Scaling Nonprofit Operations with IoT: The Lasagna Love Case Study

Lasagna Love is a national grassroots movement that started as a one-woman initiative to support struggling families during the COVID-19 pandemic. The initiative, which began with Rhiannon Menn and her toddler making and delivering meals, has grown into a robust network of over 2,000 volunteers, referred to as 'Lasagna Mamas'. These volunteers help their local communities by making and delivering meals to families in need. Lasagna Love has reached over 4,000 families across the United States, from Lakeside, California to Des Moines, Iowa to Boston, Massachusetts. The initiative has also begun collaborating with universities, companies, and other nonprofits to extend its reach.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rhiannon Menn, a concerned citizen, was looking for ways to support struggling families in her community while adhering to stay-at-home orders. She started by making and delivering meals to families in need, a gesture that quickly gained traction and evolved into a national grassroots movement known as Lasagna Love. The initiative grew organically, attracting over 2,000 volunteers across the country within a few months. However, the rapid growth presented a challenge. Rhiannon was manually onboarding new volunteers, a process that involved sending out links and welcome emails, and entering information into their database. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient, hindering the initiative's ability to scale and reach more families in need.

To streamline the onboarding process and scale the operations of Lasagna Love, Rhiannon turned to Zapier, an online automation tool. With Zapier, she was able to automate the entire onboarding process. When a new volunteer, referred to as a 'Lasagna Mama', signs up via a Squarespace form, Zapier triggers a series of automated actions. It creates a personalized Google Sheet for each volunteer, generates a custom Bitly link for text messaging, sends a custom welcome email with a link to the personalized Google Sheet, and reorders the information before sending it to the master Lasagna Mama database. This automation runs in the background, freeing up Rhiannon's time to focus on recruiting more volunteers and delivering meals to more families.

• The automation of the onboarding process through Zapier has significantly improved the operational efficiency of Lasagna Love. It has eliminated the need for manual data entry and email sending, freeing up valuable time that can be used to focus on the initiative's core mission - feeding families. The automation runs seamlessly in the background, allowing Rhiannon and her team to concentrate on recruiting more volunteers and expanding their reach. The time saved through automation has been redirected towards growth and feeding more families, aligning with the initiative's mission. Furthermore, the automation has enabled Lasagna Love to scale rapidly, reaching more communities and forming partnerships with universities, companies, and other nonprofits.

• Automated the onboarding process for over 2,000 volunteers, eliminating manual data entry and email sending.

• Saved over 200 hours of manual work through automation.

• Helped over 4,000 struggling families across the United States.