Case Study: Shopping Angels achieves automated volunteer matching and scalable deliveries with Tonkean

Shopping Angels Connecting Shopping Volunteers Amid COVID-19

Shopping Angels, founded by Jayde Powell to coordinate volunteer grocery deliveries during COVID-19, faced exponential demand and hundreds of daily requests that required time-consuming, manual matching of shoppers to people in need. Coordinators were sifting through spreadsheets and emailing volunteers one-by-one, and earlier automation with Zapier hit task limits and became unwieldy. To solve this, Shopping Angels turned to Tonkean’s Adaptive Business Operations platform.

Tonkean implemented automated intake and routing workflows that integrate with Google Forms, Trello, Slack, Gmail and Google Maps APIs to match volunteers by zip code and now latitude/longitude, surface tasks and notify volunteers, and automate follow-up actions. The Tonkean solution eliminated much of the manual matching work, freed state coordinators to handle exceptions and higher-value tasks, and supported Shopping Angels’ growth to almost 8,000 volunteers across all 50 U.S. states plus Australia and Canada, with plans to roll Tonkean out more broadly.

Shopping Angels

Ben Wallace

Indiana State Coordinator