How Easterseals Took Multi-Location Donation Drives from “Chaos” to Clarity.

When Devyn joined the Easterseals Vermont team in 2022, she learned that in-kind donations were the most efficient way to get new donors through the door and turn them into long-term supporters. But with 11 different locations, each serving a unique population with different needs, managing drives across those locations proved to be anything but simple. “Each of the locations would send their needs… and then I was just using the one never-ending Amazon list… I was having to use a separate Excel or Word document and tracking… it’s really awful to think back on… it was just messy, disorganized, and not efficient… I mean, just chaos.”

After being introduced to GiftDrive, Devyn and her coworker Susie decided to give it a try. “Once we got it up… I figured out how to publish it, and it's so user-friendly… I was just like, ‘Oh, this is easy. I can figure this out.’… I've just found it to be so easy to use.”

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With multiple locations, one of the biggest challenges was each office’s different needs. Instead of following traditional processes and forcing all locations into one list, GiftDrive made it easy for Devyn to tailor each drive to its specific community. “It’s allowed us to branch out and really fit and meet the needs of each individual office… It’s just amazing to have a platform where it's so easy to differentiate and just make it happen.”

Donors could now choose exactly which location to support, and give items that they truly needed, ensuring donations were both intentional and impactful. “When Michelle got her first haul… she was just like, ‘Oh my god, it’s like Christmas.’”

Promote on social media. 

As the drives launched, Devyn relied on her team, and most importantly, social media, to build momentum. “I’ve been really clear… we will post it on our social media, and then it's up to you… to share it with your friends, share it with your family, share it with the community.” This decentralized approach allowed each location to engage its own network and increase community engagement on a more personal level. 

“We actually just had an analytics meeting… and the top performing post… was the donation station for Burlington GiftDrive post.” The more staff shared their individual drives, the more successful they became, proving that social media plays a key role in driving donations.

Engage younger donors. 

As Devyn began building up the in-kind program, she wasn’t just thinking about meeting immediate needs; she was thinking about the future of Easterseals’ donor base. “While we have a lot of donors and supporters… The population is definitely elderly folks, which is amazing. But how do we get newer, younger people invested in us?”

By offering a simple, online way to give tangible items, Easterseals created a more accessible entry point for new supporters. “It’s brought in, I think, 12 new donors to us from all the drives… that was one of my goals… bringing in a new pipeline of donors.”

What started as a tool to simplify multi-location donation drives quickly became a way to build and nurture relationships. “For our fundraising efforts, it’s a huge… foot in the door opportunity… while meeting needs that we have.”

Simplify behind-the-scenes operations. 

Before Devyn introduced GiftDrive to her team, tracking donations across multiple locations meant piecing together information with little visibility into overall impact. Now, everything lives in one place. “I really like that I can see on the back end, like the number of donors… the number of dollars… that have come in worth of in-kind items because I was able to report out about that at our management meeting… just to show all of the locations like how much has come in even though it is in-kind.”

With real-time insights, the team could easily visualize their impact across all 11 locations, something that would typically require effort. Reporting became just as seamless. “I found it very easy to export the Excel CSV file with all the donor information, and our development data operations team seem to be happy with the information that it includes for them to be able to put it into our [CRM].”

Together, these features have given Devyn and her team something they didn’t have before: clarity. What started as a tool to simplify donation drives has evolved into a system that not only works but scales, allowing Easterseals Vermont to focus less on managing logistics and more on supporting the communities they serve. “I'm just amazed. I'm excited to keep building on the [drives] we have and starting new ones.”