Client description
Each month, more than 15,000 people receive hampers from Edmonton’s Food Bank, or one of the over 190 agencies, churches, or food depots with which they are affiliated.
Project objective
The Edmonton’s Food Bank (EFB) was looking to update their 15+ years old CiviCRM and Drupal database to manage complex information about clients, hampers, and drop-off points (known as depots). The new system needed to be flexible (so that the new features can be easily added later, without rebuilding the system), manageable by EFB staff, and adapted to the current reality of supporting a few hundred support calls every day, while maintaining information about each client individual needs and most convenient way to receive help (distance from the local food depot/agencies).
Solution
We upgraded their CiviCRM system which is integrated with Drupal. Originally built on Drupal 6, the Drupal integration was completely rebuilt to work with version 9 while still maintaining all the CiviCRM functionality. Drupal 8 and up is substantially different from previous versions, so all the integration code needed to be completely redone. After the upgrade, the system maintains the ability of Food Bank staff to manage all the details of the clients and hampers:
- track information about clients;
- their relationships between each other (households);
- history of received food hampers;
- information about depot locations from which hampers are most often picked-up;
- clients’ dietary and allergic requirements;
- allows staff and volunteers to coordinate clients with depots; and,
- help depots print labels and tracking sheets for each hamper delivery.
Custom searches and reports allow Food Bank staff to run any client searches that are needed to quickly find information about given client history where reports help to keep track of released food hampers and their frequency.
Currently, the system is being used by multiple staff members at the same time, and the database has more than 200,000 client records (and growing).