My experience with Frontline Foods

March 2020 was a crazy month for the entire planet. Mine was no exception, and now with the dust settled a bit, I wanted to write down and share some of my experiences.

Around mid-March, like many others, I felt the call to action that only a global crisis can provide. I looked to help in ways that I could be most useful. After exploring a few organizations and efforts, I found an ability to make an impact with an organization called Frontline Foods.

My time spent with this organization was a whirlwind, and I am STILL recognizing new lessons learned as the experience settles in my head. In short, the team of 100% remote volunteers that formed as Frontline Foods accomplished some amazing things, and I wanted to draw some insights from how it all came together.

Starting from nothing in late March, Frontline Foods has:

• Raised over $10 million dollars
• Expanded operations into ~50 cities in the first 4 weeks (my primary area of contribution)
• Delivered over 500,000 meals
• Merged with World Central Kitchen

It was startup experience / panic building on a hyper-compressed timeline, in one of the most fearful times I have ever known. In that time, the team managed to accomplish the above and help so many people. I’m proud to have played a small part in that. Below is a somewhat-chronological word vomit, loosely organized into interesting moments and observations from my time with Frontline Foods.

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Meet Cute (mid-March):

I first heard of #SFHospitalMeals (which became Frontline Foods) as a hashtag. Many folks in mid-March were looking to feed our frontline healthcare workers in disparate, uncoordinated efforts around the country. Through Escape from New York Pizza, I found the ability to donate a large pizza to a hospital, and found a hashtag that others were doing this as well. After sliding up into the DMs of some folks posting the hashtag, I came across the people who started the movement. Turns out they knew what they were doing, and I made a snap judgement based on their backgrounds and resume to “bet on” this team with an investment of my time. I joined the first Zoom call where about 30 people formulated a plan to launch Frontline Foods.

A bit of luck:

I wanted to help in Vermont, which is my home state. Somehow, I had the good fortune of meeting a nurse from Burlington VT who wanted to start a similar effort. My basic computer literacy combined with her ability to coordinate on-the-ground efforts in Vermont made for an excellent team. We agreed to centralize our efforts with Frontline Foods, and the Vermont chapter was born (Spoiler: Vermont raised over $150k).

Through helping her get set up, I quickly learned how to enable a new chapter using Frontline Foods’ tooling (the basics being Slack, a World Central Kitchen donation page to raise funds, and general guidance on process / best practices). Armed with this information for Vermont, I was a natural fit to share this knowledge with other chapters.

How fast can you scale? (early to mid-April)

I paired with an incredibly bright partner with the goal of onboarding new chapters for Frontline Foods. With access to the website, I changed the newchapter@ email link to a Google Form to collect interest in new cities. Some quick workflow automation sent these new applications into Slack, where a small team of volunteers triaged applications. We did our best to enable as many teams as possible to deliver meals to healthcare workers in their cities. There were so many people with the same goal as ours, and we were quickly inundated with interest from around the country.

This was the most impactful time I spent at Frontline Foods, and the most rewarding. Over about a 3 week period, I had the privilege of speaking to intelligent and benevolent people around the country (and a few internationally!) that responded to the Covid crisis in the same way — by putting the rest of their life on hold and doing what they could to help their communities. I will be forever grateful for the conversations had and friendships made in these moments. Looking back on the time, in a weird way, it has become one of the highlights of my life.

Culture and Growth: (late April)

We were quickly buried under requests to stand up new cities, and I knew we needed more people. The challenge was transferring the context that I had about chapter onboarding to more people who could mirror the work I was doing. Picking from volunteer applications, I came across an incredibly intelligent and passionate NYU MBA, which was a blessing. We tag-teamed new chapter conversations until she was ready to take them herself, and I’m proud to say she has made an incredible impact on Frontline Foods and continues to do so today.

In this process, I made the decision to train one person and train them holistically. That person then passed on this knowledge to one more person, and so on in a linear fashion. I’m still unclear if this was the right decision, or if I should have sought exponential growth by training multiple people at the same time.

Mistakes were made — I broke our donation link right after an Ariana Grande social media shoutout:

As the team grew, we naturally made mistakes. One of my “favorites” was early in our social media presence when Ariana Grande posted on IG about Frontline Foods. This was by far the biggest celebrity endorsement we had at the time on social media, and no doubt attracted a lot of eyeballs to our website. The “process” we had at the time gave a TON of access to folks that simply did not have the training to manage our backend. In short, the wrong 6-digit code was changed in the wrong field by a chapter lead, breaking the donation page links to EVERY CHAPTER for maybe 2 hours. I’d estimate it cost us thousands of dollars in donations.

I’m horribly embarrassed about this, and at the time, it was a major mistake. I had earned the trust of the technical team at FLF, and I felt I had let them down as I explained what happened. Everyone was extremely kind about it, and we soon tightened our controls and access to the website.

Tracking City Operations:

As we onboarded new cities, we also had to mature how we were tracking active city operations in Google Sheets. We were feeling a ton of pain with new users adding new cities, changing the column format, editing new fields, etc. The catalyst for me was a product leader with FLF stating firmly that “Google Sheets is where data goes to die.” This resonated so hard for me, and I wisely ripped the band-aid off and migrated all our data to Airtable (where the Product team was building).

In the short term, we all then had to climb a steeper learning curve. I was somewhat of an Airtable novice at the time, and so was the rest of the team. Part of the Chapter Onboarding role then became Airtable education and training for new cities (btw, this is the best 12 minute overview on Airtable).

Moving to Airtable gave us the ability to tie our primary key with what Product was building (once we could link bases, of course). We replaced the Chapter Onboarding Google Form with an Airtable form, routing the applications directly into this database and allowing us to better track the status of each city application as a team. This was one of the best decisions we made, and helped keep our data quality high for the eventual transition over to WCK.

Tooling in general:

Thinking more broadly about all the technology that made this possible, we used a ton of new technology. I’m missing some of the more technical tools that were no doubt in use here, but my experience in somewhat chronological order is:

• Instagram — How I discovered Frontline Foods, and what has become a digital gateway to my local community.
• Slack — Absolutely essential for how we communicated. Its also easy enough so that every new chapter could learn it, despite their technical literacy. Having their former Chief of Staff as a volunteer didn’t hurt :)
• Zoom — From the first Zoom meeting to every chapter onboarding conversation, Zoom was easy to use and made remote work a possibility.
• Front — Shared email inboxes for each chapter allowed every chapter to have local control and feel while still being centralized and easy to manage for national volunteers
• Trello — Following along with the product builds was important to be able to update chapter leads on the upcoming roadmap.
• Google Forms / Sheets — A 1.0 version of collecting data, and an obvious improvement beyond our email alias.
• Airtable — A much-needed 2.0 version of chapter operations and application tracking. I am an Airtable convert.
• Segment — We were able to track all site visits and send site data to the proper end tool. As a Segment employee, I was able to get a deal done with my employer to use their product at no cost.
• Amplitude — The primary destination for Segment data, we were able to analyze conversion data to increase donations.

ALL of our technology was offered free of charge by these companies. Many companies had senior leaders join our Slack community to help out. The most helpful organizations that I saw were the folks from Airtable and Amplitude, but almost every organization had senior employees jump into our Slack to help out.

Corporate Partnerships (May):

Over time, the number of applications for new chapters slowed, and I refocused my efforts on Corporate Partnerships. With yet another incredibly capable partner and now friend, we were able to centralize sponsorship efforts that helped fund our mission (by building a custom CRM in Airtable, of course).

The highlight here was watching an incredible social impact team leader (and UNICEF board member) lead a group of volunteers in fundraising. This was a privilege that taught me so much about culture and leadership, and I’m grateful for the experience.

I also was able to work closely with leadership on a pitch to the Start Small foundation for Frontline Foods, which was another incredible highlight.

Wrap up:

By late May, I needed to step back from Frontline Foods and focus on some personal and professional goals. The experience with this community at this time is something I will cherish forever, and I hope that our work was able to help people and give volunteers a sense of belonging and community in a time we all desperately needed it.