Midwest Food Bank is a nonprofit organization that actively serves 3.6 million people across 2,000+ pantries in the U.S and Canada through an “aggregator extended affiliate network model” aimed to alleviate hunger and poverty by gathering and distributing food donations to not-for-profits and disaster sites without cost to the recipients.
Whether it’s a variety of Unicef country offices, state and local governments, United Ways around the country, multi-location nonprofits like the California Volunteers and HandsOn Atlanta or community hubs like the Greater Chicago Food Depository and Midwest Food Bank, Golden’s network effect enables large scale organizers to track key program metrics, and roll them up to the parent level, enabling a holistic overview of local partners and corporate affiliates.
Prior to using Golden’s award-winning volunteer management platform, the organization faced many organizational headwinds and were working across multiple disparate systems in order to manage their volunteer-related workflows, such as communicating with volunteers via email and SMS, running background checks and processing waivers, tracking of volunteer hours, reporting on the impact of community partners, creating and managing ongoing opportunities for CSR partners, and more.
Due to these ongoing challenges, the team was spending more time on daily administrative volunteer workflows, and less time focused on recruiting, screening, and retaining volunteers and progressing their programs.
Given Midwest Food Bank’s unique model and recent capital investment in Salesforce, they were in search of a best-of-breed volunteer management solution that would integrate with their Salesforce donor database and enable a 360-degree view of their volunteers and potential donors. It was also imperative that Golden’s platform would offer depth and scalability to other CRM’s like Blackbaud, and Microsoft, in the event that the organization decided to make programmatic changes to their donor CRM.
Additionally, it was imperative that they could synchronize all volunteer activities within Salesforce, and provide easy-to-use tools for local chapters to organize their own activities and share real-time results with their regional headquarters.
That’s where Golden stepped in!
By leveraging the power of the Golden platform and its email & SMS automation capabilities, Midwest was able to save its administrative team 400 hours of time per chapter, per year – dramatically reducing time on manual data entry. As a result, Midwest Food Bank saw a < 95% email capture rate, with higher rates of engagement. This allowed them to quickly re-engage volunteers in the case of emergency disaster relief projects, which was an arduous process before leveraging Golden.
Additionally, Midwest Food Bank needed a way to validate parental consent and waiver completion in real time, without using disparate systems. Golden stepped in and was able to streamline and centralize the waiver and background check completion process, while automatically syncing that data back to their main donor CRM – Salesforce, for a 360 view of their volunteers.
As a result of implementing Golden across their national office, their 2,000 affiliate partners and organizers were able to leverage the platform for FREE, in order to post opportunities, track sign-ups and volunteer hours, and share their real-time results with the national office.
Midwest Food Bank saw immediate time-to-value due to Golden’s turnkey implementation.
Golden is recognized as being the most award winning and user friendly volunteer management platform, proudly partnered with over 20,000+ organizations including some of the largest food insecurity based organizations with network effects reaching across thousands of nonprofit partners, volunteer centers, corporate teams, and more. Golden offers best in class integrations to donor management systems like Salesforce, Blackbaud, and Microsoft for advanced levels of volunteer reporting, segmentation, and a clear view of the constituent volunteer lifecycle.
This article is a sponsored post provided by Golden.
