A community giving board
The Needs & Deeds Board
A page in your district's colours where a parent or a teacher can ask for something a student needs — and someone in your community can buy that exact thing and ship it to the school. Turning needs into good deeds.
How it works
Six steps, and your staff are in two of them.
- A parent or a teacher asks.They pick the exact item on Amazon and paste the link, with a size, a grade and who it is for. The student's name and their own contact details go in a private section only the school office sees.
- It is checked in seconds, with nobody clicking anything.Fixed rules decide the hard limits — your price cap, which programmes are open, which retailer, in stock. An automated language check reads any free text for anything that should not be public. Routine requests publish on their own.
- It appears on the board, anonymously.The community sees the item, a photo, a price, a size and an age band. Never a name, never an exact age, never an address. Campus and grade are hidden unless enough requests exist at that campus for a child not to be identifiable.
- Someone in the community covers it.It is held for them so two people never buy the same coat. They are shown the campus shipping address, buy the item on Amazon themselves, and come back to say they ordered it.
- The box arrives at the campus.Addressed to the front office with a line saying what it is. The office sees which parcels are expected. One click marks it received.
- Staff hand it to the student privately.One more click. That click is the only thing that counts as done — not a shipping notice, not the donor saying they ordered it.
What it costs you
What the district actually provides.
- A link on your website. A button or tile on the homepage, and ideally each campus page, so families can find it. Nothing is installed — no software, no plugin, no server access, nothing for IT to review or patch. Whoever already edits your site does it in ten minutes.
- A delivery address and one receiving contact per campus. Boxes go to the front office, the way packages already do.
- Your price caps and which programmes to open. You decide what the board will and will not accept.
- About thirty minutes of an administrator's time at setup. We do the rest, including taking your crest and colours off your own website.
- Optionally, a one-time roster export of two columns and no more — a student ID and the last four digits of the guardian phone you already hold — if you want requests matched against your own enrolment. This is off by default.
What it does not cost you: no staff member approves requests one by one, no money passes through the district, no home addresses are collected from anyone, and nobody has to install or maintain anything.
Privacy
The questions your privacy officer will ask.
- Is a home address ever collected? No. Not on the form, not later, not by staff. Delivery is to the campus. This removes an entire category of risk and it was a design decision, not an oversight.
- What is public? The item, a size, an age band, a price, a category, whether it is for one student or a classroom, and a random reference. Never a name. The public card is built from a short allowed list of fields — it is not your private record with columns hidden.
- Who at Ray-Lane can see a student record? Operations only, for support, and it is logged. Our sales staff cannot reach one at all — the sales system has no connection to the student tables and the database refuses the role. We test that on every build.
- Free text? Anything a family writes is checked automatically for other people's names before it can appear. If that check cannot run, the text is withheld rather than shown.
- If we leave? Your data is deleted, including the hashed roster and the key that made it. You get an export first.
A full security and privacy questionnaire is available on request, and most districts' own data-privacy agreements are ones we can sign as written.
Pricing
An annual licence, priced by enrolment.
A base fee plus a per-student rate that falls as the district gets larger, so a small rural district and a city district are not quoted the same number. There is a one-time setup fee based on how many campuses you are turning on. No per-request fees, no cut of anything the community buys, and families pay nothing ever.
Introductory, and we mean it. Our first districts are quoted below where this will settle, and they keep that rate when it rises. Ask and we will send you the exact figure for your enrolment — we do not play the "contact sales for a number" game beyond needing to know how many students you have.
Request a demo
See a version with your district's name on it.
We will build a working board in your district's colours, with your campuses on it, and walk you through it in about twenty minutes. There is nothing to install and no obligation at the end of it.