Big At Heart volunteer management system

Big At Heart: Redefining volunteering with a vibrant community spirit. Join us to make a collective impact and create lasting connections! 🌍🤝 #VolunteerCommunity

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Inspiration

Firstly, who is Big At Heart? Big At Heart was one of the Non-profit organizations that shared their need for a new system at Hack for Good's welcome ceremony.

Our team, inspired by the objective of creating a socially innovative project, draws from contemporary trends of gamification, social interaction, and personalization. The core aim is to address pivotal concerns faced by Big At Heart, notably the challenges associated with volunteer recruitment, retention, and inspiration.

Barriers to volunteering

Considering our team's collective experiences in volunteering, we've recognized a significant barrier to volunteering. Namely for us, the social discomfort associated with signing up or wanting to volunteer but may not be people to go with. Thus, this prospect of attending volunteering events alone, particularly for individuals who may be introverted, creates a sense of potential social discomfort - as they are in a new environment, potentially doing a new thing (volunteering) "alone". Thereby potentially dissuading participation in volunteering.

Furthermore, another barrier could be negatively perceived notions regarding volunteer service, with some perceiving it as yielding minimal impact, as volunteers may not be able to feel the impact of what they are doing and volunteering is a big time commitment.

Thus, our team is steadfast in our commitment to mitigating these barriers, aiming to streamline processes and fostering more pathways for Big At Heart to inspire, onboard, and retain volunteers.

What it does

Simply put, our web application acts as a platform for volunteers to join events and manage their volunteering-related needs as well as administrators of the system to gain insight into volunteer statistics and management of events and volunteers.

We believe that implementing more social features such as ( not all have been implemented yet) :

  1. A chatroom for events for peers to communicate and get to know one another.
  2. Ability for volunteers to submit feedback to admins about events to improve.
  3. Ability for volunteers to see who is currently going to an event so that they can see if they know everyone alleviating the potential 'social discomfort' of feeling like they are 'going alone'
  4. Ability for volunteers to comment on events about their own positive experiences to both inspire others but also to show the tangible benefits of community outreach to others.
  5. A blog forum for volunteers to discuss or potentially find others to volunteer with.
  6. A bespoke personality quiz to increase personalization and volunteer connection with Big at Heart.
  7. Gamification to increase personal stake through the use of XP as an alternative to hours served and superficial easy to obtain achievements that can be gained such as "went to your third volunteering event" such that it doesn't promote competition but gives volunteers a sense of accomplishment.

How we built it

Our platform leverages the MERN tech stack. The MERN stack's compatibility and community support make it ideal for creating a scalable VMS with a user-friendly interface.

Front end

We utilize the React App Framework coupled with Material-UI, ensuring polished and intuitive user interfaces. Development is grounded in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap, with TypeScript to deal with potential type issues and maintainability. In the design phase, Figma serves for prototyping and refining interface designs.

Backend

We used Node.js to drive our server, Mongo DB Atlas serves as our NoSQL zero-cost data storage solution. Express.js facilitates API development. Mongoose enhances database interactions, streamlining operations and ensuring data integrity.

We built the system based on a few schemas such as volunteer schemas as the user collection, events for every type of volunteering event as well as feedback and comment schemas to track feedback or comments users submit for each event.

To enable real-time communication in the future we will integrate WebSocket.io, allowing for seamless interaction and collaboration across our platform.

Challenges we ran into

A significant obstacle we faced involved learning web development from scratch. Understanding the intricate interactions among front-end components and navigating the connection between the back end and front end proved to be challenging. Additionally, implementing a webchat room into a web application posed a particularly demanding task that we have still yet to solve, as we are unsure of how to exactly connect the frontend and message server sockets.

Our last challenge revolved around navigating Git while working in a collaborative team. These issues included branching and resolving merge conflicts. Poor commits also caused the main branch to be compromised or cause broken issues for other teammates. We started to understand the need for a meticulous approach to version control, emphasizing the importance of effective communication in maintaining a disciplined Git workflow within a team.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our team is proud of the valuable learning experience and enjoyable collaboration during our first venture into web development. The creation of our personality quiz system is a notable accomplishment, serving as an effective tool for volunteer onboarding and fostering a stronger connection with Big At Heart. Most significantly, we commend each team member for their dedication and hard work in managing project challenges alongside academic and external commitments.

Whats next for us

We intend to comprehensively develop and launch this service, realizing the initial ambitions we had for the project. Our plans involve enhancing the chat room system, placing a greater emphasis on analytical functionalities for administrators, and incorporating additional social features to strengthen volunteer retention.

Here are a few things we want to implement:

  1. AI / ML algorithms for enhanced data analytics: Utilizing Python libraries, we aim to extract raw data from our servers, enabling the generation of practical analytics. This endeavor seeks to enhance comprehension of volunteer or event statistics, facilitating more informed decision-making. The objective is to identify popular events and areas, contributing to an improved understanding of our organizational dynamics.

  2. Implementing stronger security measures: Implement a secure messaging system to facilitate communication between volunteers, administrators, and organizations, ensuring efficient and confidential information exchange. This can be achieved through using SSL certification for example.

  3. Implementing a notification system: This is to keep volunteers informed about upcoming events, new opportunities, and any important updates related to their involvement. Allowing events also to gain more awareness and publicity.

  4. Volunteer Spotlights: Allow other users to submit praise ( opp of feedback ) about an event or a volunteer to admins. This social recognition system is where volunteers can give virtual shout-outs or kudos to their peers for exceptional contributions. Positive reinforcement strengthens the community bond.

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