Second Harvest Community Food Bank
Second Harvest Community Food Bank is proud to be a member of the Feeding America Network. Feeding America is a hunger organization with a nationwide network of food banks feeding the hungry.
Nearly 30 percent of the individuals served by Second Harvest are children under the age of 18. Many of our neighbors are faced with tough choices, with more than half forced to choose between paying for health care and paying for groceries in the past year. Each week Second Harvest serves more than 15,000 individuals, and last year Second Harvest distributed more than 5.1 million pounds of food.
Challenge
Second Harvest Community Food Bank was looking for a user-friendly donor management system to help them keep track of donations and donor records, and run reports. “We were looking for a user-friendly donor database,” said Gayle Stowers, Development Specialist at Second Harvest Community Food Bank.
It was also important for Gayle and her team to take steps to make their organization more sustainable. Bloomerang’s Sustainability Scorecard feature was built to help with just that.
Solution
Second Harvest Community Food Bank had found a system and a feature that could help them become more sustainable by growing their fundraising team. “We are working on building our Development department and implementing a development committee to help grow.” One of their goals is to use The Sustainability Scorecard to help them focus on documenting more face-to-face meetings with prospective donors. Increasing donor loyalty is a positive factor for sustainability.
Results
Since using the feature, Second Harvest Community Food Bank has benefited from the enhanced visibility into their organization’s sustainability. Their CEO uses the Sustainability Scorecard to stay on top of their metrics, while also having an idea of where they fall on the sustainability spectrum.
At the end of the day, the single most important thing Bloomerang does to help Second Harvest Community Food Bank increase its impact, raise more money, and ultimately become more sustainable is simple. The capabilities they have with email solicitation and segmented communications have helped them increase donations over the past 3 years. Ensuring donor retention is an important step on an organization’s sustainability journey.
It’s amazing what a user-friendly, yet comprehensive tool built for sustainability and nonprofit data segmentation can do for the long-term growth of an organization such as Second Harvest Community Food Bank.