A critical tech partnership between Golden and Feeding San Diego has transformed the charitable giant’s ability to allocate resources toward reducing hunger in San Diego County, both with direct services and through a network of 160 partner organizations.
Integrating technology can be a timesaver for a charity – but only if it’s the right technology. Too often, charities shy away from new tech integration because it seems like more of a headache than a help. The tech system needs to be state-of-the-art, easy-to-use, compliant, and apply seamless integration to make it easier for staff to complete their work.
A key tech partnership between Golden and Feeding San Diego is one such program that achieves those goals.
In San Diego, more than 330,000 people live in conditions of food insecurity. What is more, 35% of food in America is wasted. Feeding San Diego is the leading hunger relief and food rescue organization in San Diego County and the only Feeding America member in the region. It is on a mission to “maximize” food rescue, and feed as many of these people falling through the cracks in the most efficient way possible.
Feeding San Diego manages over 14,000 volunteers per year from application, through screening, scheduling, tracking and re-engagement. This is what led the organization to Golden, the world’s most awarded volunteer management software. The charity depends almost entirely on volunteers and volunteer management to run its operations.
In years prior, effort spent reconciling paper processes and disjointed technology consumed the majority of their volunteer staff’s time. After adopting Golden, all of these processes were fully automated with Golden’s volunteer management Dashboard, effectively allowing the staff to reallocate at least 10 hours of their time per week per person toward building more productive relationships.
How? Feeding San Diego utilized Golden to go fully paperless and streamline compliant data sharing by integrating with all of their other technology systems. Golden automatically applies the highest security standards including GDPR, COPPA, and other thresholds for responsibly handling, storing, and encrypting PII. The system enables live, volunteer-facing background checks and assures organizations meet local and regional guidelines.
The largest time-saver, though, is automated CRM management through Golden. Golden has unique partnerships with Salesforce, Blackbaud, Microsoft, and many other industry leaders to improve relationship management for volunteer-led nonprofits everywhere in the world.
As a result of these time savings, Feeding San Diego was able to launch an entirely new initiative — a San Diego community-wide web portal where they are able to promote and track the volunteer opportunities associated with 160 external partner nonprofits, companies and other organizers who collaboratively work to alleviate hunger. All of these partners have access to their own impact data in real time for free, without having to enter anything into a system. This compliantly automates all of their reporting for grant-writing and re-engaging supporters. Lack of time and technology limitations made the dream of this program impossible before Golden.
“By implementing the Golden Aggregator software, we will be able to increase our partners’ capacity, benefiting them by increasing hours of operations, streamlining and formalizing operation processes, and increasing visibility through Feeding San Diego’s network of more than 14,000 volunteers,” said Carissa Casares, Senior Communications Manager at Feeding San Diego.
According to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, 6 million tons of recoverable food ends up in landfills annually. Much of this food could be recovered and redistributed to the millions of families and children that are hungry.
The key tech partnership is also helping Feeding San Diego recruit more volunteers for its new programs. Golden helps connect charities to corporations that seek to support mutually beneficial goals through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Many of these companies support volunteer time off and other programs – using Golden for support.
Schools and community groups also promote volunteerism among their populations. Golden serves as a community organizing platform for all of these agencies. It is the link in the value chain to help charities improve their impact while supporting organizations and corporations to fulfill their community engagement goals.
Sam Fankuchen, founder and CEO of Golden, says: “The partnership with Feeding San Diego shows exactly why we invented Golden, and we couldn’t be more thrilled for their success. Tech can help great organizers maximize their impact to spread more kindness throughout the world. Our goal is that they spend as much time as possible on actual program work, and improve their practice through the tools on our platform to connect with more like-minded volunteers and supporters.”
In Casares’ words, “Golden supports the volunteer department’s mission of providing the best possible experience to our volunteers, who are the heartbeat of our organization. This starts with their first introduction to Feeding San Diego, which regularly begins with our Feeding San Diego-branded Portal that Golden supports on our website when community members are looking to donate their time. To be able to provide a seamless experience when signing up for a volunteer shift, we know that our volunteers will not be distracted by technology issues and they can spend more time focusing on our mission.”
Learn more about how Golden can help you.
This article is a sponsored post provided by Golden.
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