On a single Saturday each spring, over 8,000 people show up to 150 locations across the state of Tennessee to pick up and plant over 80,000 trees. The campaign starts in November, when the Tennessee Environmental Council opens its online store for people to place orders for up to 13 different species of tree. Though planting does not happen until March, in past years, they had to stop taking orders in January, because of the time it took to run reports, process orders, and plan for distribution.
In 2023, TEC reached out to Undaunted to see if we could help. We analyzed their systems and determined that the main bottleneck was the service they used for their online store. It had some significant reporting limitations, which forced staff to spend dozens and dozens of hours processing data by hand.
We built a rapid app to help solve this problem. The app grabbed all the data at once and used algorithms to process everything. Totals were instantly distributed to each county pickup site, and professionally branded documents for volunteers were generated with the click of a button, rather than the labor intensive process of creating one spreadsheet at a time.
“The work you did under 10 hours for Tennessee Tree Day resulted in some 60 hours of staff time saved, a much better experience for our site leaders and an estimated $10,000 in additional revenue (and 5,000 additional trees planted), since we were able to keep the online tree reservations open an additional week. So, a huge thank you for your expert services in making our entire operation more sophisticated, efficient and accurate!”
Jeffrey Barrie, CEO, Tennessee Environmental Council
Everything we did for TEC, we did in a matter of weeks. Recognizing the value we brought to their operations, TEC began working with us months in advance for Tree Day 2024, where they are on track to plant their 1 millionth tree!
