YouGiveGoods.com Launches Online Food Drive Contest System to Celebrate Its 1st Anniversary

MENDHAM, N.J., Oct. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- When the YouGiveGoods website launched in September 2011, it offered a new way to help - an innovative online system for running food drives and animal shelter drives. Since then, the website has hosted hundreds of drives that have helped food pantries, soup kitchens, homeless shelters and animal shelters throughout the country meet their mission.  

"It's been terrific to see all of the people and organizations using our website to run their drives - from pre-schools to colleges and every type of school in between, Fortune 500 companies, local companies, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts and families, as well as a number of religious organizations," said Patrick O'Neill, CEO of YouGiveGoods.  He continued, "One of the most exciting things to see is the number of charity organizations using our site to run drives - we've had the Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, and Habitat for Humanity run drives, among many others."

To celebrate its first anniversary, the company has announced several new features for its site.  The most notable one is its Contest System.   Drives can now be set up on their website to compete against one another - in real time.

The contest system is a reflection of the company's philosophy.  According to Michael Connell, EVP of Marketing and Sales, "We developed the online drive concept believing that if we could make helping out easier to do, that more people would help.  We used today's technology to reinvent how food drives and other in-kind charity drives are done.  Our system makes setting up and running these drives easier to do, it makes them more fun, tangible, social, environmentally friendly and, most importantly, more productive.  Our experience to date shows that online drives tend to out produce traditional drives by a factor as high as 20 to 1."

Connell continued, "Since we launched, we've received a lot of feedback and questions about whether our website could be used to run contests, which are used by many organizations to spur greater interest in the charity drives they conduct."  The company's development team used a ground up approach to develop its contest system.  "We've done the same thing with contests as we did with drives.  We took a fresh look at how you would want to run a contest if you could develop it from scratch, using today's technology and how people use it," said Connell.  

With a traditional contest, it's very hard to know how it's going until the very end - when all of the food gets weighed or the items are counted.  YouGiveGoods has created a Leaderboard as a central part of its contest system - a webpage where all of the competing drives can see how they are doing against one another in real time - 24/7.  "That's very powerful," according to O'Neill, "These days, people expect to be engaged in real time - whatever they are doing.  Our Leaderboard provides the type of immediate feedback that helps to fuel interest and excitement.  It makes the competition feel like a real horserace."

Interest level in the new contest system is running high.  The company has already had a number of organizations commit to use the system this fall from companies, colleges, high schools and middle schools.

It's been a very busy year for the company.  Besides the contest system, the company has added several new features to the website.  For Drive Starters, these services include a complete set of organizational and promotional tools for their drive and the turnkey management of the logistics of the drive (i.e., delivering contributed goods to the charity the drive supports).  Charities can use the system to start their own drives and enjoy the same set of services as Drive Starters at no cost. Additionally, the platform provides a recently introduced free set of valuable management and communication tools to charities.

YouGiveGoods is based in Mendham, NJ and is operated by a group of people who strongly believe in the importance of helping others in need.  It is a for profit company devoted to social good that partners with the United Aid Foundation, a 501c3 organization.  The company's website, YouGiveGoods.com, was developed to make it easier for people and organizations to set up and run in-kind charity drives, including food drives and animal shelter drives.  The site provides free services to charities and makes it simpler for people to donate goods to the charities they want to support. The innovative technology platform is designed to inspire people to give and help others.  Visit YouGiveGoods.com

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SOURCE YouGiveGoods