Bay Area Rescue Community

What prevents younger individuals from getting involved with fighting homelessness? Younger generations are more likely to get involved when they are able to see their impact and feel a sense of accomplishment and community (instant gratification = big value for people like us). By seeing tangible results of their own efforts, younger people feel that they are indeed making a difference and are more likely to get further involved. In addition, we as young people are less informed on how exactly we can make a difference. Oftentimes, we throw out old clothes without considering that others could use them. Even if we do want to help out, the process to actually get involved may be tedious and complicated, which might turn away prospective donors.

What does the app do? How is the problem resolved? Our app, “Bay Area Rescue Community,” creates a sense of urgency for millennials and Gen Z individuals to get involved in fighting homelessness through Bay Area Rescue Mission by creating a vibrant and lively community of supporters that inspires and encourages their local peers to volunteer and donate. Our goal was for them not to just donate or volunteer once, but to truly feel immersed and committed to their local community and cause for the long term. This community of supporters is constantly mobilized by... Live updates of donations and volunteers individuals across SF are contributing to Bay Area Rescue Mission. These live updates create a sense of community within the individual (feeling recognized) and for others (inspired by the liveliness of kind actions across the city!) Top needed items highlight and goal progress bars, which create the sense of a common goal (to reach a tangible number of items, hours, ect.) amongst this community of supporters. A simple, seamless process for scheduling volunteering hours and donating items to specific locations. This combats the issue of not knowing where to donate or where to even get started in giving back to your local community. Profiles, which makes the community of supporters feel connected, accomplished, and recognized for their contributions. Moreover, it allows them to keep track of their contributions and help them a cadence in the long term.

How was it implemented? We created a high fidelity prototype using Figma.

What challenges did we face? A challenge we faced was making sure the donation or volunteering is not just a one time thing from an individual. Since we’re a part of the target audience, we thought about what might incentivize us to keep contributing. For us, it’s rewarding to physically see how much we contribute so we added a graph that shows the user’s contributions in their profile page. Users can also see other user’s contributions if the other user decides to make that public in order to get inspired to contribute themselves. We also added a live feed of donations and volunteering across the Bay on the homepage to create a sense of community and belonging within the user. Another challenge is to involve younger generations in this cause, and make the application more appealing to them. Throughout the design process, we put in a lot of effort towards making the interface seamless and easy to use with minimal colors so that it doesn’t distract the user. For example, to simplify the process of donating and/or volunteering, we included two highly visible buttons corresponding to the donate page and the volunteer page respectively and a “top necessities” box on the donate page to indicate what items are most needed at the moment.

Built With

• figma