Hunger Free America & Conagra: Advocating for food insecure families

The New York City Coalition Against Hunger (now Hunger Free America), taught us one million New Yorkers alone live in households without sufficient food.

Working with corporate sponsor ConAgra Foods, Inc. , we designed HungerVolunteer.org to adapt a suite of print publications to the Web and to build an application matching skilled New Yorkers to hunger agencies in need.

With an eye towards national expansion - we designed the site to ask “Who is Hungry in America?”, “How Can you help?” and to suggest “Volunteer Today”. Taking the “Ending Hunger Through Citizen Service” Initiative and Toolkit as point of departure, this site communicates the myriad ways in which New Yorkers can help support the 1.4 million low-income residents of the city who rely on the city’s 1200 non profit soup kitchens and food pantries for sustenance.

Messaging

Our messaging identifies the different kinds of volunteers drawn to hunger relief and offers encouragement (and volunteer opportunities) specifically for them:

                  Are you a student looking to volunteer?

                  Are you a business eager to make a difference?

Our messaging also  relies on calls to action such as:

                  Increase use of child nutrition programs

                  Grow & distribute farm-fresh food

                  Raise public awareness

The web-based application increased NYCCAH’s  national  reach by inviting skilled volunteers to fill the specific needs of  their local agencies. It identifies and maps these volunteer opportunities to a nationwide map generated by NYCCAH’s database of food agencies.

We also put a social media outreach strategy in place using Facebook, Twitter and an e-mail campaign to continue to engage volunteers over time.

skills deployed: discovery, information architecture, copywriting, UX design, UI design, database architecture, Drupal, CiviCRM, HTML, CSS, SOLR, social media marketing, administrator training