Pantry hours that are right the same afternoon

Stonebridge Food Network supplies thirty-one pantry partners across Allegheny County from a warehouse in the Strip District. Its website has one job that matters more than any other: telling people where they can get food this week, and when.

“Pantry hours change all the time,” says Tom Kowalski, who coordinates partners and volunteers. “A church pantry loses a volunteer and closes Thursdays. A school pantry adds a Saturday in the summer. If the website is wrong, a family takes two buses to a locked door.”

Nine days was too long

Before last year, the site was maintained by a freelance developer on a monthly retainer. Changes were batched and sent by email. The average time from a pantry calling with new hours to the site showing them was nine days.

A board member who builds Laravel apps for a living offered to rebuild the site on Starter over two weekends. The pantry list became a collection with a row per partner: name, address, hours, phone and a note. The pages that show it read from that one table.

Edited by the people who know

Tom and two other staff members now update the list themselves. When a pantry calls, they open the collection, change the row, and publish. The median time from the call to the live site is now four hours, and most changes are live the same afternoon.

The volunteer shift pages work the same way. When a Saturday sort needs twelve more people, the coordinator changes the number on the page and the call to sign up goes out the same day.

What it cost

The network ended the retainer and now spends nothing on outside web work in a normal month, about $11,400 a year. It runs on the Free plan for its single site, with the board member reviewing the occasional new section.

“We are not a tech organization,” Tom says. “We did not want to become one. This let us stay what we are and still have a website that tells the truth.”