Nonprofit technology volunteer support drives more money and time for Second Harvest to feed families in need.
Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina strives through education, advocacy, and partnerships to eliminate hunger by the solicitation and distribution of food. They provide a regional distribution warehouse and branches that supply food and grocery items to over 950 charitable agencies that assist people in need in a 24 county service region. They also provide training, technical assistance and hunger education to partner agencies.
As they prepared to migrate off of their on-prem server to a cloud-based infrastructure, Dominique Link-Kelley, IT Supervisor, reached out to Apparo for support to ensure a smooth transition. Through Apparo’s Tech Therapy program, he was matched to volunteers Cory Aurandt (Opkalla) and Don Domzalski and Mike Persichini (both of RSM) who helped ensure Dominique was following best practices throughout the transition. We checked in with Dominique recently to learn about the impact of his work with Apparo and his volunteers.
Dominique shared, “There were two major projects: getting our Active Directory into the into the cloud and moving our Microsoft Dynamics from on-premise to the cloud. Those two things are our biggest resources. Without them, everything else doesn’t run. As I have not done a changeover of that size or scope before, I needed experienced people to be able to bounce things off, to help make sure that I’m on the right track and asking the right questions.”
Nonprofit technology support has already driven significant cost and time savings and helped Second Harvest realize other important benefits that will help them fulfill their mission of eliminating hunger.
Several important benefits have already been realized:
- Cost savings of more than $20,000
- Increased security of data
- Considerable time savings (150 hours+)
- Improved quality of life for project lead
Dominique explained, “If it hadn’t been for conversations that I was able to have with my Apparo volunteers, I would not have asked the right questions about the customization that we needed. We were ready to spend $20,000 on customization of reports, and, working together to ask the right questions, we got it down to $1,000. I’m more prepared for the migration and will save additional money because I have things set up, so I will need less external vendor support. It will be about a 50% cost savings, which will be another several thousand dollars. Our goal is to run as lean as we because with every dollar we save, we can put about 7 pounds of food in someone’s home.
“Without this support, I would have spent hours and hours and hours of curating research, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, listening to webinars, reading documentation and attending classes. A couple of hours of discussion with my volunteers replaced 2-3 weeks of me working an extra 50 hours a week to just get to a cursory level of understanding. Even with that, I would have been more likely to make a mistake, which would have cost us even more in time and money.
“It would have also taken away from all the other work I’ve been able to do in that time. I’ve been able to dedicate time to three additional projects trying to help improve other processes, that will help save even more time and money, so we can distribute more nutritious food to the 950+ agencies that we serve.
“Because of their support in asking the right questions, things that I didn’t think of myself, we are also better positioned in terms of the security of our data. That’s important for maintaining the goodwill of our donors and the people we serve, but is also important in terms of saving time – time I won’t have to spend dealing with security issues or data loss. Time that I would have had to waste getting things back to the status quo instead of being able to invest my time in making things better.
“In the past, without support like this, I worked several all-nighters to ensure we made deadlines. Working with the Apparo volunteers also helped me streamline the migration process, so now we are about 6 weeks ahead of schedule and I haven’t lost a wink of sleep! And that’s very important because when I get sleep, I’m much more efficient than when I’m just holding on, just trying to get through the day. It has been phenomenal to work with them. I know a lot, but there is always more to learn. Getting connected to subject matter experts has made this a much better project. Without Apparo, I would have made it work, but I would be a lot more tired right now.
“The work we’re doing with Apparo and our volunteers to move to the cloud is so important because the more people we can get out into the field, with more access to information, the faster they can turn things around, the more money we can save and, ultimately, the more people we can help, which means we’re putting more food on people’s plates and that’s what we’re here for. Through wonderful partnerships like the one with Apparo, we know that ‘Together We CAN end hunger.’”
