Zarephath Christian Church’s Pantry is located in central New Jersey and serves struggling families with shelf-stable foods and basic necessities.
Mark Avery has been serving the pantry for over a decade, currently as their Director of Outreach and Life Groups. “10 years ago we were using pencil and paper,” recalls Avery, “[We had] little to no idea of the communities we were serving beyond the fact that they needed food.” At the time, pulling together reports for the local food bank was difficult. Staff change-overs and re-training made this manual method even more time consuming.
Avery doesn’t remember if it was a websearch or a recommendation from another pantry that introduced him to PantrySoft, but he does remember the difference it made: “PantrySoft changed everything. The administrative reporting burden went from 3 to 5 hours to a few seconds.” Reports could be run with a press of the button, and client check-in no longer required redundant forms to be filled out. Volunteers could now simply scan a client’s ID card and talk one-on-one with a client – instead of having them fill out a paper form for the hundredth time. This vital face time makes for deeper insight into a client’s situation, and allows the pantry to suggest additional resources if a client struggles with more than food insecurity.
With a more efficient reporting and registration process, Zarephath Christian Church Pantry began to focus on a bigger picture. They customized registration questions to learn more about the multicultural community they served. Learning which countries their clients hailed from helped make decisions on sourcing culturally appropriate food. It also validated the push to have bilingual and trilingual staff members and services.
Outreach activities were informed by their data, too. They realized that 70-80% of their clients lived in 3 or 4 zipcodes in the county. Instead of driving all over the county, they could focus their outreach efforts on the deep need of families within these zipcodes. Now almost a decade later, data from county agencies is backing up the need Zarephath Christian Church Pantry saw years ago. “That was huge,” remarks Avery “[Having the data early on] made us relevant within the conversations around us.”
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, volunteer data scientists helped Zarephath Christian Church Pantry configure a tool for visualizing their data from PantrySoft. This information was shared with local social service agencies to add valuable facts to the conversation on need. “It wasn’t arbitrary, it wasn’t a guess. It wasn’t like ‘we’re serving a lot more people’,” continues Avery, “We could give very granular information on who we’re serving, how much, where they’re from, patterns of zipcodes” and more.
Now when the Board asks ‘Who are we serving?’ Avery can show the information visually. Whether it’s a map with the global distribution of clients, or a bell curve demonstrating that most clients use the pantry supplementally (not chronically), the data visualizations have helped Avery communicate patterns over time. These broad patterns can always be tracked back to individual clients being served. That connection to the human story is essential for donors and other stakeholders. “People who support this kind of work support it because it connects with something in their story,” Avery explains, “There’s something in the data picture that they can connect with and the fact that you can show it is huge.”
Zarephath Christian Church Pantry does more than collect data – they act on it. Using the text message integration in PantrySoft, they can communicate with clients by zip code directly from the platform. This proved ground-breaking during a local flood, when emergency services worked to distribute pallets of bleach to affected families. Avery describes their impact as “incomparable” to other systems of distribution used by emergency services. Zarephath Christian Church Pantry received 18 pallets of bleach, and distributed all of it widely across their service area in a single day. Thanks to the trust they’d built and the right tools, they mass texted families in need in the impacted areas. In contrast, another distribution site took six weeks to distribute a pallet and a half of bleach.
During onboarding, the PantrySoft team helped Zarephath Christian Church Pantry configure the software to meet their needs. Above and beyond the benefits of graduating from paper to a digital platform, Avery found the PantrySoft platform to be very easy to work with.
Additionally, over the years Zarephath Christian Church Pantry invested in some custom innovations and the PantrySoft professional services team leaned in to make them happen. Some of these innovations are standard features today, like the referral feature and text messaging. “The PantrySoft team worked with us to make the program do what we need it to, and far more” Mark concludes.