Organizational FAQs

1. Meet The Need is a Christian ministry, not just a charity.  Our goal is to mobilize more people to demonstrate God’s love to others through acts of service.
2. Meet The Need is not a clearinghouse. Driving all traffic to one central site creates more work and gives too little control to each organization. Instead, Meet The Need's approach is to empower charities, churches and business with ALL of the state-of-the-art platforms they will EVER need to manage and communicate ALL of their charitable activities. Our systems work through their web sites, not ours.
3. Meet The Need is not just an automated connection of individuals to organizations. We also have a full-time staff that provides services to support the outreach efforts of your church or charity.  We can even take calls from those in need and connect them with your organization.

There are tremendous inefficiencies today in how charities communicate needs to local churches and businesses (via emails, newsletters and phone calls), and how churches share needs with their members (via the pulpit and the bulletin).  No technology vendor has brought modern tools to connect and mobilize cities to serve those in need - until Meet The Need.   Meet The Need automates all of those communication processes and provides each church and charity with a single platform for managing volunteers, in-kind donations, families in need, events, drives, etc., saving money spent on purchasing and time spent learning all of those different systems.

When people "shop" on your web site to find needs, they can sign up to receive automatic notifications when you post new needs.  When they do, you will see them show up as a "Pending Member" on your organization's Meet The Need Dashboard. If they are a member of your church or a person your charity would like to stay in contact with, you can automatically confirm their affiliation with your organization by changing the status of that "Pending Member" from Pending to Approved. As soon as you do, that individual will be able to see any needs you have posted for volunteers, resources or for local families on their "account" and will start receiving your "new needs posted" emails.

You can view and update a wide variety of need and donation activity through your organization’s private “Dashboard” at My Account on MeetTheNeed.org, including:

• Your profile and primary contact information
• The status of your needs, including all details about what you've posted and who's signed up to meet your needs for:
  • volunteers
  • resources
  • events
  • families
  • missionaries
• The activities of individuals or groups within your organization (e.g. Bible Study groups, Women’s groups)

No. Your organizational and personal information is only used to administer the Meet The Need program. We do not disseminate, distribute, sell or otherwise share your (or your members, volunteers, families, etc.) information with other organizations. For more information, please see our Privacy Policy.

Meet The Need provides churches and charities with sophisticated software and services that would be expensive in the for-profit world.  Meet The Need takes work off your staff, increases your impact in the community, enables you to manage volunteers, etc.  However, as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization whose mission is to see churches and charities do far more to serve families in need in their communities, we offer you all of our state-of-the-art solutions at no charge.  We do not want the cost of Meet The Need to impede anyone from being part of this global effort to mobilize the communities to meet the needs of those less fortunate!  We request only that your organization consider making a donation to help cover our costs of providing this valuable service to you and other churches and charities.

No, we will not ask your members, volunteers or anyone else associated with your church or charity to donate money to Meet The Need. Although Meet The Need is a 501(c)3 Public Charity and can accept tax deductible public contributions, we do not solicit funds from individuals who use Meet The Need. In fact, our philosophy is that we don’t want them to even know who Meet The Need is - your organization is the face of compassion and Christ to the community so we work through your web site - they need to see your heart for those in need, not Meet The Need's!

Meet The Need is funded by donations from our church and charity members and a select group of individuals and foundations that believe in our mission and feel it is the game-changer that will enable cities to reconnect and mobilize to bring far more help and hope to those in need.

Meet The Need was an idea that started in 2000 when its founder, Jim Morgan, was working as a strategist for a Dot Com consulting firm. He had been a consultant to Fortune 500 companies for many years.  But as a Christian, he wondered how the power of business technologies could be leveraged for a ministry purpose rather than just as a money-making or money-raising tool. God gave him an inspired thought - rather than people shopping for what they want to buy on the web, why can’t they “shop” for someone who needs what they want to give away! Through one-to- one connections, donors could not only help meet physical needs but spiritual needs as well. And the rest, as they say, is history. A local ministry based on that principal was launched 2 years later in the Tampa area as a pilot and Meet The Need was began it's Beta test in 2008 after 6 years of additional design, development and, most importantly, prayer!  Since its national launch in 2012, Meet The Need now works with many of the largest churches and charitable organizations in the country.