Community has always been vitally important to Inductive Automation. As such, we carve out space for community both virtually (such as the IA Forum) and in person (like our annual Ignition Community Conference). And in 2023, we launched the IA Community Impact Program to take things a step further — helping nonprofit groups or individuals make positive impacts on their communities by providing them with free Ignition licenses.
Because of this program, nonprofit management can become significantly more effective, helping to accomplish important missions such as sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry, saving lives, and more.
This blog post will explore some of the outstanding projects that are part of the program. And what better way to kick things off than with the project that inspired the conception of the program in the first place – a project created for Room in the Inn.
Solving A Homeless Shelter System’s Logistical Nightmare
Room in the Inn provides a safe haven for homeless individuals in Nashville, Tennessee, but its staff was struggling with its management system. They used four disparate software packages, Excel, and email to run the operations for 13 shelters and 111 congregations, and for managing thousands of homeless participants and thousands of volunteers.
But then, Vertech’s Chris McLaughlin, along with more than 150 volunteer engineers from IA’s integrator program, built Room in the Inn an Ignition solution to help improve its operations. The new system combines all its different homeless shelter management software into one single platform, providing additional logistics features to boot.
The Ignition-built system has been completely transformational for Room in the Inn. It functions similarly to an MES, and can be used to generate KPIs for continuous improvement. With it, Room in the Inn can easily track room availability, manage volunteers and information about participants, and schedule classes and other events.
Thanks to the new system’s scalability and functionality, Room in the Inn will be able to expand the reach of the important work it does, improving the lives of countless more people.
A Fresh Solution For Access To Fresh Food
This next project deals with another critical human need — food. People in the Green Bay, Wisconsin community were struggling to get easy access to fresh food, but a local neighborhood association came up with an innovative solution to provide its community with 24/7 access to fresh, nutritious food — a community refrigerator named “The Fridge.” They put The Fridge outside a community policing center, providing it with a power source and improved security, then partnered with local stores to rescue their unsold food.
Ignition Edge and MQTT is used to monitor The Fridge’s energy usage, temperature, and when its doors are open and closed. The temperature monitoring was an especially critical feature, as it allowed The Fridge to stock raw meat safely. Additionally, automated reports provide data on The Fridge’s activity, and alarming is set up so that if, say, the doors are accidentally left open, a volunteer can be dispatched to close them before the food spoils.
After hearing about this wonderful project, the Green Bay Packers provided a grant enabling a second fridge to be set up in the area. Thanks to The Fridge, the people in Green Bay have access to fresh food when they need it, and a lot less food is going to waste.
Resuscitating The Heart Of A Community
Even people who are brand new to Ignition can leverage the Community Impact Program to make a big difference in their community. This is because Inductive University offers a plethora of online training videos that are freely available for anyone to learn from. Andrew Tait was one of these people. Tait didn’t have prior experience working with Ignition, but while he was earning his free Ignition Credential at Inductive University he was able to build a solution that revitalized the heart of his community – Bixter Hall.
Bixter Hall is a community center located in the Shetland Islands, north of Scotland’s mainland, that hosts craft fairs, weddings, funerals, parties, dance lessons, and yoga classes. Because Tait’s village is sparsely populated, connecting with other people is difficult, so Bixter Hall is an invaluable fixture in the community.
Unfortunately, energy costs for the hall skyrocketed 360% in recent years, forcing them to turn off the heating completely, remove the Internet, and remove the bar’s alcohol license. Needless to say, this resulted in the hall barely being used, and the torch at the heart of the community threatened to go out.
But after learning Ignition, Tait was convinced he could help, and he most certainly did! He created an Ignition system that promises to dramatically reduce Bixter Hall’s energy costs by automating the hall’s heating system. The hall now turns on during events, and then shuts off when events are over. Additionally, he created an application to make it easier for people to book the hall, which will help it stay in business.
Thanks to Tait, Bixter Hall now has a fighting chance at weathering the spike in energy costs, so it can continue to be a hub where folks can connect with each other in person.
Improved Management For Emergency Medical Couriers
This next project is, quite literally, saving lives. SERV Kent, which stands for Service by Emergency Response Volunteers, provides emergency courier services for transporting vital medical supplies. These supplies include things like blood donations, test samples, and medication.
SERV Kent provides these free services to major hospitals in Kent, England, and the group consists of 250 volunteers who collectively make around 6,000 transportations a year.
Since the coordination of these deliveries was not only complicated (sometimes requiring numerous handoffs to transfer items across long distances) it was also extremely time-sensitive, as people’s lives could depend on receiving them. Unfortunately, SERV Kent had no proper volunteer management software, but instead used a combination of paper forms, various websites, and Google calendars. The lack of logistical capability was an unacceptable limitation in SERV Kent’s system. As such, BIJC’s Chris Taylor stepped in to build a cloud-based volunteer management system in Ignition, knowing it would be the best route to achieve the efficiency needed.
Now, volunteers can manage their work schedule, adding and removing themselves for the days they are available, and managers can use geolocation tracking to monitor the location of volunteers. This volunteer tracking element is important not only for coordination purposes but for the safety of volunteers as well. The system satisfies GDPR regulations and is refreshingly intuitive for volunteers and managers to use.
Thanks to Taylor’s wonderful Ignition solution, SERV Kent can more easily and more efficiently do its volunteer work, saving lives every day. And because the group is able to do this for hospitals at no cost, hospitals save money which they can use to improve patient care.
Spreading Joy During The Holidays
This last project we’ll highlight is truly heartwarming. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the Gifts of Love program sells drastically discounted (70-90% off retail) gifts to qualifying low-income families, so parents can shop affordably during the holidays with the pride of knowing they purchased the gifts themselves.
Gifts of Love needed a special system though, since typical inventory and point-of-sale systems wouldn’t meet its needs. Its system needed to allow volunteers to look up retail prices for donated items so that they could be accurately priced. It also needed to track additional data points for tax purposes.
Huffman Engineering volunteered to build Gifts of Love an Ignition system which streamlines the entire process and makes pricing consistent across multiples of the same thing. Volunteers use the system for inventory, then for running the store in December, and then use it to collect data to manage the payment of sales taxes and do their nonprofit financial audit in the spring.
Thanks to Huffman Engineering’s efforts, the operations at Gifts of Love are more sustainable, so it can better provide affordable gift options to low-income families and spread a little more joy during the holidays.
Ignite Your Philanthropic Spirit
If these projects have inspired you, we encourage you to apply for the Community Impact Program, so that you can help make a difference in your community as well!
