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Impact Community Action Partnership

Platform Buildout for Online Food Pantry

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Fighting Food Inequity Through Technology

The Impact Community Action Partnership is a central Iowa-based nonprofit organization that provides direct support and connections to community resources for low-income families. One of their many services, food pantries, are meant to provide supplementary grocery items to families in need. In their 2019 Community Needs Assessment, 60% of IMPACT’s enrolled families responded that they rely on access to food pantries, food banks, and food services. Bolstered by this data, IMPACT saw the need for an online shopping alternative during the pandemic and into the future.

The goal of this project was to create a safer alternative to in-pantry shopping that ultimately consisted of two major parts. Users of all backgrounds can conveniently place contactless pickup and delivery orders via a modern ecommerce experience. Meanwhile, robust pantry administration capabilities allow IMPACT staff to access multiple pantries across multiple organizations—managing visual customization, product inventory, volunteers, orders, fulfillment, and family preferences.

Solution
  • Interface Design
  • MVP Development
  • Responsive Web App
  • Cloud Infrastructure
Tech Specs
  • Angular 11
  • .Net Core
  • IdentityServer
  • Docker
  • LocalStack
  • GitHub Actions

Discovery of Daily Operations

Working closely with the IMPACT team and their partners, DMARC, we developed a deep understanding of the daily operations of the food pantries and the needs of their users. We determined an initial robust feature set and corresponding wireframes that would fulfill the various needs of volunteers, staff, and families alike.

With regular video calls, bi-weekly sprint planning, and routine platform demonstrations, we continually adapted our work to ensure every use case was accounted for.

TAKE IT FROM THEM —

We Write Code was an incredible partner for IMPACT! We came to them with the need to create an application that would allow our families to shop online during the pandemic, and they were able to help us fulfill our vision. Given the opportunity, I would be eager to work with them again and I’m very pleased with our end product. Our expectations were exceeded in every aspect.

Anne Bacon Executive Director, IMPACT

Better Together

Existing infrastructure for IMPACT’s household intake and management systems gave us the opportunity to work alongside an internal development team, ensuring shared, valid user identities and a tight integration between our applications.

As development moved forward, IMPACT coordinated a product photoshoot, six translated languages, and volunteer testers to help validate our user experience. Soon, a polished e-commerce experience was ready to debut.

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