Role: Donations Growth Specialist (System Architect & Implementer) | Timeline: 4 months | Platform: Airtable
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At a glance
America's Thrift Stores operates a Bags for Bucks fundraising program—turning donated goods into cash for community organizations across multiple states. By 2025, ATS had helped thousands of schools, churches, and nonprofits raise millions of dollars through these drives.
But with hundreds of drives occurring simultaneously, the Donations team was drowning in scattered spreadsheets, email threads, and manual follow-ups. Partners were falling through the cracks, and scaling was impossible.
I designed and implemented a complete Airtable operations system that automated partner onboarding, standardized communication workflows, and gave leadership real-time visibility—enabling the team to manage 200+ drives per year without adding headcount.
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America's Thrift Stores (ATS) operates a Bags for Bucks fundraising program that turns donated goods into cash for community organizations. Local schools, churches, and nonprofits host donation drives where supporters bring in gently used clothing, books, and household items. ATS weighs the collected goods and provides a cash donation based on total pounds, benefiting both the host organization and ATS's charity partners.
The appeal is simple: participants don't need to sell anything or spend extra money—they just donate unneeded items, making it a win-win for fundraising and for keeping items out of landfills.
With hundreds of drives occurring across multiple states (Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, and beyond), the Donations team at ATS needed a reliable way to manage all the moving pieces of the program.
Before implementing Airtable, our process for managing donation drives was disjointed and labor-intensive. Critical information lived in a patchwork of emails, spreadsheets, and even verbal updates.
The fragmentation:
The consequences: