- All Single Adults Quality Data Scorecard Rubric
This guide is crafted to provide communities and coaches with the clarity and direction needed to achieve a “yes” across all questions of the scorecard, ultimately steering towards the foundational goal of achieving Quality Data for this population of individuals experiencing homelessness.
