Circle City Digital build’s Sew and Serve’s Website In A Day!

As everyone is well-aware, COVID-19 is a massive pandemic that is affecting the entire world. The virus is shutting down businesses, schools and putting a lot of strain on our healthcare workers. Hospitals, nursing homes and outpatient healthcare centers are all feeling strain of the disease more than ever when trying to purchase supplies to keep their employees safe. There’s a huge demand for ventilators, gloves, masks and caps as the disease can be transmitted both by indirect contact and a simple breath.

Due to this, the amazing team of Sew and Serve began a Facebook group to try and do their part to assist Central Indiana healthcare workers on the front line. It started with a small group of sewers and has quickly become a group of over 4,000.

Circle City Digital became involved initially by helping with graphics and spreadsheets. We aren’t a team of sewers, but we wanted to help. When diving into all of the amazing video tutorials that were being made,  pattern instructions that are being built and social media graphics that were being developed we asked: “Is there a website yet that can house all of this information?”

There was not and so we dove right in! We got on a call and on Thursday we purchased a domain and set up hosting, Friday their team picked a website design they liked and Saturday we got started building!

Starting at 10:00am we had a conference call with three CCD staff members, tasks were given to all, and we got on our way! 

Little did we know that we’d have a 7pm conference call that Saturday night and a prompt to finalize the website ASAP for a newscast that was going to air at 10pm. 

Interested in what we built in 12 hours? Learn more below:

Drop-Off Map Functionality

One huge part of the website that the Sew and Serve community wanted was the ability for someone to put in their address or zip code and see where the closest place they could drop off their donations for distribution to healthcare facilities. We had a list of 15 different locations with their addresses and the contact person in charge so we built this Google Maps based locator functionality that shows people all of the drop-off areas nearby and the one that is closest to them!

Patterns Page 

The patterns page was an essential part of the website. All 4,000+ Facebook followers who are beginning their journeys with sewing masks come to this page to reference the patterns and choose one that they’d like to work on. This page had to provide ease of use for people to navigate the patterns in two different ways:

1. Via written instructions
2. Via a video tutorial

Donate Page 

All efforts from Sew and Serve are volunteer-based without profits received. Due to this, a donation page was a big necessity for their team. Donations could come in the form of time, materials and monetary. If you were a sewer, donating your time would be right up your alley. Have any fabric, elastic, or thread? A materials donation would be of great service to the Sew and Serve the community. Or, if you just wanted to help in the purchasing of new materials, a monetary donation.

This page allowed people to easily be able to come to the website and click the link to what best suited their interest.

Sew Much More (ha! a pun!)

Now, obviously there is much more to the website than these few pages but, at its core, what we want to focus on is this amazing group of volunteers from the Indianapolis area. In less than a week this group, started by Erika Pike, went from a small group of friends and families to a collective group of volunteers from all over Central Indiana.

They’ve sewn over 10,000 masks for healthcare workers and there isn’t anything stopping them to do much more. The demand is not going away and this organization is helping more than they’ll ever know. They’ve received “thank you” pictures and social posts from healthcare workers benefitting from these masks and even have received a public shout out from the Governor of Indiana, Eric Holcomb, for their efforts.

Grateful Web Designers

Building a website was just one part of this amazing story and we were so glad to be able to help out. We continue to support Sew and Serve by making daily updates to their website as the amount of volunteers and masks they’ve sewn have continued to grow. One thing that hasn’t stopped: The demand. The list of healthcare facilities in Central Indiana continues to increase as thousands of masks are requested every day. Please, if you have an opportunity to help in any way, please stop by their website at  http://sewandserve.com/

Thank you!!

Circle City Digital Staff

And More!

Now, obviously there is much more to the website than these few pages but, at its core, what we want to focus on is this amazing group of volunteers from the Indianapolis area. In less than a week this group, started by Erika Pike, went from a small group of friends and families to a collective group of volunteers from all over Central Indiana.

They’ve sewn over 10,000 masks for healthcare workers and there isn’t anything stopping them to do much more. The demand is not going away and this organization is helping more than they’ll ever know. They’ve received “thank you” pictures and social posts from healthcare workers benefitting from these masks and even have received a public shout out from the Governor of Indiana, Eric Holcomb, for their efforts.

Grateful Web Designers

Building a website was just one part of this amazing story and we were so glad to be able to help out. We continue to support Sew and Serve by making daily updates to their website as the amount of volunteers and masks they’ve sewn have continued to grow. One thing that hasn’t stopped: The demand. The list of healthcare facilities in Central Indiana continues to increase as thousands of masks are requested every day. Please, if you have an opportunity to help in any way, please stop by their website at  http://sewandserve.com/

Thank you!!

Circle City Digital Staff