Love INC Newberg: From the Classroom to the Home Screen

Jeff Denton didn't meet Christopher White at a networking event. He met him in a classroom, both serving as mentors in Love INC Newberg's Shame No More program, sitting alongside neighbors and church partners doing the actual work. By the time any product conversation happened, the trust was already built.

Christopher had been watching a pattern develop. Love INC Newberg does genuinely meaningful work in Yamhill County. But over the past several years, their community reach had quietly contracted. Donors who gave a few years ago had grown harder to reconnect with. People in recovery looking for wrap-around support often didn't know that Transformational Ministries classes and Gap Ministries resources were open to them. The pathways in had narrowed without anyone making that decision intentionally.

The fundraising picture reflected it. No public fundraiser since 2019. Giving trending down year over year. Christopher put it plainly: the challenge was rebuilding Love INC's presence in the broader Newberg community, not just among people already plugged into local church networks.

Most nonprofits operate on three channels. Word of mouth is powerful but impossible to steer consistently. Church announcements and presentations are meaningful but intermittent. A website is where people go when they already know to look.

None of those channels follow someone home.

That's not a criticism of what Love INC had been doing. The problem is structural. Every one of those channels requires someone to already be looking. A donor who gave three years ago isn't looking. A neighbor who heard the name once but couldn't quite place what Love INC does isn't looking. A person in recovery who needs exactly what a Transformational Ministries class offers isn't looking, because they don't know it exists.

The data behind nonprofit mobile engagement is striking. Nonprofits and charities post the highest push notification open rates of any of the 14 industries Airship benchmarks. The audience is already on their phones. Most nonprofits just aren't there yet, because until recently, getting there meant $40,000 to $100,000 in custom development that almost nobody has. That's the gap GrovLink was built to close.

GrovLink gave Love INC Newberg something straightforward: their own branded app, with their own listing in the App Store.

Behind the scenes, it runs on the shared GrovLink platform UpStart maintains. Staff manage it from a browser. The same person who handles social can post an event, send a push notification, update program information, or share encouragement with subscribers, without writing a line of code or calling a developer. About thirty minutes a week.

What the community sees is Love INC. Their colors, their programs, their voice. Pathways to request support, discover Gap Ministries resources, join a Transformational Ministries class, volunteer, give, or stay connected between announcements. Everything they were already doing, now on the home screen of anyone who wants it.

Love INC Newberg's app launched to the App Store in Spring 2026. The rollout is underway.

Christopher and Jeff are both in active pilot mode: working with early adopters, tuning the experience, and paying attention to what the community actually uses. The fundraiser happening later this month is a natural early test. Will a push notification reach a donor who hasn't heard from Love INC since a church pew announcement? That's one of the questions worth asking.

When there are outcomes worth publishing, this page will say so. For now, the app is live and available to anyone in Newberg who wants it on their home screen.

Most nonprofit executives aren't short on ideas. What's hard to find is a path to experiment that doesn't require betting the annual budget on a custom engineering project.

Love INC Newberg didn't have to. They got their own App Store listing, their own branded experience, and a builder who had sat in their program rooms, for a fraction of what custom development would have cost. The pilot is honest about what it is: a beginning, not a finished story. But the beginning is real, and it's already in the App Store.

If your organization does meaningful work that not enough people in your community can find, that's exactly the problem GrovLink was built for. Download the Love INC Newberg app to see what it feels like. Then visit grovlink.com when you're ready to talk about yours.