The traditional food drive has gotten an upgrade. Instead of scouring the pantry for spare cans, do-gooders can donate to a drive of their choice with a few clicks at the Jersey-grown web business, You Give Goods. “We basically virtualized the heavy lifting of a food drive,” says CEO Patrick O’Neill.
The Mendham-based company was born of a conversation O’Neill had with friends. “We started to wonder whether there could be technology to help the productivity of charity work,” he says. Since its launch in September 2011, the website has aided more than 600 drives. It also won an innovation award from the New Jersey Technology Council, which provides business support to technology companies.
Food-drive organizers can register their drives at yougivegoods.com for free. The company creates a unique page with the drive’s description, goal, and start and end dates. Supporters use the website to select from the company’s list of needed items, which are shipped free of charge to the chosen food pantry or soup kitchen. “No one has to drive anywhere,” says O’Neill.
You Give Goods, a for-profit company, buys the merchandise wholesale from the same suppliers supermarkets use and charges donors grocery-store prices. You Give Goods keeps the difference. The system, he says, is better for food pantries, whose personnel typically have to sort the goods they receive from traditional drives to weed out expired and unneeded products. You Give Goods also helps organizers reach their community through e-mail blasts, creates competitions to engage more participants and provides advice on how to make drives more successful.
When a Warren County church’s food program for kids ran out of supplies, Volunteer Management Centers, a nonprofit that supports other nonprofits, turned to You Give Goods. “Within two e-mailings, we had 830 units of food,” says executive director Carol McKinney. “It was hugely successful and almost too simple.”
“Our core philosophy is, if you make it easier for people to help, more people will,” O’Neill says.