How Loaves & Fishes Scaled to 7,000 Volunteers

When a nonprofit grows fast enough to serve half a million meals a year across 24 dining sites, the mission is clearly working. What doesn't scale automatically is the coordination behind it. For Loaves & Fishes in Minneapolis, getting the right volunteers to the right places every single day became a logistical challenge as significant as the growth itself.

This is how they solved it.

The Organization

Loaves & Fishes is a Minnesota-based nonprofit with one clear purpose: no one should go hungry. They provide free meals to anyone who needs them, no questions asked, across a network of dining sites, summer lunch programs, weekly produce distributions, and community gardens throughout the state.

The scale of that work is significant. At the time of this case study, Loaves & Fishes was serving more than 1,900 free meals every single day, operating 24 year-round dining sites, running 17 summer lunch locations, and growing fresh vegetables across four community gardens. Every one of those programs depends entirely on volunteers to function.

The Problem

In two years, Loaves & Fishes grew its volunteer base by 75 percent, reaching 7,000 active volunteers. That kind of growth is a tremendous asset for any mission-driven organization. It's also a coordination problem that doesn't solve itself.

With 24 sites running year-round and thousands of volunteers moving through them on rotating schedules, the organization needed a way to manage sign-ups that was accurate, accessible, and scalable. Volunteers needed to be able to see available opportunities and claim their spot without calling an office or waiting for a response. Site administrators needed visibility into coverage without managing everything by hand. And the whole system needed to work reliably at a volume that paper sheets and email threads simply couldn't handle.

As Carly Quintus, Director of Volunteers at Loaves & Fishes, put it:

"Every service the organization provides requires the dedication of volunteers. Without a system that could match the scale of their growth, that dedication risked going uncoordinated."

The Solution

Loaves & Fishes adopted SignUpGenius as the primary method for volunteers to sign up for opportunities across all of their sites and programs. Using a Premium account, the organization was able to manage multi-site coordination, bring on multiple administrators, and give volunteers a single place to browse all available opportunities and sign up at their own convenience.

The Premium tools were specifically what made the difference at this scale. Multiple administrators meant site leads across the network could manage their own volunteer coverage independently, without routing everything through a central coordinator. Custom reporting gave the organization visibility into participation across sites, making it easier to identify gaps and plan ahead. And volunteers could access the full range of opportunities themselves, choosing the site, role, and time that worked for them without any back-and-forth with staff.

Genius Tip

If your nonprofit operates across multiple sites or programs, multiple administrators is one of the most valuable features available to you. Rather than routing all sign-up management through one person, each site lead can manage their own coverage while you maintain visibility across the whole organization.

Create your free account

The Results

The numbers tell the story clearly.

The volunteer coordination that once required significant manual effort was running largely on its own. Volunteers browsed available opportunities, claimed their spot, and received reminders without anyone at the organization managing the exchange individually. In June alone, 3,500 volunteers used SignUpGenius to reserve spots across Loaves & Fishes sites.

In the words of Carly Quintus:

"The use of SignUpGenius has been essential for our growth. Loaves & Fishes uses SignUpGenius as the primary method for volunteers to sign up for opportunities as it proves to be convenient, accurate and user-friendly. The Pro tools have provided the opportunity for Loaves & Fishes to have multiple administrators, create custom reports and engage more and more volunteers."

That last phrase is the one worth sitting with. Engage more and more volunteers. For an organization whose entire mission depends on people showing up, a tool that makes showing up easier is not a logistics upgrade. It's a mission-critical one.

What Made the Difference

The Loaves & Fishes story is a useful model for any nonprofit managing volunteers across multiple programs or locations. A few things stand out about how they approached it.

• They treated volunteer coordination as infrastructure, not an afterthought. As the organization grew, they invested in a system that could scale with them rather than patching the existing process. That decision paid off at exactly the moment it needed to, when volume outpaced what any manual system could handle.
• They gave volunteers autonomy. Rather than assigning people to shifts, Loaves & Fishes built a system where volunteers could see all available opportunities and choose what worked for them. That flexibility is a meaningful part of why participation grew. People are more likely to commit to something they chose than something they were slotted into.
• They distributed management responsibility. By using multiple administrators across their site network, they avoided the single-coordinator bottleneck that limits so many growing nonprofits. Each location could manage its own coverage while the organization maintained a unified view of participation.

Keep Reading