Used by250+agencies & organizations
Partners since2018
OVERVIEW
Since 1984, Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado (VOC) – Colorado’s largest and oldest outdoor stewardship organization – has mobilized volunteers to care for and provide sustainable access to Colorado’s public lands. Along the way, VOC became the group other organizations call when they want to learn how to run a great volunteer stewardship program. In 2018, Relish helped VOC answer that call by designing and launching the Stepping Up Stewardship Toolkit. Five years later, as the program grew into the Outdoor Stewardship Institute (OSI), we rebranded and migrated the site to serve organizations in Colorado and beyond.
The relationship goes deeper than the website. Relish co-founder Stu Swineford has volunteered with VOC since 2018 and serves as a Crew Leader. When we talk about trail work and volunteer programs, we have the blisters to back it up. Stu also serves on the board of the Nederland Area Trails Organization, another trail nonprofit we’re proud to support.
CHALLENGES
VOC needed a way to turn decades of hard-won, field-tested know-how into a toolkit other organizations could actually buy and use, without adding complexity for its small team. Resources, purchases, and user records all had to flow through VOC’s existing CiviCore CRM. And the experience had to stay simple for busy program managers looking for the right training at the right time. Five years later came a new challenge: as Stepping Up Stewardship matured into OSI, the site needed a new name and identity without losing anything that was working.
SOLUTION
We built the original toolkit on WordPress around clear pathways, so visitors could quickly find the resources that fit where their program was today. Behind the scenes, the site connected directly to CiviCore to handle eCommerce, user engagement, and data tracking, giving VOC one connected system instead of several disconnected ones. When the program became OSI in 2023, we didn’t tear down what was working. We rebranded and migrated the site under the OSI name and carried its proven structure and integrations forward. Accessibility and ease of use guided every decision, both times.
RESULTS
Eight years in, the site is still doing its job. OSI’s training model has now reached more than 250 agencies and organizations, giving VOC a scalable way to share its expertise and extend its mission beyond Colorado. And because the platform evolved instead of being replaced, the organizations that rely on it never had to relearn where to find what they need.
