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Metro Meals on Wheels goes to F1 Overnight Website Challenge

Non-profit thankful for getting free website from volunteer team stocked with Sierra Bravo nerds

Client profile

Metro Meals on Wheels develops quality local systems of delivery to homebound individuals by partnering with 41 neighborhood Meals on Wheels programs throughout the Twin Cities. Through their volunteer delivery drivers, the organization provides a daily wellness check, allowing people to remain in their own homes and maintain their dignity and sense of self-reliance. Metro Meals on Wheels is the internet face for the entire Twin Cities’ seven-county metro area; most program members don’t have websites of their own.

Mission statement: Metro Meals on Wheels with our program partners leads the effort to ensure that individuals in our community receive nutritious meals and the human connection they need to enable them to live independently.

Volunteer team profile

The recipe for Pollywog Stew is six Sierra Bravo web pros and two designers from local ad agencies who’d worked with Sierra Bravo through its Partner Program on web projects for their end clients. The team was quick to post provocative remarks on the F1 message board and seemed to have set up a war room for rapid response to Swift-boating competitors.

Objectives

“Our website is our main contact with each of our audiences, and it was not doing a good job of reaching each audience specifically,” said Molly Kennedy, office manager and volunteer coordinator of Metro Meals on Wheels. “We did not have the funding to hire someone to create a new website. Our donation site was not working properly. We were not getting much website traffic and online visitors were not staying long. Our ‘find your local program’ function did not function well enough. With a new mission statement, a new long range plan in place and a new executive director coming on board, we needed a new image.”

Pre-F1 wish list: to better represent and serve members; give visitors more knowledge and appreciation for services provided; attract more volunteers, sponsors and community support; raise efficiency through online communications, marketing, fundraising; provide educational/training services to members; reach more aging homebound people and provide more services.

“I signed onto F1 because it sounded like a fun and new experience, and I wanted to see if we could pull it off,” said Mike Johnson, who in real life is a software development manager at Sierra Bravo. “Plus, it’s a Sierra Bravo event, and we’ve got to represent. I also wanted to do some programming rather than just manage programmers as usual.”

“We have a staff of three, and my job consists of so many things,” said Kennedy. “As I prepared for the event, a lot of my other tasks had to be put on hold to get ready. Entering F1, others thought I would not have time to complete the project correctly, but we did!”

From the start, Kennedy was impressed with her F1 team, captained by Tom O’Neil, Sierra Bravo’s director of software development. “They listened well when we explained what we wanted to do and they worked very hard to get the project off and running,” Kennedy said. “The team divided up into smaller groups to work on specific areas of the project, each consulting me at various points of their process and then bringing the pieces together towards the end to work on trouble shooting.”

Solutions

“During the first hour we went through Molly’s checklist of goals — we would go on to accomplish them all,” said Johnson. “Their existing site was too static — hard to edit or add to — so one of our first priorities was putting it into a content management system (CMS). After the first hour we created sub-teams that matched individual strengths to specific tasks. One of the first was to create a new design, so three of us came up with mock-ups and let Molly pick the one to go with to frame the new site’s look and feel.”

“The team did a wonderful job working hard the whole time,” said Kennedy. “We got no sleep. My advice for future F1 participants would be to sleep a little bit; I became ill after working for 30 hours straight, and the team will work better at the end if they can relax for a little bit in the middle.”

The custom map API largely created by Sierra Bravo programmer Mark Seemann was a GoogleMaps overlay in which users can type their zip code and find the nearest Meals on Wheels programs. The team used Flash to create an engaging homepage. For the CMS, they used the PHP-based ModX, an open source CMS — a cost-effective solution that Sierra Bravo often uses to work within tight budgets. Metro Meals on Wheels’ donations page had not been working, so the team fixed and integrated it into the new site.

“The most important part of our job was to understand their operating needs and making a website that fulfills them — this is hard without having much time to learn about their business,” said Johnson.

Results

“All in all we are now much better equipped to serve our members better in many ways,” said Kennedy. “Our message board is integrated into our website. The look and ease of use is way better. Our ‘find your local program’ works really well. We have new volunteer referral forms and receive a lot more referrals. Our donation site works now, and it’s much easier to use the new CMS and fix problems on it.

“Our new site has increased volunteer referrals from one to three a month to about eight per week,” said Kennedy. “Twice as many program members have visited our site than before. Before almost everyone stayed on our site for under 30 seconds, now people mostly stay from 1.5 minutes to 2 minutes. We now use our website as a tool for advocacy and grant work by directing groups to it, before we were not able to do this because it was in bad shape.”

“After about 18 hours, we’d addressed the entire list of goals and asked Molly for more wish-list features, then hit every one of them as we polished and fine-tuned their new site,” said Johnson. “I closed my eyes during the last 30 minutes but did not sleep. I drank no coffee. My teammate Chad Ladensack (another Sierra Bravo programmer) was nodding off at his computer — but did not go down. We all kept going. But if we had it all to do over, we wouldn’t send Nick (LeGuillou, another Sierra Bravo software development manager) up to do our demo; he had plenty to say but had lost his voice.”

“We spent the last hours modernizing their look and trying to make the site more and more engaging, including pithy marketing messages here and there,” said Johnson.

Kennedy said Metro Meals on Wheels got more from the F1 Challenge than they bargained for, including free lifetime hosting by Sierra Bravo. “The team was very nice and did a superb job of explaining things in ways I could understand, and if I didn’t understand it the first time around they would figure out another way to explain it so it did, and they did a wonderful job after the event trouble shooting and fixing problems on our website,” said Kennedy. “Also, the HTML class I took (compliments of Supporting Sponsor New Horizons of Minnesota) has come in handy a few times already; it was a great class.”

Had Metro Meals on Wheels not been selected for F1, Kennedy speculated they would’ve tried to tackle a few basics on their own. “We would have fixed the donation part of our site and improved the content on the site,” she said. “But that’s about it.”

“Feedback has been amazingly positive from staff, board, volunteers, program members, affiliates, and our IT consultant — everyone is astounded! They love our new site and have said that it is easier to use, has more functionality, better represents our organization and just looks better!

“I’ll do F1 again,” said Johnson. “It’s definitely something to be proud of, and it shows we care about our craft in helping others. It’s a good dose of altruism.”

“We were lucky to get the Sierra Bravo team!” said Kennedy. “Super lucky!”

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