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Quiz that integrates on any WordPress page
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Example layout of success story
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LLM integration
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Modify quiz
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Add success stories
Motivation
Every child deserves a safe, loving home. But not every child is so fortunate. Foster parents are extraordinary individuals who open their hearts and homes to children in need. However, the decreasing trend of willing foster parents raises alarming concerns for the many children who still need a new home.
For the non-profit organization Ascentria, we built a unique, empowering tool to encourage and guide prospective foster parents on their journey. This tool is meant to be used by Ascentria in their marketing efforts with their target population -- prospective parents who need that push with support and reassurance. Through a quiz and empathetic chatbot, we match website visitors to success stories with similar backgrounds, questions, and concerns to help prospective foster parents envision themselves as capable and emotionally ready.
What it does
Our project consists of three key components:
Quiz: We developed an interactive questionnaire that assesses prospective foster parents' situations, concerns, and readiness. Integrates into any WordPress website using a shortcode and custom post types. The plugin allows the users to add as many success stories as needed. The admin tags each page, which is used by the quiz to match users to stories depending on their answers. The quiz, specialized questions, and success stories are fully customizable.
Matched Foster Parent Success Stories: Based on the user's responses to the questionnaire, our platform presents them with inspiring success stories of foster parents whose experiences closely align with the user's profile based on their quiz answers. These stories aim to provide encouragement, motivation, and a chance to discover that they too, even in their situation, can be great foster parents.
Empathetic Chatbot Support: To further support prospective foster parents, we have integrated an empathetic and knowledgeable chatbot that can provide personalized guidance and resources. The chatbot is powered by a large language model (LLM) and is trained to offer emotional support, answer questions, and connect users with relevant information and services provided by Ascentria.
How we built it
We built a WordPress plugin using PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that integrates into any WordPress page through shortcodes and custom types. The WordPress plugin relies on custom post types and taxonomies to make it extensible and dynamic. No need to go into the code base - just use the WordPress front end to make your changes!
We used Python, Streamlit, and the OpenAI API to create the empathetic chatbot through custom prompting and retrieval-based augmented generation.
Challenges we ran into
Coding a dynamic and extensible WordPress plugin from scratch proved challenging, especially since we had limited prior experience in PHP. The most challenging part was the data transfer between the PHP backend and the JavaScript front end.
It was also a challenge to craft plausible questions that could assess a prospective foster parent's situation, readiness, and concerns.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud to have developed a complete WordPress plugin that integrates into any page and is fully customizable from the WordPress admin page! We also gained more experience working with LLM and using them for empathetic purposes, such as foster care.
What we learned
- The importance and the many challenges of the foster care system
- WordPress and PHP development
- Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies in WordPress
- Chatbots for empathetic responses applied to foster care
What's next for EmpathyBridge: Empower your Heart, Transform Lives
- More advanced integration with the empathetic chatbot
- Handle success story retrieval (RAG) in chat to encourage and reassure users as they share information about themselves
- Handle videos in success story description
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