When Martha van Berkel, CEO of Schema App, learned that over 490 families in Guelph were living with severe food shortage and that only 50 families (soon to be 90) had been granted access into the Food4Kids program, she felt compelled to help.
Food4Kids provides students, living with severe food insecurity, with healthy food for the weekends. During the week, schools supply these children with food but on the weekend there may be nothing in the cupboard. Food4Kids fills in the weekend gap by providing each child under the age of 14 (and their stay-at-home siblings) with their own food package. A donation of $400 supplies one child with weekend food over the course of an entire school year. Schools identify the children and families that would benefit most. “We already have another 150 children on our waiting list. It’s estimated that some 400 children in Guelph are in need of weekend food support, but we will only sign them up in our program once we have sufficient funds in hand to support them for at least one year,” says Terrie Jarvis, Rotarian organizer.
Terrie shared that in addition to the $400 donation from Schema App, she also received an email from Martha a couple of months ago, “with a free offer to optimize their Food4Kids website to make it easier for people to find them online and increase the likelihood of click-throughs to the donation page.” Terrie plans to engage her digital marketing team to take advantage of this opportunity in the near future.
Schema App sells solutions that increase the visibility of companies on the internet. Businesses can use Schema App to market their business, products, services, sales promotions, people, events, articles, videos, job openings, etc. to enjoy greater online success (higher impressions, clicks, click-through rates and ultimately revenue). Schema App accomplishes this by augmenting a company’s website (or digital content) with Schema markup. Schema markup is a vocabulary developed by and maintained by the major search engines which, when applied to your digital content, helps them to understand who you are and what you are about. When the search engines explicitly understand your content, they can improve the quality of organic and voice search results. The Schema App solution enables digital marketers to do this advanced search engine optimization for a single page or a million pages without dependency on IT or developers.
The Schema App donation resulted in the first photo op for the Food4Kids Presentation Cheque, but we’re hoping that this will mark the beginning of many more to come.
“I’d like to challenge other local small business to match or better this donation to Food4Kids”, Martha exclaims. “It’s an incredibly worthy cause and it is so disheartening to think that so many families are struggling within our own community. If Guelph’s startup of the year (2017) can find it in their budget to support this great cause, we hope the more established businesses can do the same!”
Interested in helping out?
Donations can be made one of two ways:
1. CANADA HELPS, directed to the Food4Kids program in Guelph
In the message box, be sure to add “Guelph Small Business Challenge” so we can track and acknowledge the results of this challenge. Signing up for regular monthly donations would be a huge help!
2. CHEQUE made out to FOOD4KIDS WATERLOO WELLINGTON
Memo line: “Guelph Small Business Challenge” so we can track and acknowledge the results of this challenge
Mailed to:
Food4Kids Guelph Program
c/o Hazel Dickie
133 Rickson Avenue
Guelph ON N1G 4V5
At Schema App, one of our core values is to always be giving back – to our customers, to each other, and to our community.
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Martha van Berkel is the co-founder and CEO of Schema App, an end-to-end Semantic Schema Markup solution provider based in Ontario, Canada. She focuses on helping SEO teams globally understand the value of Schema Markup and how they can leverage Schema Markup to grow search performance and develop a reusable content knowledge graph that drives innovation. Before starting Schema App, Martha was a Senior Manager responsible for online support tools at Cisco. She is a Mom of two energetic kids, loves to row, and drinks bulletproof coffee.