BePresilient

What if anyone willing to be helpful could easily find out how to commit in the most effective and necessary way, meeting other people and gaining knowledge and expertise all along the way?

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Inspiration

Every cloud has a silver lining: emergency times show the world the bright side of people and their will to help the less fortunate. The issue is, most of them simply don’t know how to effectively address their efforts to the recipients, working along with other willful volunteers, institutions and PA, this way dissipating energies, time and (not only financial) resources. As proud blood donors and volunteers, for example, we lived a critical situation with blood donation: during emergencies everyone would be pleased to give their blood for the will to help people hit by Covid-19 pandemy, as well as earthquakes or other natural disasters, not being aware about timing, logistics and healthcare issues required by becoming a blood donor. Then we wondered: what if anyone willing to be helpful could easily find out how to commit in the most effective and necessary way, meeting other people and gaining knowledge and expertise all along the way? Here comes our BePresilient project: more than an app, a step above a community, the “most social” of social networks. A platform with eyes wide open on the burning spots all around the world, matching the actual needs of who’s hit with soon-to-be volunteers’ expectations and desire to make a difference.

What it does

We figured a wide eco-system where wannabe volunteers can meet individuals and communities in need, get in touch with organizations and institutions, gain awareness and education on how to cope with emergencies worldwide not as lone-wolves, but as a collective. Users get full profiling at their first access and are addressed to challenges, communities and organizations which best match their skills, their availability and their interest. Tailor-made, online training is provided from organization to suitable new volunteer before they can join the field tasks. Whatever the needs, people are the answer.

How I built it

Taking advantage of some of the useful tools suggested (e.g. Miro), we started identifying our target users through some personas, focusing on their pain drivers, their desired gains and their empathy maps, prospecting their mutual interactions, we designed an open repository on GitHub (see link below) in a react.js framework. We worked out different customer journeys whether the end user is someone in need, someone who wants to volunteer or an organization to be registered in the database; everything is built on an open-source platform to let everyone improve and enhance UX and database. We also drafted a plausible business and financial plan (see link below), showing the project sustainability with a 30k€ starting investment and a 2-years payback period.

Challenges I ran into

For sure we spent lots of energies identifying the optimal customer journey and UI both for users in need of help and for users willing to become volunteers and/or join a registered organization; we also found challenging - but highly inspiring and motivating - building up from plain-white sheet a working environment.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud of having worked on a solution which not only impacts on several crisis-related issues (loneliness, isolation, not self-sufficiency, urgent needs for goods and services, etc.) but also catches the opportunity to build up a solidarity-driven global and local network, connecting people in need to ones who want to give something back to the world. When Covid-19 crisis will finally be over, this platform will remain to keep on addressing and training volunteers to be effective in their will to make a difference with their time, energies and skills, along with boosting not-for-profit organizations recruitment for new workforce. Besides, it will be ready and working for any crisis to come in the future, providing a skilled and trained network to face emergencies and allotting to crisis management- through collecting small donations - most of its incoming financial flows to immediately donate in case of need.

What I learned

We learned to develop a project not focusing only on its own reason-why, but putting ourselves in our final users shoes, practicing for the first time a customer-driven generative process. We learned to build fast products from the idea to a MVP, exploiting time constraints and remote collaboration to stay focused on our shared target. We got to know powerful design and development tools, and, thank to mentors, coaches and experts, we trained our pitching skills and empowered our entrepreneurial and marketing knowledge, becoming aware that efficient workflows can make a difference not only in a business framework.

What's next for Avistomai

Here it is the greatest challenge to come. We aim to build a world-spread ecosystem based on mutual trust, providing full users’ identity and direct connection. We believe that this project fits some crucial goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (Good Health and Well-Being, Quality Education, Sustainable Cities and Communities, Partnerships for the Goals), so we want to catch all the opportunities of development in this framework.

We will carry on the project with the full support of the great NGO we are proudly part of - AVIS, the biggest Italian blood donors organization - and together with all volunteers, communities and institutions who would like to join us on board. We are all helping if we know how to do it!

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