Montgomery County Food Bank extends a small team’s reach across the county with Claude

A growing county, a lean budget and work that pulled staff away from food

Montgomery County is the fourth-fastest-growing county in the United States, and its master-planned communities sit beside rural food deserts. About one in six residents and one in four children experience food insecurity. During a government shutdown, the food bank served its neighbors more than 115,000 times in one month.

With 96% of donations going directly to programs, the food bank has little room for anything that isn’t food, yet non-food tasks kept stacking up. About 25% of the pounds entering the warehouse were non-nutritious, from paper goods to bicycles to pool floats, and staff and volunteers spent hours sorting them. Drivers and operations personnel serving 96 partner agencies built up overtime because the food bank accepted every requested delivery time. Donor, email and volunteer records sat in separate platforms with gaps between them.

“Our default was to sort everything, so we were spending a lot of volunteer and employee time on things that aren’t value add for our primary mission, which is food,” said Scott Burns, President and CEO.

Putting every dollar and hour back into food

Jay Martin, Marketing and Communications Manager, was an early adopter of Claude. When Claude Opus 4 landed on the scene, he saw capability climbing quickly, told Burns, and the food bank signed up for a nonprofit license. “It felt like having a coworker I could explain the mission of the food bank to and not have to re-explain,” Martin said.

The Montgomery County team now uses Claude to extend its impact. About 14 staff hold paid seats, which Martin reserves for people who will use tools such as Claude Cowork in depth, and he shows each team how to build a Claude project that holds its own documents. Martin tells staff to use Claude Opus 5.5 when they don’t know the answer to what they’re asking, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 when they already know how they want the result to look and want Claude to be the workhorse. He uses Claude in Chrome daily for form building and website editing, while the Programs, Sourcing and Operations teams use Claude in the food bank’s Microsoft apps to build slide decks, dashboards and one-pagers. Their work falls into three areas, which are lowering the cost of getting food to neighbors, using data to decide where to invest, and caring for donors.

Every dollar and hour saved on logistics goes back into food, so the team started where those costs accumulate. The sourcing team noticed that many partner agencies still bought supplemental food from grocery stores at retail margins. The team walked one agency through Claude in Excel to see what it bought, where, and at what price, and compared those prices with the at-cost rates the food bank gets from retail partners. That agency now buys all of its food through the food bank and spends 40% less.

The same thinking applies inside the warehouse and the fleet. Claude parses exports from the food bank’s older inventory system to show which mixed-load items are worth sorting in house, and the food bank now sends pallet-size cartons of the rest to other agencies. For the fleet, Claude analyzed routing and shift patterns, which led the food bank to stagger start times so overtime no longer fell on the same few drivers.

Claude gives the leadership team evidence for deciding where to invest staff time and fundraising effort. Burns downloaded Form 990 filings, the financial statements nonprofits publish, from local peers and similarly sized food banks across the country. Claude compared government funding against donor funding, pounds distributed, meals and fundraising efficiency, which gives the board a view beyond year-over-year growth. Burns now runs the same comparison event by event to decide where staff time returns the most. “Nonprofit is a lot of ‘this feels like the right thing to do,’” Burns said. “The great thing about what Claude is doing is that it makes it very data driven.”

Donor stewardship is a big part of Burns’s job as CEO, so the development office looks to Claude for ways to keep each gift personal. Burns built a donor thank-you skill in Claude for Outlook. He enters a donor’s name, gift amount and first gift date, and Claude drafts a personalized message in about a minute, which he reads once and sends. Martin left a Claude Cowork session running one evening and returned to a finished workflow in which a first gift triggers a thank-you, a one-week survey, a three-month invitation to give monthly and a one-year anniversary note. He estimates building it by hand would have taken about a day. “Claude lowers the barrier between a good idea and not enough time,” Martin said.

Personal outreach depends on clean data, and the food bank’s records sat in separate donor, email and volunteer platforms. Martin and Stephanie Arend, Data Analytics Manager, wanted a past volunteer to appear in the right email and donor lists for targeted campaigns, but third-party import tools never closed the gaps. With Claude Fable, they began to match records across the three platforms and email bounces fell. “Data cleanliness for us was always a faraway, ‘one day we’ll figure it out’ goal, but Fable helped us finally turn the corner on finding solutions and getting every database clean and cohesive,” Arend said. The team keeps donor records, which hold personal information, out of Claude.