Case study · Giving Garden of Carrollton · nonprofit · pro bono build
Sixteen years of harvests, one login-gated Wix page, and a garden ready to grow up.
The Giving Garden of Carrollton has fed families in Carrollton, TX since 2010, donating over 24 tons of produce along the way. Its digital home hadn't kept pace: a decade-old WordPress blog for the public, a bare Wix login screen for members, and everything else tracked by hand in spreadsheets and an Access database. Here's what changed.
Role
Design + build, end to end
Terms
Build donated · hosting + care plan at cost
Stack
Next.js · Amplify · Cognito · Cloudflare
Status
Live · Aug 14, 2026
The starting point
Nothing was broken, exactly. It just wasn't one thing.
Record-keeping here had grown by accretion: notebooks, then spreadsheets, then an Access database, then a Wix site bolted on for members, each one layered on top of the last, none of them built to talk to each other.
The public-facing site ran on WordPress through a third-party host, styled with a generic blog theme and navigated through a sidebar of monthly archive links stretching back to 2010. A separate Wix site, gated behind a login screen, covered a sliver of member self-service: logging volunteer hours, little else.
Plot assignments, harvest weights by pantry, board rosters, the actual record-keeping, lived in spreadsheets and an Access database that only one person could really make sense of.
What replaced it
One system, three audiences.
A single platform on the garden's own domain, with three front doors and one set of data behind them.
- 01
Public site
The front door, now a real reflection of a 16-year-old organization.
- ·Live harvest-impact chart, auto-updating from admin-logged data
- ·Photo gallery with a review/publish workflow
- ·News (merged Press & Awards), Calendar, Sponsors
- 02
Member portal
Self-service, for the first time.
- ·Log volunteer hours and harvest/delivery dates directly
- ·Personal activity dashboard, own plot and agreement history
- ·Member directory, visual plot layout, searchable reference library
- 03
Admin portal
Replaces the spreadsheets, the Access database and the old member site entirely.
- ·Member, plot and agreement management, 32 beds tracked live
- ·Harvest logging with per-pantry breakdown, CSV export
- ·Reporting suite: birthdays, member turnover, agreement compliance, hours
Side by side
The public pages, page for page.
Same content, same organization, rebuilt for the person actually visiting: a prospective member on a phone.
Adopt-a-Plot
The primary conversion page for new members
Volunteer Opportunities
Real photos of the actual activities, not stock images
News
Press & Awards merged: two old sections, one admin-managed page
Members & admin
The part that never had a real interface at all.
A separate Wix site stood in for a member portal, useful for logging volunteer hours and little else. The real admin work happened off-screen entirely, in spreadsheets and an Access database.
Now, real members and admins log into purpose-built portals that handle:
- · Volunteer hour and harvest logging, self-service and admin-verified
- · Plot assignment across all 32 beds, including shared community plots
- · Role-based access: admin, content contributor, member
- · A reporting suite built for board meetings
After · described, not shown
Screenshots of the live portals aren't shown here. They display real member names and contact information, which stays out of anything public under the engagement's confidentiality terms.
16+
years of uninterrupted harvests, now digitized back to 2010
49,290
lbs of produce donated, now tracked on a live public chart
1
system, replacing a website, a second website and an Access database
$0
charged for the build, delivered as a charitable contribution
Built for The Giving Garden of Carrollton, a project of Community Gardens of Carrollton, 501(c)(3)
Run a nonprofit or a local business with the same problem?
Two websites, a spreadsheet and one person who knows how it all fits together. That's usually one system waiting to be built.