Pinelake has 4 different Care Centers (think food pantry). Currently we use a custom web app on one of our webservers. The web app was generously written by a former member. While the former member has been gracious to help maintain this software, we would like to investigate what other churches with food pantries are using to track visitors, assistance given and other analytics.
Please share your software tracking system and any other ideas for pantries.
Our church uses a custom web database app hosted on a platform called Knack (https://www.knack.com). It’s not as flexible as a custom web application, but it’s very little maintenance - we pay a single monthly fee for them to take care of all the infrastructure (hosting, backups, etc) for XX amount of records, I think, and we make tweaks to the UI every once in a while and mostly it just works. It’s not real pretty, but our volunteers are almost exclusively senior citizens, and they use it 3 days a week with minimal hassles. I don’t remember what’s involved, but if anybody wants a “copy” of it to customize for themselves, I’d be happy to set that up.
We don’t have any clients currently using this, but I know a few of the local food banks in North Texas use this: http://www.foodbankmanager.com/
It’s a hosted solution that is possibly provided or subsidized by the North Texas Food Bank system so there are several small food banks in the area that are distribution points for that organization that use this. I’ve only seen it for about 5 minutes.