The season of giving.
Each year, the holiday spirit brings with it a desire to give back. Whether it is through individual donations of gently used household items, purchasing toys for a collection event, or giving cash, this is a time of year when people reflect and give back to their communities and organizations that they care about. One popular practice is when a family in need is “adopted” by their community, a local business, or other organization to help create a better Christmas by donating items that they want and need. Earlier this month, we were contacted by three different groups to see if we could help them streamline their Christmas giving programs – and with a few hacks to our site, we were able to help them make it easier to coordinate support to those in need. We are so happy we were able to help and wanted to share some details about organizations that have used CheckedTwice to give back this Christmas.
One group was the Moores Park Neighborhood Association in Lansing, Michigan. The president of their association, Paul Johns, contacted us to see if we could help with their annual adoption of neighborhood families. There were 7 families in need and he was looking for an upgrade from their previous system that involved a PDF list of all of the family member’s wishlists. After talking with Paul to get some additional details, Andrew was able to adapt our system to work for the neighborhood – allowing access to up-to-date-wishlists for all the neighbors interested in helping. They could see exactly what the family members wanted and saw instructions about where to drop the items off. Some entire families were adopted by local businesses and now they’re just working on an event to wrap all of the gifts!
We also worked with Peggy Smith who was organizing an effort on behalf of Eagle Point, Wisconsin’s PTO. They were looking for a way to organize wishlists that the school’s teachers had for their classrooms – items that would make the school a more enriching learning environment. We were able to set up an account where each teacher was able to add items to their lists and parents or others in the community could take a look through a dedicated link to decide what to purchase and donate. This is a great way for teachers to share specific needs and for the community to make direct donations that they know will have an immediate impact.
One other group that we worked with this month was the Goleta Valley Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, California. Madeline Bergerot was looking for a way to make their annual donation collection process more efficient and we were more than happy to help. We made a few modifications to allow the hospital’s staff to view and claim gifts from the wishlists of local families in need. Using CheckedTwice helped to eliminate duplicate items, made it easy to see exactly what each child wanted, and made it super easy to administer the program as a whole.
We were so happy to have been contacted by these three great groups and are so glad that we were able to help them help their communities. We had already touched on some ways to use CheckedTwice for charitable giving on our blog but each of these organization’s programs allowed us to explore even more ways to help and for that we are very grateful. If you are organizing a charitable event this Christmas or any time during the year that requires organization of multiple recipients or groups, contact us and we’ll see if we can help!
