Campaign · 2026
A food drive program the community could actually run
Turning scattered goodwill into a repeatable system — with the tools, pages, and messaging to support every organizer.
- Client
- Tempe Community Action Agency
- Services
- Program Design, Web Content, Print Collateral, Messaging
- Outcome
- End-to-end — from first interest to final drop-off
The challenge
People in Tempe wanted to host food drives for TCAA. What they didn't have was a clear way to do it. Every inquiry became a one-off conversation, and every organizer needed to be walked through the same questions from the beginning. The interest was real; the infrastructure to meet it wasn't there yet.
The approach
Rather than answering the same questions faster, I built a system that answered them in advance. I designed an end-to-end food drive process that combines information, tools, and communications to support an organizer from the moment they get curious through the day they drop off donations — including a dedicated webpage, a registration form, and a promotional kit they can use to rally their own network.
The impact
The result is a cohesive communications system that lets multiple community partners run drives at once, while giving TCAA sustainable infrastructure instead of a growing pile of individual conversations. Organizers get clarity; the organization gets capacity back.
The problem with saying yes one email at a time
Community-hosted food drives are exactly the kind of support a nonprofit wants more of. They bring in donations, they widen the circle of people who know the organization exists, and they cost very little to accept.
They also cost staff time — a surprising amount of it — when every organizer has to be onboarded by hand.
Designing for the organizer, not the org chart
I mapped the process from the organizer’s side rather than the organization’s. Someone hosting a drive has a predictable set of questions in a predictable order: Can I do this? What do you need? How do I tell people? Where does it go? The system answers each one at the moment it comes up.
The webpage handles discovery and eligibility. The registration form captures what TCAA needs to know without a phone call. The promotional kit means the organizer doesn’t have to design anything themselves — and, not incidentally, means every drive looks like it belongs to the same organization.
Why it holds up
Nothing about this depends on one person being available to shepherd it. That was the point. The program can run several drives simultaneously, and it will still work when the next communications manager inherits it.
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