Grassroots Grocery
Event Manager
Platform
x2
Figma, Airtable,
Illustrator, Slack,
Notion
Grassroots Grocery is a nonprofit distribution organization that connects volunteers with food banks across New York City. Their mission? Empowering communities through a network of neighbors who help each other.
Freshly Packed for Growth
As Grassroots Grocery’s operations expanded beyond their Bronx origins, growing pains emerged. Integrating new neighborhoods meant growing their team, and growing their team meant it was time to streamline their operations.
Managing contacts and event messaging manually through Airtable was no longer cutting it.
Our team aimed to automate Dan’s workflow by building a seamless, easy-to-learn CRM.
Challenge
Scaling the system to support more events, organizers, volunteers, and locations.
Challenge
Keeping things simple for organizers who were not all tech-savvy.
Challenge
Avoiding human error in a sea of spreadsheets and records.
Automate, Automate, Automate!
User Diversity
The system had to be easy to use for Grassroots Grocery’s volunteer organizers, who varied in their levels of technical expertise.
Insights
Dan wanted data visualizations baked-in to make better decisions and boost community engagement.
Scalability
The system had to grow alongside Grassroots Grocery’s ambitious plans.
The Recipe for Success,
Mapped
We started by mapping the current user journey for managing events. This let us zero-in on pain points and opportunities to streamline what would become the primary function of the new CRM.
By evaluating the user journey and its pain points, we designed a streamlined sitemap that consolidated all tasks into four pages, eliminating redundancy and automating most of the data management.
The user flow expanded on this model by highlighting multiple access points for event management and volunteer information.
Plated for Engagement
We designed low-fidelity wireframes that expanded on event management and data visualization features.
Armed with this feedback, we created a high-fidelity prototype with new data visualizations that would better inform the organization’s volunteer engagement strategies.
The Grassroots Grocery CRM is the one-stop shop for event management and volunteer engagement. The homepage provides key insights and features at a glance, while the Event page outlines an event’s location, status, timeline, and volunteer signups. For deeper insights, the Analytics page offers data-driven visualizations to track event performance and overall engagement.
The Events page offers a clear overview of past and upcoming events, with a quick preview when selecting a date. Creating an event is seamless, with dependent fields that dynamically adjust to each other, and a real-time preview of the timeline. The design language for the timeline is consistent across all pages, making it easy to scan and share with others.
Volunteer management is more intuitive with quick-access filters for frequently searched-for segments. Users can filter volunteers more granularly using properties such as date joined, locations attended, and total events. The new Rankings feature recognizes high-performing volunteers, highlighting their recent attendance and total events.
What Worked
Users praised the intuitive hierarchy of information.
The event creation process was seamless and easy to navigate.
The event calendar, which automatically populated with event details, was a standout feature that users found particularly helpful.
Aisles of Opportunity
Since the CRM’s implementation, Grassroots Grocery has transformed its operations:
Market Leader in Event Frequency
Hosting 1,250 events in 2023.
Community Impact: Ranked Third
in alternative community distribution by volume.
Team Growth
Enabled the onboarding of more event managers and the organization’s first full-time hires.
This success was achieved through close collaboration with a volunteer team of full-stack developers. With tight deadlines, our design team worked in parallel with developers. This fast-paced workflow honed my ability to work around backend capabilities, ensuring the final product followed best design practices while being technically robust.
Beyond the CRM, this project sparked a lasting partnership between Dan and I. Together, we’ve worked on expanding the organization’s visual brand identity and designing customer-facing services to drive engagement.
Looking ahead, the CRM has the potential to incorporate a team system, similar to HubSpot, with unique interfaces for the marketing, operations, service, and content teams. These features could strengthen team collaboration and assist in advancing the organization’s goal of empowering communities nationwide.
Next
Politika NYC
Work
UX, UI, Brand Identity, Web Development, Illustration