When it comes to providing food to communities at risk, social service software provides invaluable tools and resources for increasing your organization’s reach and impact. The more you know about your program and the community it serves, the better you can serve that community. This much is common sense, but using software to provide more food to those who need it can seem counterintuitive or wasteful. This couldn’t be more untrue. By simply tracking data points, managing projects, and organizing strategies on specialized software, food programs will be able to quickly increase efficiency and begin helping more people. 

Tracking data is one of the most important things an organization can do to begin working more efficiently. Data points such as volunteer turnout, donations, and waste will surely provide invaluable knowledge for your organization in the long term. Clear Impact Scorecard can create easy-to-read visualizations of your collected data, allowing for more efficient meetings to discuss the implications of your findings. Even the most efficient organization has room to improve, and by turning your work into crunchable numbers, any inefficient practice will likely be quickly brought to your attention. 

Social service software is also likely to bring more coherent organization to your food drive or nonprofit. By allowing supervisors to read, assign, and create tasks for themselves or other employees, organizations will find a sense of cohesion among their ranks. Similarly, all employees will find use in a unified calendar, which can be updated to match the needs of your organization. Cross-organization calendars also reduce redundancy by eliminating misunderstandings and the need to repeat tasks. 

Strategizing for the future can also be an important task for any organization providing food. In this way, software can help you go from the short term, such as having a food drive next week, to the long term, such as aiming to provide food for 200 new families by next winter. Directing an organization towards a unified goal can help staff to remember what they are working for, and will avoid confusion or lack of clarity regarding organizational goals. By creating readily accessed visuals and charts regarding future strategies, all members of your group will be able to work on the same page without unnecessary or redundant meetings and reminders.

By reducing waste and increasing an organization’s overall knowledge of their work, social service software is a necessary tool for anyone who wishes to make the biggest impact with their food-supplying nonprofit or group. Without useful analytics and software, any organization will end up working at a level below maximum efficiency.