Impact management for Your Local Pantry
The Local Pantry worked with Economic Change earlier in 2019 setting up their initial salesforces CRM. We helped set up the membership processes and build out a community to track the operation of the Pantries and allow for the growth of the system.
The Context
Your Local Pantry was formed by Stockport Homes Group in 2013, just as austerity began to bite. They noticed that several of their tenants were constantly struggling to make ends meet. They needed something different from a food bank – which is designed to provide short-term emergency support. Through Your Local Pantry they built a social franchise, which is different from a food bank in a number of important ways:
The Challenge
The focus of this project was to set up the membership processes and build out a community to track the operation of the Pantries and allow for the growth of the system.
Priorities of the project were as follows:
- To further customise Church Action on Poverty’s Salesforce system to host the Your Local Pantry CRM information including Pantries, Pantry Volunteers, Pantry Members and payments/visits
- To establish sharing rules and security to ensure external pantry users can only see the information appropriate to them as agreed with the project team.
- To build a customer community for initially 50 pantry managers and senior volunteers to manage their pantry operations.
- To provide an induction and training for pantry managers via webinars, ‘how to’ guides and initial set-up
- Build a suite of reports which allowed the team to highlight the work and impact they have on the communities they work in.
The Solution
Economic Change customised a back end membership management system to all for Pantry members and their payments to be tracked.
- Tools we used included the NPSP functionality around management of households as this is particularly relevant to the work that they do
- Reports were set up to look at how many people have been supported, as families and as adults and children.
Each Pantry location was set up as a separate organisation which allows the members, visits and payments linked to each particular pantry to be tracked and reported on over time.
Economic Change created a community which each Local Pantry can access and add real time data for visits and payments. This can be linked back to existing members or new members can be created.
- Salesforce’s mobile capabilities allow volunteers to log into the community via tablets and to record the relevant data for each visit
The Results
Your Local Pantry is now in a roll-out phase, supported by Church Action on Poverty, Thrive Birmingham, St Andrew’s Community Network Liverpool and Faith in Community Scotland. The national network is 50 strong, and growing, with the benefits of the model clearly evident:
- Saving money on grocery bills: Over £20 a week or if a member visits weekly, £780 a year
- Saving food from landfill: Through environmental charity FareShare, Your Local Pantry draws on the oversupply in supermarket supply chains
- Enhancing nutrition and food variety: Through a commitment to offering fresh and frozen, chilled and seasonal produce
- Knitting neighbourhoods together: Through the weekly shop, with familiar faces, fighting isolating and signposting to other services
- Developing employability: Through a range of volunteering opportunities, developing skills through systems governing stock and software, payments, communication and environmental health
You can find more statistics from Your Local Pantry in their Impact Report here: https://www.yourlocalpantry.co.uk/about-us/our-social-impact-report/
