Community Food Works (CFW) developed a system of Google forms and sheets to aid in our operations, building from an open-source tool available to all in order to fulfill our grant reporting requirements, financial obligations to our farmers and vendors, and to harness the power of data to better understand and improve our farmers markets.
The Master Tracker has allowed our organization to productively scale market-level sales and incentives data collection from three markets, to seven markets, to fourteen markets, keeping pace with FINI reporting requirements and accounting needs along the way.
The Tracker provides individualized, automatically-updating reports to each of our farmers and vendors, helping our network of food business enterprises better understand and run their businesses.
Thanks to a partnership with a local-food-loving software developer and multiple years of R&D, CFW is now able to share this tool directly with other farmers market organizations and state associations to increase data collection and operational capacity for farmers markets and DTC retailers of all sizes, at little to no cost.
The Master Tracker is a story of grassroots, low-budget origins, helping a small nonprofit succeed in implementing an FMPP, building capacity to receive and execute an LFPP, to working towards sharing the tools that helped them succeed with other local and state-level actors.
Presented by: Nick Stavely, Farmers Market Program Manager, Community Foodworks
About Nick Stavely:
Nick is the Farmers Market Program Manager for Community Foodworks, where he manages daily operations across the organization, including new partnerships, farmers market and incentive programs, sponsorships, and more across CFW’s network in the DMV. Nick has held an interest in food since he first tried calamari in elementary school. As an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, he cultivated his interests working on a small farm, researching food recalls, and studying terroir and sustainable agriculture in the Loire Valley of France, and ultimately received his BS in Agriculture & Resource Economics.
