Aug/100
New List of “Settlement Agencies” for Settlement.Org Services Near Me
Over the last year or so we have integrated the community agency mapping services of Findhelp Services into Settlement.Org. This is the group that does the “Blue Book” of community services and 211ontario.ca. For the most part we have been really happy with this new tool but we still felt some of our search results were too broad to be useful to someone looking for specific services.
For example clicking on “Settlement Agencies” in Guelph used to give you dozens of results, however we know that there are only 3 or 4 agencies in that region that you could really call a “Settlement Agency”. What was happening was that our search was looking just for keywords and not services identified as “settlement agencies” and returning way too many irrelevant results.
So we worked with Findhelp to come up with a solution. In the end we took our expert knowledge of the settlement sector and created a list of traditional “settlement” agencies. Then we had Findhelp code each agency in a special way that allowed our users to only see agencies we mark as a “settlement agency”. Now you really do only see the few settlement agencies in Guelph.
We understand our list won’t be perfect. We have started with CIC-funded, NSP-funded and relevant OCASI member agencies and we will continue to update our list as need be.
But we feel we have created a very usable directory of settlement services across Ontario – a guide that will be easy to use for newcomers and those trying to help.
Try it out for yourself – Search by Region.