Join us on Thursday, December 9th and 11:00 AM EDT for a virtual workshop-style roundtable discussion with other child-serving organizations in various stages of the collaborative process. Everyone will leave with an understanding of the possibility of a collaborative approach and the steps necessary to be ready to implement it.

Your organization and your schools are serving the same children; wouldn't it be great if you could know how the children are doing in school - grades, behavior, attendance, etc. You could collaborate to understand the value of the programs you're providing, including measured improvements, attendance, etc. You could have real-time data that enables your community to understand the difference your organizations are making.

COMET Informatics LLC is pleased to announce the appointment of John Chapman, MS as their new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) effective Monday, April 19, 2021, following a planned CEO succession plan and unanimous approval from the board.  

With nearly 40 years of experience in the technology industry that include start-ups and fortune 500 companies alike, Chapman is excited about joining the COMET team and continuing to work and serve the Rochester community. “I am thrilled and humbled about the opportunity to join the outstanding team at COMET to help to continue their growth to the next level," says Chapman, “I am excited about their product offerings as well as assisting their clients to achieve their goals while further enhancing the customer experience.”

For the past several years, Chapman has been President of the JMC Advisory Group where he consulted with companies to execute GTM and sales programs, create and deliver product innovation, scaling operations/systems/process, and technology, enhancing customer experience, and assisting various organizations by filling interim CMO and COO roles. This work allowed Chapman to achieve results through collaboration and teamwork where accountability, customer-centric value and service were top priorities.

COMET’s current CEO, Leonard Gingello, MBA will officially retire Friday, April 16th, 2021 after being a part of COMET since its inception eleven years ago, four of those years as CEO and five as Board Chair. "I have deeply enjoyed the privilege of working with COMET's dedicated team and all the child care professionals, partners, and customers alike, who are so focused and passionately working to improve the lives of our precious children," says Gingello, “John is a great addition to the COMET team, and will serve our partners and clients well. I can retire with the knowledge that they are being left in the best of hands."

Assessments | Outcomes | Accountability | Collaboration

Since 2008, the COMET team has been working to support the success of children. 

The COMET® System, a web-based data management tool, was created to solve the problem of data being processed and analyzed too slowly to help children. The goal of COMET is to support our customers' organizations and missions by providing data management to improve programs and youth outcomes. We work with educators, parents, program providers, policymakers, and researchers to support informed decision-making in pursuit of this goal.

COMET Informatics (COMET 4 Children) was developed out of a partnership between two leading experts in their fields: A. Dirk Hightower, Ph.D., Executive Director (former) Children's Institute, a center of excellence in supporting the social and emotional health of children, has been working with communities, schools, and other not-for-profits for over 30 years to support the success of children; and Serge Lossa, Ph.D., CEO SophiTEC, Inc., a software development firm specializing in web-based, database applications. 

COMET was founded as a tool for measuring outcomes.  At its core, features to assess and understand the progress of children in a variety of programs, to identify gaps, and report the gains help our partners provide appropriate and timely interventions.  As the COMET System evolved, the imperative to support service providers and collect attendance resulted in a rich set of capabilities to operate a child-focused organization, including tracking and reporting on membership, programs, classes and activities, counseling and therapeutic services and their associated outcomes.

Our partnerships with such a variety of child-serving organizations brought attention to the silos of information that are created when the organizations serving a child are not also sharing information about that child. This led to the creation of our Collaborative Solutions. COMET Collaborative allows multiple organizations to share data about all of the children in a community. This type of sharing allows communities to come together to serve the needs of a child across all facets of their lives.

The COMET team has experience supporting collaborative community initiatives and community funding organizations by integrating data from program sites, schools, and homes. These efforts are HIPAA and FERPA compliant, using a rigorous data usage consent methodology and our customized to meet the goals of the community initiatives and stakeholders. 

Whether a School-Age Collaborative, focused on bringing together data gathered in schools and Out-of-school time organizations for a full picture of a child’s capabilities, or Whole Child Health, focused on the creating a singular picture of a child from the data collected in the medical systems and by community based organizations to provide better access to services, COMET Collaborative is molded to the organization to create and support an environment of continuous improvement, allowing the community to analyze and leverage comprehensive data revealing emerging trends supporting preventative and corrective action, supporting flexible analysis. Data-driven decision-making, creating an integrated system allowing for process changes that reduce waste and duplicative data-gathering efforts.

COMET Informatics started as a collaboration of two Rochester, NY organizations (Children's Institute & SophiTEC) that wanted to make sure that our children were receiving the assistance they needed as quickly as possible so that they may thrive, and developed into a collaboration of organizations across the country working towards the same goal like the Boys & Girls Club, and local organizations such as, Upstate Cerebral Palsy, CIDS, SPCC, and The United Way, and finally, on to the collaborations of entire communities in Ohio (Aspire Toledo), Rochester and the Southern Tier (Get Ready To GROW Rochester & Chemung County).

Original Posting 12.10.16

Most organizations today know that part of their infrastructure is their data management system. And their operational excellence depends on having great data collection processes. But it is very easy to overdo the effort in the interest of keeping track of details and also providing inaccurate information by short-cutting methods. Here are a few sound guidelines to use when developing or refining your organization's data collection processes:

8 Tips for Data Collection

1. Only collect data that you know is needed and will be used.
2. Don’t re-collect data that is already available and kept up-to-date.
3. Make sure the person providing the data will have accurate information.
4. Make the survey / test / instrument as easy as possible: keep it as short, minimize effort and time required to complete, schedule it for an appropriate time (example, a time of the year that's less busy), use standard terms and be consistent
5. Have the survey / test / instrument reviewed by knowledgeable professionals
6. Provide clear instructions (purpose, how the data will be used, deadlines, etc.)
7. Do a pretest of the survey on a pilot group and adjust according to feedback.
8. Understand and communicate what laws and regulations govern the data (examples could be FERPA or HIPAA).

Original Posting 24.01.17

This post is for leaders that are trying to understand the role of social media in their professional lives.

As a lifelong learner and a technology leader in my 50's, the current environment of communications poses many challenges, as well as opportunities. It has never been harder, in my lifetime, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

However, I am convinced of one thing. It is at a leader's peril to not develop an understanding of and proficiency in social media. This is true for those in technology, education, manufacturing, non-profits, government - actually for everyone. It is not just career peril I refer to, it is organizational peril as well. We have only to look at the last couple presidential elections to see the results. Or the companies who are having more successful financial results. Or the non-for-profits that are achieving their strategic goals. A recent article the Nonprofit Quarterly’s Winter 2016 edition, “Social Media: The New Nonprofit Nonelective” reflects this.

But change is hard. And habits die hard. Many managers and leaders are at a place in their career where it is easier to lean on current strengths and write-off implementing improvements in leveraging operational databases, social media, inbound marketing and sales automation. They rationalize with reasons such as "it doesn't apply to our market" or "we never needed to do it before" or "or customers don't use it; why should we".

But change is happening anyway. So find ways to walk before you run, but start walking. My local community in Rochester, NY has a variety of seminars, professional associations and peer groups to support the journey, and to meet others that are in the same stage of learning. It is a pleasure to share and work with these professionals.

Original Posting 18.04.17

There is nothing quite like springtime in upstate New York.

It’s mid-April, the sun is shining, the grass is greening and the flowers are budding.  It is a time where people are filled with energy to “get out there” and confront obstacles and make the changes they know they need to do. It’s the Season of Renewal.

Well, if you use Software as a service (SaaS) and leverage applications over the Internet to help run and manage your organization, there is also a season of renewal.  Sometimes it is annually, sometimes monthly, but you do get a chance to “re-up” your commitment to using the tool.  This is often seen as a time to review the costs and see what you can do to keep them as low as possible, or to subtract or add functionality.  But it is also a perfect time to do some self-evaluation with your team and the way you are using the tool.

Often the value of a software tool, such as a database management system, is lost in bad data management practices and inconsistent usage and deployment.  Interrupt-driven tasks and regression to old habits don’t help either.  And a few rogue individuals who won’t follow operational procedures can really make your data inaccurate - or just plain wrong.

So, when it is time to renew your software tool, plan a review of your team’s usage. Invite input from users who are champions, as well as users who struggle with the process. Include the following questions.

1. What are the main goals for using the system? Are the goals being met?
2. What are the main problems with using the system? Why are these problems happening?
3. Do we need to buy different functions or even a different software system?  What are the costs / changes involved?
4. Do we need to change how we use the system?  What are the costs / changes involved?
5. Do we need additional team members to get an optimal value for our system efforts? (IT support, related groups, …) How can we engage these people?
6. What should we use the system to achieve in the future? How will we measure this and how often?
7. If we make the identified changes, can we see a strong return on investment for using the software?

A fresh outlook on your daily processes can sometimes yield unexpected benefits.  Consider if springtime is the right time for renewal for your organization’s software practices. 

If you are a COMET customer, feel free to reach out to your account manager for tips and support in improving your team's usage of the COMET system.  

Contact support@comet4children.com - we would love to work with you!

Original Posting 15.06.17

It’s Monday, the children are starting to roll in and you’ve already prepped your area. Scanner plugged in: check; Unsupervised Scan window opened: check; and on top of that, everyone remembered their cards. With all of your i’s dotted and t’s crossed, you waive the child up to the front desk to begin the day’s sign-ins only to realize that after about 10 minutes, your internet-based system doesn’t seem to be registering much, if anything at all. It’s happening again- the system is slowing down right when you need it most; or is it?

One of the common issues that we see over at COMET is that many of our users don’t realize the impact that this influx of users can have on their organization’s internet connection. The above example is for taking attendance, but internet connection speed can impact any software that runs using the internet, impacting the speed of functions such as database searches and reporting. Nowadays, almost everyone has a device that can connect to the internet via Wi-Fi. All those devices connecting to the internet is going to affect the overall speed. This means that when a group of children come in and all of their devices connect to the internet at once, you’ve just split your connection by as many children as there are standing before you. This alone is enough to cause a delay between each scan, meaning that your connection is throttled and can cause some of your scanner data to not register into the system.

What can you do to prevent this?

The first thing that we suggest to our customers experiencing this problem is to do a speed test at www.speedtest.net or do a Google search on “Speed Test” use the service offered by them. We advise you do this at a time when there are no children in the building and then again when the children start to arrive. If you see slower speeds after they’ve shown up, you’ll know that the internet connection is being throttled…

So, what now? If you’re noticing that the connection is slowing down there are a few things that you can look in to. First, reach out to your IT department to see if they would be able to allocate a dedicated portion of the connection to your main PC.  They may even want to look into getting a Dual-Band Wi-Fi router that allows for two separate channels for your internet connection. This way you could have a dedicated Wi-Fi channel for the members (2.4ghz) and one specifically for the staff (5ghz).

Second, you may also want to contact your service provider to see what speeds they would recommend for the number of users you have accessing the internet at one time, in combination with the activities that they are using the Wi-Fi for (streaming media, web browsing, etc.). They have staff dedicated to learning about your operations and recommending the best solution for your needs.

Third, if you’re a COMET customer, contact support! We’d be happy to talk with you in more detail about any difficulties you’re having with internet speed - we’re here to help.