The more we know about our food-insecure neighbors, the better we can meet their needs and measure our impact.
What is Service Insights?
Service Insights is our food bank-wide initiative to collect basic information about our community members accessing food services across our distribution network. Our goal is to learn more about the community members we serve so that we can work to better meet their needs. We collect this information by equipping our partner agencies with a neighbor intake system to use at food distributions.
This neighbor intake system is a website. The website is built to perform neighbor intake and record each service provided to neighbors. Our database is secure, and the data collected is only used to help us understand how well we are helping our community.
Over time, this information will inform the food bank’s strategies to fight food insecurity across our region – and we can’t do it without our member agencies!
The Service Insights Homepage. You can see how many people you are serving in real time!
How will you benefit from participating?
- Reduce or eliminate paper intake forms. USDA/TEFAP forms are digital and built into the system!
- No cost to use the software.
- As you learn more about your neighbors, you can order more appropriate food.
- Easy reports for grants, audits, or info requests.
- Neighbors sign up once, rather than at every pantry they visit.
- The Food Bank will provide training and support!
The Snapshot Overview report provides a quick view of your organization’s visit history during a selected date range.
What will you do?
Our indoor and outdoor pantries are both able to use the system. No paper needed!
You will use a computer system to perform neighbor intake and record your food services. Neighbor intake involves collecting basic information to build their household’s profile (first and last name, age, address, household members, etc.) in addition to helpful data such as dietary considerations and assistance programs.
Each neighbor only needs to complete this process once. After the initial intake questionnaire, the system creates a household profile that makes documenting subsequent visits quick and easy.
Recording your food distribution can be a very quick process – just a click or two for each person receiving food!
If a neighbor does not wish to register in the system, assistance will still be provided. All personal data is protected, using the same type of encryption as in banking software. No personal information will ever be shared outside of our network. We will never share our neighbor’s information with agencies such as law enforcement or immigration services.
Questions?
Don’t have internet or equipment at your program? That’s okay! The Food Bank has partnered with Mobile Citizen, who provides low-cost mobile internet with unlimited data plans to nonprofit organizations. Equipment and startup internet costs may be supported by The Food Bank. Please contact us to discuss options!
Do you have other questions before signing up? Email us
Ready to start Service Insights?
If you are interested, please complete our survey and we will reach out to you to discuss next steps!
Tools and Resources:
Service Insights Training Site
