Shortlisted for Innovation: the Loaves and Fishes CRM

We are delighted to share that Crann Taic has been shortlisted for the Innovation Award at the ICON Business Awards, run by the Inverclyde Chamber of Commerce. The nomination recognises the CRM we designed and built with Loaves and Fishes, a grassroots foodbank and community hub in East Kilbride.

The challenge

Loaves and Fishes has served its community for more than 30 years. Today the team supports over 250 food parcels every week, more than 13,000 in the past year, with the help of over 70 volunteers. That scale of work was being tracked across spreadsheets, paper forms and memory. It worked, but it cost the team hours every week, made reporting to funders slow and painful, and made it hard to see patterns in need across the community.

Off-the-shelf CRM products were not the answer. They are priced for commercial sales teams, they carry features a foodbank will never use, and they ask a charity to reshape its service around the software rather than the other way round.

What we built

We built a CRM shaped around how the service actually runs, not how a sales pipeline runs. It gives the team:

• A single record for every household supported, with consent and data retention handled properly
• Fast parcel and visit logging that volunteers can use in seconds on a phone or tablet
• Stock and donation tracking, so the team can see what is coming in and what is running short
• Volunteer records, roles and rotas in one place
• Funder ready reporting: parcels issued, people supported and trends over time, produced in a click rather than a weekend

Crucially, the charity owns the system. There is no per seat licence that grows with the number of volunteers, and no vendor lock-in on their own data.

Why it matters

This is the model we believe in: software built for the third sector, owned by the sector. The same patterns of need - referrals, visits, stock, volunteers, reporting - come up again and again across charities, and there is no good reason each one should pay commercial software prices to solve them alone.

Every hour a volunteer does not spend re-typing a spreadsheet is an hour spent with someone who needs support. That is the whole point.

Thank you

Thank you to the team at Loaves and Fishes for trusting us with the work, and to the Inverclyde Chamber of Commerce for the nomination. Whatever the result on the night, we are proud to be recognised alongside the other businesses and organisations shortlisted.

If your charity is wrestling with spreadsheets, paper forms or software that was never designed for you, get in touch. Crann Taic SCIO is a registered Scottish charity, SC055182, providing subsidised finance, IT and digital support to other non-profits.