The By-Name-List  

HUD’s prioritization notice encourages COCs to include in their policies and procedures governing coordinated entry a “requirement that all CoC Program-funded PSH accept referrals only through a single prioritized list that is created through the CoCs coordinated entry process, which should also be informed by the CoCs street outreach.”  

The ability to produce prioritized By-Name-Lists is also a pillar of Community Solutions’ Built for Zero methodology yet many communities struggle to create and maintain such a list. Administrators also have difficulty producing the outcome measures that are shared via dashboards to track progress over time. In coordination with Community Solutions, Simtech created By-Name-List functionality within HomelessData.com to meet the needs of communities participating in Built for Zero, and piloted this technology in Kansas City to validate the accuracy of the work.  

The image below demonstrates how HomelessData.com can ingest HMIS data, and outreach data gathered through Show The Way, to produce prioritized, By-Name-Lists of people experiencing homelessness.   

Key Features of This Technology

Integrated Data Cleansing – The BNL ignores duplicate records as well as enrollments for clients that are no longer active. The BNL also applies logic to ignore clients as actively homeless if they have had a subsequent enrollment in any permanent living situation.   

Inflows and Outflows – To move towards “Functional Zero,” the region needs to be able to house people at a faster pace than people are becoming homeless. With a single click, an administrator can send the BNL results to Community Solutions for the inclusion in the Performance Management Tracker (PMT) dashboards.  

Geospatial Reporting – The geospatial component of the By-Name Lists (BNLs) is critical as it takes proximity into account and can support comparisons against census data to help evaluate disparities by race, gender, age, and other key demographics. The Notice Of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) scores the COC on the ability to evaluate disparities in outcomes and to be able to highlight disparities in demographics between the housed and unhoused populations.  

Prioritization – The data can be quickly sorted within the list according to show those who have been homeless the longest. To align the results with the HUD Prioritization Notice, this data can subsequently be filtered to show only those who have a disabling condition.