Scott Lewis of Trail Websites specializes in nonprofit websites specifically for conservation. Based on his experiences using Give with his customers, he recently decided to use Give in a project at Loaves & Fishes Food Pantry where he is a board member and volunteer.
Cause: Thanksgiving & Holiday Dinner
Loaves & Fishes exists as a mission of love and faith to provide food and temporary support services to residents of Ayer, Devens, Groton, Harvard, Littleton, and Shirley Massachusetts and advocates for changes by its clients that will promote independence and self-reliance. Loaves & Fishes helps feed over 800 families each year and distributes about 7,000 pounds of food every pantry session.
They have about 3,000 people who subscribe to their newsletter, follow on social media, in addition to their local print media reach.
How Trail Websites found Give
When we asked Scott how he found Give, he said that he searched in the WordPress.org repository and now loves it.
“One reason Trail Websites is using Give on many new projects is the quality and positive attitude of Give’s technical support.”
Campaign Goal:
450 turkeys and 175 hams this holiday season.
How Loaves & Fishes Used Give:
Trail Websites designs, builds, and operates websites for a variety of nonprofits, primarily those in land conservation. Their founder, Scott Lewis, is a board member at Loaves & Fishes Food Pantry and built their current website as a volunteer. Trail Websites has now been able to help them with a special campaign and will be evaluating Give to replace their standard donation solution in the future.
Special Campaign:
Last year the community’s overwhelming generosity resulted in 800 turkey donations. While this is a blessing, it is also a problem as they do not have space to store 800 frozen turkeys.
This year Loaves & Fishes is using Give for a donation form for their Thanksgiving and Holiday Dinner fund drive. They are asking the community to repeat their generosity but to do so with financial donations. There are several advantages for Loaves & Fishes to provide holiday dinners for their neighbors this way.
Firstly, the donor doesn’t have to go buy a turkey or ham and bring it to Loaves & Fishes. Secondly, because of bulk purchases, Loaves & Fishes can stretch the value of the donations. Loaves & Fishes can also manage the purchases to ensure the right amount and types of food.
With Give, they can show a progress bar to let people know how close Loaves & Fishes is to their goal and can redirect visitors to the regular donation page once this special goal is achieved.
The Give form is embedded via shortcode in a page that is a landing page for various promotional efforts for this campaign and we are using offline and PayPal payment gateways at this time.
Campaign Results:
At the time of writing, this campaign is just getting ready to launch. Thanks to a generous donor’s initial offline donation, Loaves & Fishes is launching their campaign with their progress bar already at 10% of their goal!
An important result not directly related to the campaign’s outcome, is that Trail Websites saves significant time and money by using Give to build forms like this allowing them to help more nonprofits, more cost effectively.
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