Making a volunteer-run fundraiser run like a modern retail campaign.

A program with two decades of goodwill was running on a stack that had grown one workaround at a time. Shopify, PassKit, Zapier, and a dormant HubSpot license each did part of the job, and volunteers absorbed the gap between them with paper forms, manual credit card entry, and hand-tracked promo codes.

That is survivable in a quiet month. It is expensive in the ten days when every purchase, every wallet pass, and every seller attribution happens at once.

The fundraiser did not have an awareness problem. It had a capacity problem. Merchant recruitment, buyer reminders, and seller follow-up were all things volunteers did by hand, which meant growth in Northwest and Central Arkansas was limited by how many hours people could give.

Tools the program already paid for could carry most of that load. The work was to make the technology reliable first, then use it to reach merchants and buyers at a scale volunteers could not reach alone.

The best place to sell a Partners Card is inside a store that already accepts it, at the moment a shopper is holding something they want. So the piece was built to work there, on a counter, without a volunteer standing beside it.

The display graphic gives a shopper two ways to buy before they leave the register. One code opens the digital card, which lands in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet and is ready at the next shop. A second code orders a physical card for people who would rather carry one. A third opens the full merchant list, which answers the question shoppers ask first: where can I use this.

Each participating store gets its own version with its name on it, so the same design does three jobs at once. It sells cards, it gives the merchant visible credit for taking part, and it puts every counter in the program behind the same ten day window.