AmpleHarvest.org

A redesign of the free nationwide registry that enables gardeners to donate extra surplus to food pantries

The beloved original Ampleharvest.org (built in 2009) was a completely custom build that was difficult to update and failed to respond to mobile. The team was looking for an upgraded experience that would work well on mobile devices, adhere to accessibility standards, and leverage a CMS that would allow internal staff to manage pantries with ease.

what we did together

client industry

Nonprofit Organizations

A new, responsive design featuring organic elements, custom illustrations, modern type, and a touch of whimsy

One of the chief requirements presented at the outset of the project: That the site needed to adapt beautifully for all sizes of devices: desktop, tablet, mobile, and everything in between. The AmpleHarvest.org team also emphasized the importance of a high contrast color palette, not only for accessibility and WCAG compliance purposes, but also to ensure that gardeners looking at the site outdoors would be able to see elements clearly.

The design team at Simpatico gravitated away from obvious color and type choices, settling instead on a bold modern type stack and primary palette that features blue and yellow. Organic, hand drawn, sketchy accents provide a more organic feel to the site, and whimsical illustrations not only add delight, but also assist users in understanding what AmpleHarvest.org does as an organization and the value it provides.

Ampleharvest.org Desktop & Mobile Screens

Ampleharvest.org Illustration Putting Product in Car

Ampleharvest.org Illustration Producepedia

A powerful and intuitive pantry search user experience, powered by Google Maps

Both gardeners and hungry families use the same powerful pantry search experience, in which they can search by any criteria (landmark, city, state, zip code, and more), and filter pantries by open dates and times. The integration with the Google Maps Street View feature also allows users to see an image of the pantry, allowing them to easily identify the correct building. The newly designed pantry detail page features an abundance of content for gardeners, including the ability to share information about their donation or find and connect with their local Cooperative Extension.

Ampleharvest.org Pantry Detail Information UI

from the client Our staff and stakeholders love our new website. In fact, the new site has given us the confidence to talk with a big-box retailer. We wouldn’t have been able to do that before; we would have seemed an unprofessional program. The new site presents us as someone a corporate partner would want to work with.

Gary Oppenheimer Founder & Executive Director, Ampleharvest.org

A robust pantry registration system and custom back-end that leverages Advanced Custom Fields

Prior to the new site, AmpleHarvest.org’s pantry manager struggled to make updates in the custom built system. The new build dramatically improves the ease of both registering new pantries and updating existing ones. Our development team leveraged WordPress and Advanced Custom Fields to create a back-end system that makes updating, approving, or rejecting pantries a breeze. The custom build includes plenty of validation checks to ensure AmpleHarvest.org receives quality data from pantries, including a check for duplicate pantries (a problem in the previous build). When a pantry registers, the system automatically notifies the appropriate Feeding America food bank and hunger program in a faith community when one of their member pantries registers.

Full migration from old to new, thanks to a custom built import/export tool built by Simpatico

A key aspect of this project would be a successful migration of the existing 8,000+ pantries’ usernames, passwords, and data. During our discovery and infrastructure planning phase, we made a significant change to the schema: rather than assigning a username and password to the pantry, the new system would assign users to pantries. This would allow multiple people to manage the same pantry, and remove users if they are no longer associated with the pantry. We created a custom solution to allow the AmpleHarvest.org team an easy way to import and export all pantry data. Concurrently, AmpleHarvest.org worked with generous consultants at Deloitte to use AI to change unstructured data around open times/dates into structured data so users can now filter pantries by open times/dates.

Rich content creation tools, including a modular builder to allow the AmpleHarvest.org team to build targeted, beautiful landing pages quickly and easily

AmpleHarvest.org largely relies on Google Ad Grants to drive free advertising to the site. We created a modular builder for the AmpleHarvest.org marketing team to be able to build custom landing pages inside WordPress for different campaigns. The builder includes content modules, donation modules (that integrate with Salsa, AmpleHarvest.org’s CRM), and more. The custom WordPress theme also includes a blog, press area, and a fun “ProducePedia” tool that helps people understand how to store and prepare different types of food that gardeners donate.

Integration with Salsa CRM software to allow AmpleHarvest.org to manage customer data and custom Google Analytics dimensions

To manage all of the nonprofit organization’s contacts, AmpleHarvest.org made the decision to use the Salsa CRM. Simpatico placed forms throughout the site for contact information gathering (newsletter signups, donations, and more), and themed them to seamlessly match the look and feel of the site. Lastly, Simpatico wrote code to support custom Google Analytics dimensions so the nonprofit can obtain even more granular data about user types and location.