Tag Archives: service providers

Upcoming feature: enhancements to the service provider profile

Posted on by Chris

We’ll soon be adding a few features to the service provider profile page, in order to give users and particularly service providers more ways to communicate and interact. These features will include:

1) an Announcements box, which will allow a service provider to type in a brief message, announcement, fact, description, or whatever else they choose. It’s similar to the ‘say something about yourself’ box on a Facebook profile;

2) a list of Events, which lets a service provider display a list of upcoming events being held at their facility or otherwise hosted by their organization;

3) the ability for a service provider to submit an official response to user reviews left on that service provider’s profile page. The response will appear directly under the review it responds to and will be clearly marked as having come from the service provider; and

4) the ability for users to mark reviews with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, to signify whether they find the review useful or not. We will eventually allow you to view reviews by a ranking of their usefulness.

Watch out for these features at the end of April. We think they’ll help make the service provider profile page do more for our users. If you have any features you’d like to see built into the profile page (or any other area of the site), please let us know!

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Why you, a service provider, should use the Warrior Gateway Directory

Posted on by Chris

The Warrior Gateway Directory allows users in the military community to easily find the resources they need. However, it is also a tool which makes it easy for service providers to interact with their clients and stakeholders. We know there are a lot of sites out there that list information, resources, and service providers for the military community…

So why should you, a service provider with limited time and resources, use the Warrior Gateway Directory?

1) It allows you to easily communicate important information with your client base in the military community. We list basic but necessary information about service providers (where you’re located, what you do, how to get in contact with you, etc.), which you can edit once you claim your profile. We are also developing more advanced ways to communicate via your service provider profile, such as an Announcements box, an Events Calendar, the ability to post the need for volunteers or emergency donations, plus more.

Why use the Warrior Gateway to communicate rather than relying only on traditional channels like your own website? We are building a single, central place for users who are looking for information about service providers; it makes it easier for the user if he or she can find information about ten organizations in one place rather than on those ten organizations’ separate websites.

2) You can easily find out what your clients are saying and thinking about you. We allow users to leave ratings and reviews for service providers they have used. This can help you to discover areas which are in need of attention or improvement in your organization’s provision of services. Think of it as an online comment box.

3) You can interact by commenting back. If a user posts a review for your organization, you can post an official reply which will be displayed directly below the user’s comment. This will allow you to directly and publicly address the user’s concerns (or thank them for their praise!). We think this will create an open forum that will be good for transparency.

4) It provides a unique metric of success for stakeholders, especially donors. Knowing what clients think about a service provider can be more illustrative than traditional financial metrics used for non-profits, such as program expenses and revenue, when measuring an organization’s success and effectiveness. We’d like your success as a provider of services to the military community to be told not just through your financials but through the words and stories of those whose lives you affect with your service. This will have major implications for the way donors measure your success as the ‘ratings-and-reviews’ model becomes more prevalent in the non-profit community.

5) It’s a good way to discover and get in touch with other organizations doing work similar to yours. Just as our users in the military can use the Warrior Gateway Directory to seek out organizations near them, so too can you! This should be useful for coordination and referrals, and also for sharing resources and best practices with organizations like yours. We are also looking into building an online forum for discussion and resource-sharing between service providers.


We are confident that the Warrior Gateway Directory is a tool that will help service providers communicate with their clients, stakeholders, and other service providers. To use the Warrior Gateway, get started by finding your organization’s listing in the Directory and claiming it. If you can’t find a listing for your organization, you should add it to the Directory. You can then verify or edit the information we have listed for your organization, and respond to any comments left by users on your profile page. Also, be sure to tell your clients about your profile on the Warrior Gateway and suggest they log on and leave a rating and review about you.

If you have any further questions about how you can start using the Warrior Gateway to the fullest advantage of your organization, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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The Warrior Gateway partners with the Real Warriors Campaign

Posted on by Chris

The Warrior Gateway is proud to announce its partnership with the Real Warriors campaign. Real Warriors is a program of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE) that works to “combat the stigma associated with seeking psychological health care and treatment and encourage service members to increase their awareness and use of these resources.” Real Warriors is a source of useful information and resources for brain and psychological injury, and is particularly known for its profiles, which tell the stories of members of the military community who suffered or suffer from PTS, TBI, and related complications.

Real Warriors has also established a great network of partners working to support the military community. The Warrior Gateway is proud to join that network of partners. You can find us listed in their National Partners section.

Stay tuned– we’ll try to keep you updated with the latest from the Real Warriors campaign.

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Virginia is for Heroes

Posted on by Chris

Yesterday we attended the Virginia is for Heroes conference hosted by the Virginia Wounded Warrior Program in Richmond, VA. The conference is a forum for those who provide services to wounded warriors within the state of Virginia. This was the first time VWWP put on this event, but it appeared to be a great success for all involved. It is wonderful to see a diverse group of stakeholders–NGOs, caseworkers and representatives of DoD and state/local/federal programs, veterans, active duty, Guard/Reserve, and their families–get together to speak openly about the challenges that exist in providing services to the military community, and active steps we can take to overcome those challenges.

The event featured a number of great speakers, including a key note speech by Tammy Duckworth (Assistant Secretary of Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, Department of Veterans Affairs) and a very rousing speech by BG Loree Sutton (Director, Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, DoD).

A highlight of the event was a breakout session where participants broke into groups and discussed current needs in the field–action items that service providers (both NGOs and government/DoD programs) can and should undertake to improve the provision of services to wounded warriors. The groups then presented the conclusions of their discussions. Action items presented included: the importance of careers; the need to focus not solely on veterans but on their families as well; the need to improve ease of access to service providers; and the desirability of a central clearinghouse or forum for service providers. The importance of these needs rang true for us as well. These are in fact some of the most pressing considerations that drove the creation of the Warrior Gateway. It was great to hear service providers and wounded warriors themselves talk about what they need most right now, and we hope to address some of those needs with the Warrior Gateway.

The conference also presented a great opportunity for us to meet and speak with many, many service providers that were in attendance as participants and exhibitors. It was great to hear about the exciting things being done by these organizations to serve the military community. We plan to add all the service providers we spoke with to our Directory. If we didn’t get a chance to speak with you at the conference, drop us a line and we would be glad to add you to the Directory or tell you more about how the Warrior Gateway can help both the military community and service providers looking to improve their client outreach.

The event was a great opportunity to meet and understand the needs of service providers, caseworkers, and wounded warriors on the ground. Thanks very much to VWWP for hosting us!

You can view more photos we took at the event here.

Q&A recap from our info session last week

Posted on by Chris

Last week we held an information session in which we explained a bit about the Warrior Gateway to those new to the project, and updated everyone on our progress. (If you missed the info session, you can check out the presentation here. Also we’ll be holding an info session every 4-5 weeks, so stay posted and tune in for the next one.)

The presentation by Devin was followed by a Q&A session in which we received some great questions and suggestions. Following are the questions we received, plus our answers.

[For the service provider directory]: Rating scale.  Is 1 good or bad?

A rating of 1 is bad; a rating of 5 is good.

Since you are blueprinting Texas, how does your employment website differ from the services provided by the Texas Workforce Commission and the veteran case managers who are provided by the Texas veteran Commission?

We largely see the Warrior Gateway as a tool to complement services like the Texas Workforce Commission and the Texas Veterans Commission. A major innovation of our Jobs site is to allow veterans to see how their military skills translate into skills valued by employers in the civilian workforce (e.g., they can enter an MOS and return a list of jobs which utilize those skills, which then links to actual job postings for those jobs). Additionally, we offer a nationwide search area; veterans can seek jobs out-of-state if they prefer.

In short, we see the Warrior Gateway as an excellent tool in the toolbox of case workers at organizations like the Texas Veterans Commission. Our Jobs site helps veterans make forward-looking career choices based on their military skills and on projections of the future of the job market, so it will be a useful asset for caseworkers seeking to help veterans with employment decisions and finding a job.

[For the service provider directory]: How do you keep all your information up-to-date?

We have three ways to keep our information up-to-date: 1) If a service provider has ‘claimed’ its profile, it can edit the information on its profile so as to keep the info current. 2) If a service provider’s profile has not been claimed, the information on its profile can be edited by users, who can substitute updated information (e.g., a changed address) for outdated information. And 3) we will periodically share data for service providers with our strategic data partners (e.g., National Resource Directory, Network of Care); if their information is updated, it will enter our system and be updated there.

Does that include your database of customers (i.e. email addreses, etc.)?

Members of the military community who register on WarriorGateway.org will generally keep their own information (e.g., email address, location) up-to-date. We will occasionally send out correspondence via email asking members to verify that their information is active. We will also send out an email to inactive users (e.g., users who haven’t logged in in 6 months) to verify if the account is still active and valid.

Have the Services all agreed with this approach? They will be key to success.

We have spoken extensively with B.G. Cheek of the Army Warrior Transition Command, Capt. Watkins of Navy Safe Harbor, Paul Williamson at the Marine Corps Wounded Warrior Regiment, and of course Admiral Mullen. Everyone we have spoken with has been very supportive and enthusiastic about the project. We are also working to speak with representatives from the Air Force and Coast Guard soon. We absolutely agree though – the support of all the Services will be very important.

You appear to be allowing ALL NGOs to self register.  Will there be any pre-vetting of the groups before posting or will you just allow the metrics feature to weed out groups?

We will allow all NGOs to register. However, we will also validate which NGOs are registered 501(c)3 organizations, and those organizations’ profiles will bear some seal which denotes them as such. Also, any NGOs whose listings were provided to us by one of our strategic data partners who do their own vetting (such as the National Resource Directory) will have a notation stating that the organization was vetted by and listed on that strategic data partner’s site. Aside from that, you are correct that the metrics should weed out the fraudulent or negligent service providers.

You mentioned privacy and limiting who has access to information of veterans.  Will the government only have access to military information (i.e., DD214s – NGOS frequently ask for that information before supporting them)?

We will not release any of our users’ personal information. We act only as a conduit between the military community and service providers or employers. Thus we do not contact service providers on behalf of specific Warrior Gateway users, as a caseworker might – a user can find the contact info for a service provider on the Warrior Gateway and must then contact the service provider him/herself. If a service provider requires that a veteran to provide his/her DD214 in order to be eligible for services, it is the veteran’s responsibility to provide the DD214 to the service provider when he/she contacts or visits the service provider.

How would Employers register to have their open jobs listed on the website?

Listing jobs will be a simple process – employers can register an account on the Warrior Gateway, then once logged in, there will be a button for them to post jobs. They will fill in the typical information about the job posting, pay the listing fee, then click ‘Post!’.

VetsMeetVets.org is gaining momentum quickly yet as a state non-profit, we do not yet have our Letter Of Determination (c)3 status, can we still be in the list of providers.  Our focus is national.

Absolutely! Any service provider can register to be listed in the Warrior Gateway directory. There will, however, be a validation process which determines which service providers are registered 501(c)3 organizations, and the profiles for those organizations will note them as such. In this case where you haven’t yet received your letter of determination, you will be listed and once you receive your letter, your status on the Warrior Gateway will be updated.

How does a service disabled veteran owned small business register as a potential employer?

The Warrior Gateway homepage will have a button leading to a central registration page. Users will be able to choose which type of membership they want to register for – military community, employer, service provider, donor, etc. Selecting ‘employer’ upon registration will allow you to post jobs.

What has been done to run the website design by target groups for utility and complexity, such as focus groups and surveys? What are plans for publicizing the Gateway to target groups?

We aren’t quite at that stage yet, but we definitely plan to do user-end testing with different target groups and get feedback about how to improve the Gateway and make it more accessible to all users.

How you will be coordinating – combining the Gateway with the Network of Care site – currently available in Maryland and California. In process to be funded for national deployment.

The relationship of Network of Care to the Warrior Gateway will be one of strategic data partners. We will each provide data on service providers in our directory with one another, and we will also periodically share data on metrics that have been collected and/or any data that has changed for an service provider already existing in the database.

So as you can see, these questions were all great ones! If you have and additional questions, don’t hesitate to email us.