Meet the Need is a not-for-profit charity whose mission is to dramatically increase the impact churches and ministries have in their communities by mobilizing more people to loving acts of service.
A Message from AVC President on Discovering Meet The Need
Rev. Michael Douglass, President/CEO of Advancing Vibrant Communities, Inc. shared the following story of AVCs discovery of Meet The Need:
"Meet the Need has propelled a ten-year-old city reaching ministry into a new season of incredible growth, effectiveness, and efficiency! Advancing Vibrant Communities (AVC) in Modesto, California, was founded to help move the church out of its four walls and into the community to serve. We took Jesus’ command, to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39), very seriously. Our role, as affirmed and blessed by the Greater Modesto Ministerial Association, was to research and validate legitimate individual and community needs, and then find servant hearts within the church with the skills and passions to meet those needs in the name of Jesus Christ. AVC serves the local body of Christ by connecting it to the needs of the City, and serves individuals by providing a representative of Christ to meet their felt needs."
Growing AVC
"AVC built its own “home-grown” volunteer and care management database using simple relational database software. However, the increasing demands of the city and the needs of faith based volunteers began to outdistance the technology. Five years ago, AVC partnered with a local programmer to develop a web based network that would post AVC researched needs on each church’s individual website, but the cost was prohibitive. As God would have it, Meet the Need had also been in development building exactly what AVC was looking for! Now, as AVC celebrates its tenth anniversary, Meet the Need has been discovered during a Mission America monthly conference call!"
Implementing Meet The Need
"As I took a virtual tour of MTN technology with Tonya Nichols, Meet The Need Director of Member Services, I was blown away by the incredible power of the case management system. MTN had met the specs we were looking for five years ago and went far beyond our original vision! We immediately signed up and began implementation. I am no programmer, but because the MTN system is designed to be so user friendly, the technology was up and running within only two hours!
MTN has jettisoned AVC into a brand new season of growth and effectiveness! MTN is allowing us to share researched and triage needs with the whole city in real time and to increase our abilities to serve local churches and ministries with volunteer opportunities for evangelism. Within a week, new volunteers were utilizing the MTN technology directly on the AVC website and new needs were being met by new volunteers. In addition, our abilities to track needs and volunteers was taken to new levels of efficiency! The MTN staff has demonstrated incredible and friendly “customer service”, responding to our specific suggestions for fine-tuning with a great collaborative spirit!
We praise God for the vision of Jim Morgan and his team! MTN is an incredible blessing that enables AVC to explode into 2013 with amplified abilities to serve individual believers, local congregations, and community ministries with the shared technology to respond to Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself”, and to promote collaboration and networking in the body of Christ in new, powerful, visionary ways!"