Inspiration
Seeing how Big at Heart usually utilises the mobile application Whatsapp to liaise with potential volunteers and participants, we felt a need to create a platform that could help Big at Heart continue to do so both professionally, and expediently. If for-profit businesses and organisations can afford to have proper digital platforms and applications for them to engage with stakeholders and target audiences, we believe that non-profit organisations such as Big at Heart too deserve the right to have access to similar means of communication and facilitation of activities.
What it does
Our mobile application, Coalesce, serves to “coalesce” and consolidate all volunteering enrollments, activities & certifications onto a single platform, making the application for such activities seamless and hassle-free. We hope this would encourage more volunteers to take the step forward to give back to society, and that such opportunities may become more accessible to others through its digitalisation. Additionally, we wanted to capitalise on the convenience digital platforms can provide to organisations, and we hope that this application may also help the organisers by easing the means of vetting and approving potential volunteers. This would allow organisers to place more focus on executing socially beneficial events and activities, instead of having them worry about minute administrative responsibilities.
How we built it
We firstly used Moqups to design our mobile application wireframes, before jumping into React Native to develop the actual mobile application. We also utilised Firebase for their authentication capabilities and Cloud Firestore, which is a scalable NoSQL cloud database, allowing us to have a serverless backend for the application.
Challenges we ran into
Our main challenge was the time constraints we faced during the past few weeks. From the start, we had decided to challenge ourselves by using frameworks and libraries that we were not familiar with (such as React Native and Firebase), so that this Hackathon experience would have been fruitful, and serve as an opportunity for us to learn and acquire new skills. This meant that on top of our busy university schedules and rigorous academic syllabus, we had to juggle with learning and internalising the new frameworks and libraries, while putting together an idea we had only just formulated. We had plans to also develop a website for the administrative team over at Big at Heart to interface with Coalesce, but faced with the time constraints, we realistically could only afford to finish the mobile application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of the fact that everything we’ve created throughout this Hackathon experience was built from a place of unfamiliarity - that we had to step out of our comfort zones, away from the usual skills and experiences we were well-versed in, to dabble and explore new frameworks. As much as we would like to win this Hackathon, we believe that our own growth in this journey takes precedence, and that ultimately, what matters is that our society stands to benefit in the end. With that, we hope that we can finalise and bring to accomplishment the plans that we have, even if the hackathon is long over!
What we learned
The idea that efficiency is not limited to conventional businesses and organisations. Efficiency usually connotes the idea of lowering costs of production, and usually brings to mind for-profit businesses seeking means to appeal to their consumers. Yet, I think this hackathon really helped to cast the spotlight on non-profit organisations too, and that they too deserve and desire for expediency. The fruits of innovation and technology and not just for expanding businesses and appealing to global economic markets, but also for growing the impact social organisations have on the community, aiding their quest to help the less-privileged, the less-fortunate, and the marginalised.
What's next for Coalesce
While the hackathon may be done, there were a lot of features we initially envisioned for Coalesce that were ultimately not implemented due to time constraints. Features like calendar integration, push notifications, as well as the admin web app to compliment the mobile app, were scrapped for time. We want to finish what we started, and implement these features, so as to further flesh out the app improve usability.
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