Case study: United Way of East Central Texas
Four rural counties — Anderson, Freestone, Leon and Limestone — one meal-packing event, and a target of doubling it. This is the first campaign Give-Kit was built around, and the numbers on this page are theirs.
- 35,000meals packed at the June 2026 event
- 70,000the target for 2027
- 20local businesses taking part
The arithmetic that makes the ask
A packed meal costs thirty-six cents. Doubling the event therefore has an exact price, and it is a number a business owner can look at and decide about in the time it takes to read it:
Cost of one packed meal $0.36
Meals needed for the 2027 event 70,000
What the campaign has to raise $25,200
Split across twenty businesses, that is $1,260 each — which is not a corporate sponsorship, it is a jar by the register and a few weeks of people scanning a code. Stated as meals rather than dollars, a $25 gift stops being “$25” and becomes sixty-nine meals packed, which is a thing a person can picture.
Your donation stays local
That is their line, and in four rural counties it is the whole argument. Money raised at the counter of a hardware store in Limestone County packs meals that are handed out in Limestone County. There is no head office in the middle of it, and the people being asked are the people who will see where it went.
It also sets the shape of the campaign. The twenty businesses are the four counties' largest employers — the mills, the school districts, the hospitals, the distribution centres — because that is where the employees are, and the campaign runs on employees scanning a code in a break room rather than on a gala nobody has the staff to put on.
How it was being run
In a spreadsheet, with signs updated by hand. Twenty businesses means twenty running totals, twenty QR codes, and a December in which somebody reconciles a bank export against a column of names and hopes the gift from a donor who typed the shop's name slightly differently ends up in the right row.
The mechanic was never the problem. The mechanic is good, and it is reusable — a booster club, a volunteer fire department, a church, a food bank could run the identical play. The problem was that everything around it was manual, and what exists to fix that is priced for organisations with a development department.
What the tool takes off the table
| The job | Now |
|---|---|
| Knowing which business a gift came through | The QR code opens that business's own donation form, so the gift says so itself |
| Updating twenty counter signs | Each business has a public page that updates inside a quarter of an hour |
| Turning dollars into meals | Set $0.36 and “meals” once; every page and total says it |
| Cash and cheques in a second place | Not solved yet — there is no screen for entering one, so this is still a second place |
| Who has asked whom | Prospects assigned to board members, with their own list and outcomes |
| Showing presence in all four counties | County is on every business, and on the dashboard |
Where it stands today
This year's drive is not running on Give-Kit.
The campaign opens on 1 November and closes on 31 December, and it is going out on spreadsheets and printed signs, as planned. Software that is not finished has no business carrying a campaign a community is counting on.
What this season produces is the requirements list: how long each step really takes, what breaks, and what the director actually asks for in week three. The 2027 campaign is the one Give-Kit is being built to run.
If your campaign looks nothing like this
Nothing about United Way is written into the software. The cost of a unit and the word for it are settings on the campaign, so the same machinery counts backpacks filled, training hours funded, nights of camp, nights of shelter or animals housed, and prints signs that say so. The counties on this page are a field; the tiers are a field; the tagline is a field.
Nor is the kind of participant fixed. Twenty businesses here; it could as easily be thirty scout troops, every classroom in a school, or the eleven families on a team roster. What the campaign needs is not a particular sector but participants who each have a figure of their own to hit.
Which is the honest test of whether this is a product or one organisation's spreadsheet, and it is the test we would like to fail or pass in public with a second organisation — ideally one that looks nothing like the first.