Coalition of Community Gardens
The Coalition of Community Gardens supports community gardening, shares knowledge and resources, grows a sustainable framework through advocacy and public policy, and cultivates individual and community health. The group has over 60 Community Gardens in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco, Manatee and Polk counties in Florida.
Key takeaways
- Unified gardens hub: A hub for 60+ gardens to add their events to drive better turnout for their volunteer workdays and plot assignments.
- Garden segmentation and resources: Allows gardens to post updates and get member only resources.
- Membership management: Instituted a membership program with an auto-renewal default to generate a better revenue stream.
- Website re-design: Elevated their brand reputation by clearly describing who the Coalition consists of, how to get involved and a resource hub to make it easier to grow healthy food.
Scenario
The Coalition of Community Gardens grew out of a passion for community advocacy, a love for gardening, and a drive to help others do the same in 2015. Looking to move into a growth phase in the nonprofit lifecycle, they saw the need to professionalize and have systems for staff and garden leaders to utilize. Essentially, a hub for gardens to attract new volunteers and make it easier for existing members to see what’s going on.
Enabling this shift, COCG received a grant from the City of Tampa through the USDA that provided funding to hire an Urban Agricultural Coordinator (UAC) and an Urban Agricultural Specialist (UAS). Some of the challenges they faced was a better tech stack that could help with:
DIY Weebly site
The Weebly site lacked clear content hierarchy and organization. It was mechanical and was a brochure style site. Each garden was listed in a simple text format list only. Additionally, garden leaders didn’t have a way to contribute to updating their garden and it’s events.
Fragmented event management
COCG and gardens lacked a unified event management system, handling events as one-off setups typically on Eventbrite or Facebook events. The data on who is showing up to help would not make it back into a central place to build up the gardening community in the Tampa Bay area.
Lack of constituent segmentation
Communications ran through Constant Contact on the founder’s account, but without a true CRM there was no reliable way to segment volunteers, donors, event attendees, or casual subscribers for targeted follow-up and stewardship.
Missed engagement opportunities
Without a unified events hub with a searchable calendar, potential gardeners and supporters would not always be aware of upcoming workshops and volunteer days,—dampening turnout and slowing growth.
Making connections
Founder, Kitty Wallace had to be the consistent glue to coordinate and promote various events and make connections between gardens and interested onlookers. COCG aimed to drive new garden lead signups and foster a stronger connection to its 60+ gardens through a marketing umbrella of gardens.
The solution
Managing community gardens
The focal point was bring the coalition closer together, and at the heart of that was the 100+ garden leaders within a 60+ community garden coalition. That meant making it easier to manage event based data via volunteer workdays, workshops, community dinners and many other types of events.
For COCG, the system collects and reports on active volunteers, donors and provides mass email thru CiviMail.
Allied Partners and Preferred Vendors are sub-contact types in CiviCRM and listings are handled by passing the data to WordPress for listing using Elementor and FacetWP.
Self-service portal for garden leads
There is garden-based access control so garden leaders can manage their events, share updates and manage their own garden pages.
Now when new signups come in, they route directly to the garden leader(s), bypassing the need for a middleman and ensuring people have a better chance of being fostered into action.
Diverse and community-driven
The web design focused on bringing to life the diverse set of people who get their hands dirty. From an Instagram feed to a hero video homepage section (much thanks to Alex Baron and Meryl Stout for editing and production!), the COCG brand is brought to life. Rhonda Negard from Fat Dog Creatives provided design direction and assets.
Resource hub
Having good information is only good if it’s easily accessible. We built a resource hub that highlights monthly planting guides visually, step by step guide on starting a garden, and quick expert resources links at IFAS, the local experts.
Additionally, there’s member only access to grants and certifications resources plus a chat platform they are invited to after they become a member.
Garden locator map
The homepage and join a garden presents a custom Google map directory of the gardens so the “garden-curious” can visually find what gardens are around them at a glance. All garden data is integrated with CiviCRM so garden leaders make all the updates in one place and the location is geocoded automatically.
Event promotion and tracking volunteer engagement
COCG has 2 main types of events, so both a general event and volunteer opportunity listing are available. Prominent at the top of both is a simple proximity search (allow location access, ZIP Code or full address). Additionally, filters to see by garden and event types such as arts & crafts, community dinner, cooking class, education, fundraiser, market, plant sale/seed swap, yoga and more.
Gardens can optionally allow registration and get notifications to the garden leader(s). To facilitate this, CiviCRM message templates are customized to dynamically list the garden leaders in the email notification body when a volunteer has follow-up questions.
The changes in the website coupled with the training program created a steady stream of much needed volunteers at the Seminole Heights Community Garden. This week alone we received emails from 3 new volunteers! We are so happy to have the extra help and hoping some of them will stay on as members.
– Maria, Seminole Heights Community Garden
Community garden specialist Urban Agriculture Certification
COCG had an early success with the Specialist Urban Agriculture Certification headed up by COCG. This had 2 cohorts to certify new community gardeners, and the site received 440 signups — well exceeding expectations. The interest form integrated with CiviCRM to segment the signups into cohorts, track their interaction plus CiviMail was key to providing week-by-week updates for each six-week program.
Allied entities and preferred vendors
The coalition expands beyond gardens to allied entities like USF, the IFAS Extension Offices, the City of Tampa and many other local organizations that share the same healthy equity and grow local mission. These allied entities provide essential resources, expertise, and advocacy that enhances COCG’s capacity to deliver impactful programs and services.
There are also preferred vendors COCG recognizes and COCG members get special discounts to these community businesses that share in the passion for plants and healthy living.
The site dynamically handles both listings between WordPress and CiviCRM.
As we saw this past weekend, this website has power. There were three groups of volunteers that contacted Tampa Heights community garden about our volunteer day on Jan. 18th. They were a huge help. That would not have been possible without the COCG website.
Results
COCG’s now has a connected hub for garden leaders to manage their garden listing and events to drive higher engagement among those who truly care about sustainability, food equity and healthy living.
The membership management system replaces scattered spreadsheets to help coordinate garden activities for which many people are needed to make a garden sustainable long-term.
Finally, the refreshed web-design and resource hub raises the Coalition’s credibility and provides clarity to preferred vendors and allied partners that all make it it materially easier to recruit, train, and retain volunteers.