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Community Supported Agriculture is sprouting up in many cities - over 100 groups are offering vegetable shares in NYC this year, up from 70 last year. Most are run on a volunteer basis.

CSAmazing is a hosted web management system for CSAs, taking care of the most common tasks, including payment, registration and volunteer coordination.With CSAmazing, volunteers spend less time working on admin, have an easier time delegating and can help the CSA group grow together as a community.

Common CSA tasks managed by CSAmazing include:

• easy sign-up for new members, including waiting lists once all slots are taken
• flexible payment options - thanks to generous support from non-profit food organizations in NYC, online payments via CSAmazing have no fees.
• cost calculators allow CSA organizers to forecast income and costs over the season, and share this info with the farmer
• email and social messaging tools to communicate with members and other CSA volunteers
• volunteer shift management - flexible re-scheduling, reminders and nagging emails make the process of staffing the CS pick-ups very smooth
• farmer communication, including details of vegetables each week
• tools to share data with other CSA organizers, to support local food efforts and build on experiences from other schemes
• a flexible, modular system, with optional extras including recipe databases, photo sharing and community food mapping

Getting a CSAmazing portal is simply a matter of registering with the main CSAmazing site, and filling out some info about the CSA. A custom domain is automatically set up, like this: crownheights.csamazing.org. With some simple customization though the admin interface, costs, shift times and other essential info can be entered.

Development of CSAmazing is open source, with a tiny team of developers supported by small contributions from participating CSAs and generous assistance from food-related foundations. Using a hosted solution means that backups, upgrades and security updates are taken care of. And since the underlying system beneath CSAmazing is a widely-used content management system and database, the foundations are solid.

The site is optimized to be undemanding. It runs smoothly on mobile devices and also older hardware and older browsers - helping CSAs reach a wide audience across the spectrum. The mobile version of the site even allows volunteer coordinators to check off shifts and edit schedules directly at the pick-up location.

Do you run a CSA? Say goodbye to miscellaneous google docs, long email chains and binders of volunteer shift coordination - sign up for CSAmazing today.