Aggie House Volunteer Portal

Inspiration

Our inspiration for the Aggie House Volunteer Portal was the interest in the mission of Aggie House themselves. It is a great opportunity to be a part of helping the community to tackle housing insecurity. By streamlining the volunteer management process, we aimed to create a centralized platform to facilitate sign-ups, shift management, announcements, and other communication.

What it does

The Aggie House Volunteer Portal is a platform for volunteers and admins alike. Volunteers can use the portal to sign up for shifts, manage their schedule, receive announcements, and even receive SMS reminders for upcoming shifts. It is important communication is built with the SMS system to confirm shift attendance. Admins have access to additional functionalities such as adding or removing shifts, sending messages to specific volunteers, and creating announcements.

How we built it

We started by designing the front end interface of the website with Figma to ensure a user-friendly experience. This involved creating components and layouts with React in our frontend code when moving from the design phase to the implementation. We also began implementing backend functionality using PropelAuth for user authentication. However, due to challenges in setting up PropelAuth and navigating the directory for the tool, we encountered obstacles in completing this portion of the backend development. We are also exploring AWS for SMS system.

Challenges we ran into

PropelAuth Integration: Setting up PropelAuth for user authentication was more difficult than we had anticipated. It posed a significant challenge, as we faced difficulties in understanding its implementation of locating the correct directory and files in the code.

Learning AWS: Despite having some experience with AWS, we still needed to learn the tool since AWS has many different features and none of the members have experience with interactive SMS messaging through AWS.

React Learning Curve: Some team members had to learn or review React and it was important to synchronize the style at which we were coding at which can be to find the right pace within 24 hours.

What we learned

First and foremost, working and building team synchronization within 24 hours is very important but also very difficult in the short time period. Planning a little more ahead of time to divide the workflow and understanding the team’s dynamic will make it easier when reaching the actual hackathon. We need effective project management in allocating resources and prioritizing tasks to maximize productivity and overcome challenges. Synchronizing our downloads for PropelAuth and React was really important to make sure our codes were doing the same thing.

Also, on the technical aspect, we had to work around and learn about the tools we were using and a lot of debugging was done while working together on live share coding as well as working on different branches of code and pushing and pulling on GitHub. It was really important to know what each of us were doing on the code as soon as possible to create a continuous working environment.

What's next for Aggie House Volunteer Portal

Moving forward, our focus will be on making the backend functionality of the portal. This includes completing the integration of PropelAuth for user authentication so both the volunteer and administrator can have their accounts and purpose. Implementing the AWS in full and preparing what will be sent through the portal to phone messaging. We would also have to implement a way to use PropelAuth within our website rather than just using their login/signup page so the design follows through. With dedicated time and effort, we are confident in delivering a fully functional and efficient volunteer management platform for Aggie House.