If I can do it, anyone can.
Nancy Kanell, Founder
Project Home Again provides low-income families with recycled household goods, furniture and small appliances necessary to live with comfort and dignity.
They collect item donations and partner with social service agencies to ensure that gently used items go directly to those who need them the most in their community.
Challenge: Not Enough Hours in the Day
With only one volunteer and one paid staff member, Project Home Again is a lean operation. And repeated, manual processes were taking over their day-to-day.
A single volunteer or donation inquiry could trigger an email chain with up to 15 messages just to vet the request. Plus, the phone often rang with the same questions about operating hours and the types of donations they accept.
With limited internal capacity, they needed their website to work harder for them. But like many nonprofits, they faced a dilemma:
How do you find the time to build a new website when you’re already working at max capacity?
With no dedicated IT or marketing team, they couldn’t afford to take on a website project that required them to become developers.
Neither Nancy nor I are very technically savvy. … Your technology is not difficult to understand.
Alyssa Kevlahan, Executive Director
Solution: A Website to Communicate for Them
Project Home Again needed a website where visitors could find answers and take action on their own, without so much hands-on involvement from their team.
That meant finding tools they could manage themselves and support from a partner they could trust.
Not only did you all set up the new website and get us where we needed to be, but you taught me—always very patiently—how to do the updates. I’ve learned a lot more about what it takes to do the website and how it’s pretty easy to do the stuff yourself.
Nancy Kanell, Founder
Using custom forms to request donation pickups, the website collects the necessary details upfront. So staff can gather the info they need without the email back-and-forth.
“We would get emails and phone calls all the time saying ‘What are your hours? What’s your address? What do you take for donations?’ … That does not happen anymore.” — Nancy Kanell
An organized site structure makes volunteer and program details easy to find and answers common questions so the team doesn’t have to.
They’re also able to organize and promote donation drives right on the website with the event system, reducing issues with low participation or donated items they can’t accept.
And they didn’t need to become experts in tech or web design to pull it off.
Results: Increased Organizational Capacity
In just the first year, the website had become a central hub for their operations, helping streamline and increase both in-kind donations and volunteer signups.
96 volunteer sign ups
150 new partners
476 donation pickup requests
Project Home Again successfully built a new website that eliminates the busywork and allows their small team to focus on what matters: their clients.
It has freed up our time to do the things that we need to do more of, like grant writing and marketing, and we’re having our first gala. … It’s allowed us to focus more time on our clients and our energy in getting our new space perfect for our clients.
Nancy Kanell, Founder
By trusting a partner to handle the technical heavy lifting, they turned their website from a source of frustration into a valuable team member. One that works around the clock so they don’t have to.
Discover How Easy It Can Be
Stop letting a lack of time or tech-savviness hold you back from the website you deserve. See how easy it can be to finally launch a website that works as hard as you do.