Recording and Presentation are accessible at the bottom of this page.

Vivery Limelight Forum – October 2025 Recap

Our second Vivery Limelight Quarterly Forum brought together food bank partners from across the country to celebrate continued growth, share new tools, and highlight best practices that keep neighbors connected to vital food resources.

Hosted by Kamla Evers and Meghan Zimmerman, the session featured exciting updates on Vivery’s national expansion, new feature releases, and a special Partner Forum presentation from Redwood Empire Food Bank.

Vivery Network Expansion

The Vivery network continues to grow rapidly — now connecting 91 food bank partners nationwide!
Together, these partners support 16,251 locations currently live on Vivery-powered Find Food Maps, reaching a combined 116 million people across the U.S.

Since the last quarterly forum, eight new food banks have joined the network:

• All Faiths Food Bank
• Care and Share Food Bank for Southern Colorado (completing full state coverage in Colorado!)
• Food Bank of North Central Arkansas
• Food Bank of Central New York
• Food Bank of Northern Nevada
• Food Finders Food Bank
• Food Lifeline
• Montgomery County Food Bank

Congratulations as well to the following partners who launched their Find Food Maps in Q3:

• Central Pennsylvania Food Bank
• Chattanooga Area Food Bank
• Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona (completing full state coverage in Arizona!)
• Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana
• Tarrant Area Food Bank
• Virginia Peninsula Food Bank

Together, these food banks help power 7.88 million searches — and counting — from neighbors seeking food and support in their communities.

Product Updates: The “King” Release

Vivery’s newest product release, called the King Release, went live this quarter with exciting new features designed to give food banks more flexibility and control.

Key Highlights Include:

• Locked Map Filters: Vivory now allows food banks to lock specific filters on their maps, ensuring users cannot turn them off, which is useful for creating specialized maps such as CSFP or mobile market maps.
   
• Bulk Organization Activation/Inactivation: A new feature enables users to activate or inactivate multiple organizations at once using checkboxes, streamlining the process for managing seasonal or temporary organizations.
   
• Claim Status Visibility: Claim status is now visible in the organization grid, allowing users to quickly see which organizations are claimed or unclaimed, and filter or sort by this status.
   
• Freshness Badging Improvements: A new freshness badge indicator and 'Refresh Now' button were added, allowing agencies or food banks to easily update their profile freshness; the freshness threshold was also extended from 120 to 180 days.

These updates help make Find Food Maps even more customizable and user-friendly for both food banks and neighbors.

Agency Engagement Leaderboard: Claiming Success

We celebrated food banks that reached a 100% profile claim rate, including:

• Georgia Mountain Food Bank
• United Food Bank
• Redwood Empire Food Bank
• Westmoreland Food Bank
• Helping Harvest Fresh Food Bank

Engagement Success Milestones:

• Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana achieving 51% claim rate in their first 3 weeks.
• Sauk Valley Food Bank (a one-person team) increased their Claim Rate by 11% in three months.
• North Texas Food Bank reached a 59% Claim Rate in their first 8 weeks!​…And climbed to 70% in the following 4 months!​.

New Tools for Partner Engagement

To support your agency engagement efforts, we rolled out:

• The Fall email template to remind your agency partners to keep their Vivery profiles up to date with program details and schedule updates for the upcoming the Holiday season.
• The Site Visit Checklist  to Increase Claims and Profile Completeness by incorporating the Checklist into your team's process. A 10 minute check-in with a big impact! For the biggest impact, ensure team members are walking agencies that are unclaimed through the claim process onsite at the visit.
• A Email Campaign Template to remind agencies to maintain their Freshness Badges. This is a great starting point if you have a fair amount of expired Freshness Badges or if you simply haven't communicated about Vivery in awhile.
• A Email Template for agencies with expired Freshness Badges. You can easily see which agencies in your network have expired badges by going to your Network Overview Dashboard (via the Reports in the Menu) and scroll to the bottom for the Expired Freshness Badge Report.

Pre-filtered Maps Using Tags as Filters and Locked Filters

You can use custom tags as filters to address community needs during scenarios like the government shutdown, weather-related disasters, or for Holiday Distributions. Additionally, with the new Locked Filter feature you can create an additional map that is pre-filtered by a specific tag(s). This provides you with an easy way to provide targeted support for neighbors or highlight special programs like Holiday Distributions.

For more information about how to do this please reach out to support@vivery.org or schedule a time here.

Partner Spotlights & Best Practices

Redwood Empire Food Bank’s Experience Making Vivery a Requirement: Amy Tobener-Talley from Redwood Empire Food Bank shared their approach to making Vivery participation a requirement for partner agencies, detailing onboarding, ongoing support, and integration into regular communications and agreements.

• Onboarding and Partnership Agreements: Redwood Empire Food Bank includes Vivery participation in their annual partnership agreements, requiring program leads to review and update their online listings, with initial support provided to ease the process.
• Ongoing Support and Communication: The food bank maintains engagement through a partner handbook, monthly newsletter reminders, seasonal emails, and a partner portal with easy access to Vivery resources.
• In-Person and Virtual Assistance: Staff incorporate Vivery support during site visits and outreach, offering one-on-one help for those struggling with technology, and conducting monthly virtual check-ins for open questions and collaborative problem-solving.
• Profile Maintenance and Freshness: A dedicated team member manages monthly reviews of partner profiles and freshness badges, ensuring ongoing data accuracy and engagement.

Questions for Amy about their efforts at Redwood Empire Food Bank?

Amt Tobener-Talley, Director of Partnerships

• Email: atalley@refb.org
• Phone:  707-523-7900 ext. 161

Thank you to all our partners for showing up, sharing your wins, and continuing to power a more connected, accessible charitable food network.

A full recording and presentation slides are available below.

We’ll see you at the next Vivery Limelight Forum — continuing to shine a light on connection, collaboration, and community.

—The Vivery Team

Access the presentation here: Limelight Presentation

Watch the recording:

Vivery Limelight Forum-20251021_172327UTC-Meeting Recording.mp4