Doubling service volume and expanding engagement with Bloomerang’s Giving Platform
Key Nonprofit Highlights
Nourish Meals on Wheels serves older and homebound adults across South Metro Denver, delivering scratch-made hot meals and meaningful human connection to more than 800 clients every single day. As the organization nearly doubled its service volume over five years, it needed technology that could match its ambition without sacrificing the personal touch that defines its work. By deploying the Bloomerang Giving Platform, Nourish unified volunteer management, fundraising, and donor engagement, powering a holiday campaign that delivered 13,050 meals and 8,500 gifts via 1,250 volunteer shifts to the people who needed them most.
Challenge
Managing clients, volunteers, and a growing donor base across disconnected systems
When Gayle Melges joined Nourish Meals on Wheels as director of operations, the organization was running on printed paper lists, spreadsheets, and institutional knowledge that lived nowhere but in people's heads. Volunteers were tracked loosely across documents and Outlook calendars. Corporate groups came in to help pack meals and walked out without ever landing in a database, making follow-up nearly impossible.
With the number of meals served increasing by 92.3% over five years and 11 new delivery routes expanding service into a neighboring county, Nourish could no longer afford to manage its work this way. The organization served more than 900 active clients and coordinated 650 volunteers and donors. "Nobody could tell me when a volunteer started and how long somebody had been volunteering," Melges said. Without answers to those basic questions, deepening relationships and scaling the mission were both at risk.
Solution
Connecting donors, volunteers, and supporters through the Bloomerang Giving Platform
Nourish built its operations around Bloomerang’s Giving Platform, offering the team the power to trace every supporter relationship back to its origin with constituent profiles and 360° insights that unify every gift, interaction, and engagement signal in one place. For example, when a large donation arrived with no apparent source, Melges and her team used Bloomerang to connect it to a Girl Scout troop that had visited months earlier, chosen Nourish as their cookie-sale beneficiary, and inspired a family to give a $2,000 grant. "Connecting the dots is a big piece of what we're trying to accomplish by having Bloomerang because we want to be able to see how supporters found out about us and what their entry point was," Melges said. That $2,000 grant has since grown to $10,000 because of the relationships formed, which is enough to fund more than 3,000 delivered meals.
Bloomerang also made space for new kinds of engagement. When Melges realized longtime volunteers were aging out of physical delivery routes, her team launched "Crafternoons," community craft events where participants make small handmade gifts for meal recipients. Sign-ups ran through Bloomerang Fundraising, automatically tagging attendees and giving the team a way to re-engage corporate groups, first-timers, and community members who wanted to help but couldn't commit to a regular route. “Being able to segment our communications and invite people to be part of our family in a new way was a lot of opportunity that we weren't able to do before,” shared Melges. “Crafternoons” are now filling up three weeks in advance.
Results
Delivering 13,050 meals, 8,500 gifts, and 1,250 volunteer shifts in one campaign
Their award-winning 12 Days of Giving holiday campaign showed what was possible when everything ran through one platform. "Bloomerang was at the center of our 12 Days of Giving campaign that resulted in such a huge impact,” Melges shared. “Whether it's the 1,250 volunteer shifts, the 8,500 gifts that we delivered or even the 13,000+ meals that we delivered during that timeframe, Bloomerang is really the thing that powers it in the background.”
Over one holiday season, the team managed 18 community workshop events, tracked registrations in real time, and used segmented communications to fill under-staffed shifts and reach exactly the right audiences: donors who could now volunteer closer to home, corporate teams, and Crafternoon alumni. The impact showed up in post-holiday client surveys: one in three clients said the campaign was their only holiday celebration, and 78% experienced less loneliness and 92% said their holidays felt brighter. For its commitment to scaling volunteer connection alongside mission in the 12 Days of Giving campaign, Nourish Meals on Wheels was honored with the Heart of Service Givie Award at GiveCon 2026.
Nourish is also implementing Bloomerang Volunteer to bring schedule management fully into the Giving Platform. For an organization that's nearly doubled in five years and still growing, the goal stays the same: make sure every person who walks through the door or receives a meal at home feels seen, remembered, and part of the family.
