The holiday season is a crucial time for giving. According to reports from fundraising experts like Blackbaud, over 17% of all annual charitable donations occur in the month of December alone. Your organization might find itself wanting to meet this wave of generosity by running a coat drive, a food drive, and a toy drive all at the same time. For an event coordinator, this can be a logistical nightmare.
The Challenge: Keeping Multiple Campaigns Organized
How do you track which house is donating food and which is donating toys? How do you send the right volunteers to the right place without creating a mess of confusing spreadsheets and group chats? When campaigns overlap, the risk of missed pickups and frustrated volunteers increases dramatically. This is where logistical precision becomes essential.
The Learning Moment: The Impact of Your Drives
Before diving into the solution, it's powerful to understand the tangible impact of these different drives:
- Food Drives: According to Feeding America, 1 in 7 people in the U.S. turned to the charitable food system for help in 2022. Your collection of non-perishable goods directly stocks the shelves of local food banks that serve your neighbors. Learn more in our step-by-step guide to running a food drive.
- Coat Drives: For the millions of Americans living in poverty, a warm coat is a budget item they often cannot afford. Organizations like One Warm Coat state that a new or gently used coat is one of the most requested items at shelters during the winter. Get tips on how to start your own in our guide to organizing a community coat drive.
- Toy Drives: The U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Toys for Tots Program, a leading non-profit, has distributed over 652 million toys to less fortunate children since its inception, highlighting the immense need and the joy a simple gift can bring during the holidays.
The Solution: Custom Markers and Filters in Community Care
Community Care is designed to handle this complexity with ease.
- Create Custom Marker Types: As an Admin, you can create a unique marker for each campaign. In the settings, create a "Coat Drive" marker (e.g., with a 🧥 icon), a "Food Drive" marker (e.g., 🥫), and a "Toy Drive" marker (e.g., 🎁).
- Log Donations with Precision: When a donation pickup is scheduled, simply place the correct marker type on the map at the donor's address. Now, your map provides a clear, at-a-glance view of all your different campaigns.
- Filter for Focus: This is the key to managing multiple drives.
- For the Food Drive Team: They can use the on-map filters to show only the "Food" markers. All other markers disappear, giving them a clean, focused list of tasks.
- For the Toy Drive Team: They can filter to see only the "Toy" markers.
- For the Coordinator: You can switch between views to monitor the progress of each individual drive or clear the filters to see the entire holiday operation at once.
- Route Planning for Each Campaign: The Route Planner also respects these filters. The food drive team can calculate a route based only on the food markers, ensuring they don't waste time driving to locations for other campaigns.
By using custom marker types and powerful filtering, you can run multiple, overlapping community projects with clarity and efficiency.