Hyperion has first-class support for the sheltered count. You preload your list of shelters so volunteers pick from a dropdown instead of typing them in, which keeps shelter names consistent and lets you filter data and run reports shelter-by-shelter — not just by shelter type.
What you get
- A clean dropdown for volunteers so shelter names stay consistent
- Filtering on the map, data view, and reports by individual shelter or a group of shelters
- An optional per-team shelter list, so volunteers only see the shelters in their region — useful when you have many shelters and don’t want volunteers scrolling through all of them
Preparing the shelter list
Create a CSV with the following columns:
- name (required) — what admins and volunteers see. It doesn’t have to match the shelter’s formal name; you can use a program name within a shelter if you want to break that out separately.
- type (required) — must be exactly
transitional housing,emergency shelter, orsafe haven. - region (optional) — the team name the shelter belongs to. Leave the column out entirely if you’re not using teams.
You can use Google Sheets, Excel, or anything else that exports CSV.
Uploading to Hyperion
Go to the Shelters tab, give the list a name (internal — something like “2026 PIT v1”), and select your CSV. If your CSV includes a region column, turn on the “include regions” option and select the region map it refers to. Save.
Enabling it on a PIT count
When creating the PIT count you’ll select the list of shelters you want to use.
The volunteer experience
When a volunteer starts a sheltered survey, they pick from the shelter list. If they’re on a team, they only see shelters in that team’s region. Either way, there’s always an Other option so a volunteer who can’t find the shelter they’re in can still submit data — you won’t get blocked submissions.
Filtering and reporting
The data collected will automatically be categorized based on the type of shelter. This works in the reporting tables and filtering.