Habitat for Humanity Pickup Booking & Route Portal

Highlights

Donors book pickups online, any time, from the Habitat website

Each day's stops are mapped and put in the shortest driving order automatically

Daily caps, blocked dates and service-area rules enforced on the booking form

Phone and walk-in bookings go into the same system as online ones

Dashboard shows the busiest days and hours, for planning crews

The challenge

Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore in Sault Ste. Marie picks up donated furniture and household items from across the city. Bookings came in by phone and were tracked by hand. Planning each day’s truck route meant someone eyeballing a list of addresses and guessing at the order.

They wanted donors to book online, the crew to see everything in one place, and the trucks to drive less.

What we built

An online booking form on the Habitat website, where donors pick a date, enter their address, list their items and add photos. The form only offers dates the crew can actually take. It enforces daily and per-weekday limits, blocked days, no same-day bookings and the service area, and it lists the items Habitat can’t accept.

A crew portal where every booking lands instantly:

New booking alerts in the portal, plus email confirmations.
Calendar and bookings list, with phone and walk-in bookings entered into the same system and tagged by source.
Repeat customers, including businesses with recurring pickups.
Availability controls so staff can open or close days, block holidays and set pickup hours without calling a developer.

Smarter routes

The Route Map is the heart of the portal. Each day’s pickups and deliveries are placed on a map automatically, with address lookup kept inside Sault Ste. Marie so pins land in the right place.

One click on Optimize Route works out the shortest driving order, starting from the ReStore, and shows the total distance and drive time. Stops can be assigned to different trucks, the route can be printed as a run sheet for the driver, and past days can be looked up in the history view.

The result

Donors can book a pickup in a couple of minutes, any time of day. The crew starts each morning with a mapped, ordered route instead of a list of addresses. More than 1,200 bookings have been managed through the portal, and the dashboard shows the team which days and times are busiest, so they can plan staffing ahead.

A closer look

The Schedule a Pickup booking form with contact details, pickup address and preferred date — The donor booking form on the Habitat website. Available dates come live from the portal.

The optimized route map on a phone — The crew's route on a phone, ready for the truck.

The portal dashboard: today's and this week's bookings, online versus in-store booking sources, bookings by day of the week, and peak pickup hours — The dashboard: online versus in-store bookings, the busiest days of the week and peak pickup times, for planning the crew. Customer details hidden.

Booking availability settings: available weekdays, temporary weekday blocks, blocked dates and the pickup time window — Staff control availability themselves: open days, blocked dates, daily caps and pickup hours.