At our 2019 Community Impact Breakfast, Apparo CEO, Kim Lanphear, compared Apparo to a friend that knows a lot about cars. She told the story of a friend who was having car troubles but didn’t think addressing them was an option – until another friend showed him the way.
Like that friend, Apparo shows our nonprofit partners how “better” is an option, too.
Here’s the transcript of her speech:
“Good morning and thank you for being here today! We are so grateful you have joined us today and we have some great stories to share – to lift your month and year. And as is typical with me – I am going to ask you some questions – get you involved in our conversation today.
How many of you had a “clunker” as your first car or knew someone who did? Shout out some of the clunker models you remember ….
I have a friend who used to drive a beat-up old car. It would clunk around, huffing and puffing. And the worst part – the brake pedal wouldn’t pop up on its own after being released.
To combat this, my friend used a large rubber band to force the release after he was finished braking.
He didn’t dare take his car into the shop. He didn’t trust car maintenance shops. He was certain the fix would cost too much.
So, for several years, he continued to drive this car around, dependent on his rubber band to get it moving again after every stop.
That’s sad enough on its own, right?
Well, it gets worse.
Finally, one day, a friend of my friend’s saw the makeshift fix in his car. And this friend knew a thing or two about cars.
He said to my friend, ‘You’ve been driving around like this for how long? You do realize that’s only a $100 fix, don’t you?’
My friend was shocked. That was nothing compared to all the trouble he had been through. He had his brake pedal fixed that day.
At Apparo, we are not car experts. But what we are is that “friend” who knows a thing or two about making the right change in technology and business processes, and we’re that friend for our community’s nonprofits.
So often, nonprofits get by with the bare minimum. They either can’t, or think they can’t, afford “better.” They may not even know what “better” is.
For these nonprofits, it also feels like a rubber band fix will have to do.
So, they huff and puff along with outdated software, overflowing Excel workbooks (or worse, paper files), and business workflows that waste money and time, and put important data at risk.
But it doesn’t have to be that way! And we know this to be true.
Apparo helps nonprofits by connecting them to skilled volunteers, resources and education they so desperately need to move past their rubber bands. This makes the solutions to their needs both accessible and affordable.
To date, we’ve served more than 500 of the greater Charlotte area’s nonprofits, and it’s amazing the service capacity we’ve unlocked in doing so.
We’re talking about more than 500,000 individual needs addressed in the community so far – and that number is growing.
In the past twelve months, we’ve delivered 13,000 hours of service.
And that service has meant every $1 that was donated to Apparo was turned into $1.67 of impact back into Charlotte’s nonprofit community.
Our mission is unlocking these nonprofits’ missions – and multiplying their impact.”
