Hylaine skilled volunteer boosts WordPress skills of The Foundation for Tomorrow, needed to help meet their fundraising goals so that they help more vulnerable children get the academic and emotional support they need to live successful lives.
The Foundation for Tomorrow (TFFT) is a Charlotte-based nonprofit that addresses vulnerability through the power of quality education. With consistent and thoughtful investment in students and teachers in Tanzania, they offer orphan and vulnerable children the opportunity to succeed. Their holistic services include access to quality schooling, health and psychosocial support, and life skills programs. TFFT also works to improve the quality of instruction, resources in the classroom, and school management to ensure widespread, sustainable impact.
When TFFT leadership needed support in executing important edits to their website, they reached out to Apparo for help. Through Apparo Tech Therapy program, Samantha Filcik, TFFT Development and Operations Manager was match to a skilled volunteer from Hylaine, Kevin McDonald.
Samantha explains the importance of this work, “Our mission, breadth of programming and impact is complicated to explain. We knew that our website needed to be improved in terms of how people navigate to get key information. I knew how to make text edits and how to work with existing templates, but I needed help to learn to do more. Before this project, I went to Google every time I needed to make a change that I didn’t know how to do.
“The goal of the website is to get people to engage with us and learn about our impact so that they are more likely to become and stay recurring donors. We expected that Kevin would help us learn to make the website edits we had planned, but he did so much more. He helped us strategically improve our site to make it easier to navigate and to improve our communication of our mission. He also reviewed and advised us on all of our website plug-ins.
“This was my first experience with Apparo and I couldn’t have asked for a better Tech Therapist for them to have paired us with. Kevin was more than prepared for every meeting and gave us amazing insight to the technical side of things, as well as different marketing strategies to help us meet our overall goals. He did research outside of our meeting times and sent us several examples of websites for us to look at with ideas for our own site. He also took the time to dig into our current plug-ins and gave us feedback on each of the ones we need to change, delete or add. He was so patient with all of my questions and never made me feel like I was wasting his time. I still can’t believe that this was a free service.”
As a result of this work, Samantha anticipates that TFFT will experience:
- Time savings – through increased knowledge, confidence and skills in website editing
- Cost savings of approximately $2,000/year – by no longer needing to go to outside vendor for support
- Improved website functionality and security – through plug in optimization
- Improved website user experience
These improvements should help drive an increase in fundraising, which will be put to work to help expand TFFT’s reach into new communities and schools, to help ensure successful futures for more children in Tanzania.
In closing, Samantha shares, “I didn’t know exactly what to expect when working with an Apparo volunteer. Kevin was phenomenal! It was so nice to work with someone who cares so much and has so much knowledge. It’s been a great experience.”
