Byrd Barr Place

Byrd Barr Place provides essential services to the Seattle Community

Byrd Barr Place is a nonprofit organization that offers essential services, like food, shelter, warmth and financial tools to the Seattle community. Byrd Barr Place also supports Seattle households by administering the federally-funded Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) to provide energy assistance in the form of subsidies to combat rising energy costs along with furnace replacements and air conditioning units. This essential work has provided $5 million in energy assistance to over 5,000 families each year.

Although providing furnaces and air conditioning units through LIHEAP brought much-needed support to families, it also created operational and bandwidth challenges for staff. “The entire process was manual and that created a level of burnout on our small team, that was already understaffed,” said Tremayne Edwards, Director of Operations for Byrd Barr Place. Their staff faced the time-consuming task of ordering individual air conditioning units for each family, tracking each package, and communicating delivery information to each recipient looking for updates.

Business Giving streamlines the process of giving items to others

As Byrd Barr Place was looking to support their community's growing needs, they needed a tool to ease the administrative burden on their staff. They looked to Business Giving, a new tool from Amazon Business, to simplify the process of giving and scale their impact. Business Giving enables organizations to give items to others using product vouchers that can be used on the vast number of items on Amazon. Administrators can easily create a campaign, set a budget and timeframe, select which items are eligible for redemption, and include recipient information and allocations.

Byrd Barr Place selected this tool and transitioned from ordering units one by one to administering orders in batches. The Byrd Barr Place team created a Business Giving campaign and selected multiple air conditioning units for families to choose from. They then created vouchers for each family's awarded amount and sent a batch of vouchers out through email. Recipients could then apply the voucher to their Amazon account, select their preferred unit, have it delivered to their home, access to all of tracking information, and manage returns directly through Amazon.

Byrd Barr Place expands their impact with Business Giving

Business Giving enabled the Byrd Barr Place team to expedite the process of administering these funds. After the switch to Business Giving vouchers, they were able to triple the number of units given and administer close to $800,000 to support Seattle families. This campaign also provided much needed flexibility to recipients, who can now choose the unit they wanted for their home, rather than having it chosen for them.

Looking ahead, the Byrd Barr Place team is expanding their work with Business Giving to administer grow the impact of their other assistance programs. Feedback from their community has shown excitement and gratitude around the process being easier and the fact that recipients now can have the option to choose. “Often people know exactly what they need for help and we’re excited to use Business Giving to give them the resources to go and make those choices themselves,” said Edwards.

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