 With us today is John Hernandez. He is the Executive Director of Nonprofit Exchange. So the first thing I want to talk about is simplicity. And you're going to see that even in my slides, we try to keep it simple. Technology can be really overwhelming. We do a lot with fundraising for nonprofits and making sure that the way people can donate through technology is accessible to everybody, to anyone who doesn't have a smartphone even. The number one foundation we have found for that is text messaging. Everybody knows how to text message. You know, my grandmother sends me text messages about things she sees on the cooking channel. Well, at the start of COVID in early 2020, we, I was just amazed at how many people were really coming out of the woodworks to try to help their local neighbors. And of course we use the tools that are in front of us. Everybody had a Facebook. Everybody has a Facebook almost. And so we were seeing Facebook groups pop up in every city and every county to create like a neighborhood of giving. Did you lose your job? Can you no longer afford food? Can you not make it out because you're a single parent and you don't want to take your child out to the grocery store? There were so many reasons that people were homebound and were having trouble getting to accessing food even from their local pantries. The big problem with the groups was you would see a post and it would say, hey, I need someone to pick up, you know, milk and bread. And it was dated from three days ago. So within a few weeks of seeing these groups pop up and seeing so many people subscribe to them, we want to come up with something that immediately tied in people who are in need directly with those who could help them. And so the two groups that we're trying to support were pantries. Pantries of course were overwhelmed, at least the ones we were working with. You know, they were ready short staffed. You had a lot of corporate partnerships who weren't allowing their employees to volunteer on site. And then of course we had the people that we were talking about, the people who were homebound who had no way to get out. Maybe they were new in town. Maybe they didn't have anyone who could go out and pick up groceries either from a grocery store or from a pantry. So we created two different routes for people to access our platform. Our platform is 100% text-based. And it was a way for an individual to put in a request for up to five grocery items that could be donated or reimbursed by a volunteer or a way for a pantry to put in a request for someone to come by, pick up a box of food and just drop it off at someone in needs door. And so again, creating a solution where we weren't bugging our volunteers all the time. In Austin, during the freeze, we had 600 people sign up overnight to volunteer and do deliveries. How do you not annoy everybody when they're all claiming the same volunteer opportunity at the same time? And so the solution we came to was creating value around each text. In all our marketing messaging, we told everybody, hey, these messages go out one at a time. When you get that message that says somebody is in need or a pantry needs your help, you are the only one looking at it at that very moment. This is your chance to really be a hero. And so that's why we've structured it around not doing a mass text to everybody and then people getting frustrated by everybody replying yes at the same time and then you find out the volunteer opportunities no longer there. It's about saying, yes, I can do it. And knowing that if you're getting that message, it means someone else passed on it. And so you are the direct line for support for that person, for that pantry. It also really keeps down not annoying your volunteers. It really brings it down to you're getting maybe a message once a week because the other 600 volunteers are really picking up the slack. You're not getting constant messages throughout the day, through push notifications, through text messages. You're getting it at the exact moment when you're needed. And so it was about creating that culture of value where our volunteers know when they get that text message, it's their chance to be a hero for someone. And so we keep it very simple. The details are in the text and then it's a simple yes or no. Each volunteer has about eight minutes to reply before it moves on to the next volunteer. And again, with text messaging, it allowed us to open up to a whole new realm of people we didn't know were even need. We created a new way for people to actually submit their requests for assistance through text message. And we found out that a lot of apps and a lot of websites aren't accessible to those who are visually impaired. And so by doing it through text, they're able to use their same apps that they use for visual impairment to put it in order. And I'm gonna talk about a unique story about what happened in Austin. Right now we operate this out of three states and about five different cities. So in Austin, I actually happened to lead town right before the freeze. If everyone's familiar with what happened, everyone lost power. It was below zero temperatures, no water in some cases. And we pushed this platform. We were building our volunteer base up in Austin. We kind of just pushed it out the door. We woke up the next day to 600 people ready to do home deliveries. They said, I'm ready to go out, pick up someone's needs. And in just a matter of 24 hours, we completed over 200 emergency deliveries. Again, all of it's through text and it was about creating a fast and simple way to organize a community to be able to help those in need. Our platform is completely free to anyone in the US. You can visit our site, helpaction.org, sign up. You can get your pantry started and we can guide you through the rest of the process.