FGT Level Up

What if volunteering felt as rewarding as leveling up in your favorite game? Complete volunteering missions for FGT, earn XP, unlock achievements, and climb the leaderboard.

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Inspiration 💡

What if the real value in refurbishing computers wasn’t just in the computers themselves but the volunteers returning to fix the next one?

Free Geek Toronto (FGT) is a non-profit which helps give unwanted tech a second life. It helps make computers affordable and teaches people practical technical skills.

However, FGT only have 1 full time employee, 5 part time employees and 30-40 active volunteers. With such a small team, recruiting and retaining volunteers can be challenging.

Additionally, their Community Hub has not been used to its full potential.

We realised there did not need to be anything highly complex created. We wanted to help make volunteering more fun, meaningful and rewarding using the existing resources.

Inspired by Duolingo, we thought,

What if you got a sense of achievement from volunteering like you do when leveling up in your favourite game?

And thus we came up with the idea for FGT Level Up.

What it does 🚀

FGT Level Up is a gamified method of encouraging volunteers to contribute. It turns real-life actions into exciting missions.

Volunteers can see how their contributions add up to create something meaningful.

  1. Find missions.
  2. Grab and contribute. Each mission has a level and will award XPs. Volunteers can grab missions and make meaningful contributions to FGT.
  3. Earn XPs and level up. Complete missions to earn XPs, unlock achievements and progress in your journey.
  4. Streaks. Create weekly streaks to keep volunteers contributing regularly.
  5. Recognition. Gain recognition through leaderboards, quests, badges and rewards.
  6. Become a leader. If eligible, volunteers can take on mentoring roles and suggest workshops for the Community Hub (with staff approval).

Staff can manage missions, volunteers, check workshop suggestions and see how engaged they are through a dedicated dashboard.

Ultimately, we aren’t trying to get volunteers to earn the maximum amount of points. We want to encourage volunteers to keep coming back, develop their skills and contribute to the community.

How we built it 🛠️

FGT Level Up was built as a responsive web application using Next.js, React, Typescript and Tailwind. We created a fun, Duolingo-style UI.

PGlite is a Postgres compatible database which was embedded into the browser using WebAssembly. IndexedDB was used as persistent local storage.

This meant we could create an interactive hackathon demo without having to pay for any APIs or enter any database details.

The prototype contains;

Mission creation, editing and management by staff. Exclusive missions to claim and complete. XPs, levels. Streaks, quests, badges and leaderboards. Volunteer profiles and rewards. Workshop suggestions for the Community Hub (with staff approval). Engagement stats and history. An offline natural language mission writer.

There were also checks in place to prevent duplication of XPs, ensure people could not complete missions they weren’t supposed to and prevent volunteers from getting to areas they shouldn’t.

The application was tested using automated testing and browser testing. All tests passed (16 automated tests), typescript, eslint and production builds.

Challenges ⚡

Meaningful gamification

The main challenge was making sure we didn’t over emphasise the XPs and leaderboard. We wanted to make sure volunteers felt recognised, made progress, had mentoring opportunities and contributed to the community.

Small team and funds

As FGT only have a small team and limited funds, we kept mission creation simple. Only asking for a few key pieces of information to avoid creating another large admin task.

Not necessarily more skilled

Just because someone has more XPs doesn’t mean they are more technically skilled. We ensured people were rewarded for contributing but still kept the restricted tasks and workshop leaders under the control of staff.

Hackathon demo

We have adapted the project to be a browser based demo using local persistent storage. This makes it easier to run but if deployed in the real world would require extra infrastructure.

What we learnt 📚

We learnt that sometimes the best tech solutions aren’t about creating new resources but helping organisations utilise their existing ones.

We looked into how behaviour design, gamification and recognition can be used to potentially encourage volunteers to stay.

We also learnt how important it is to differentiate between a technically working prototype and a proven business solution.

Whilst Level Up shows a potential solution, we would need to test in real life to see the impact it would have on retention, volunteer hours and refurbishing capacity.

Feasibility and Business Impact 📈

FGT Level Up focuses on increasing engagement with volunteers. There are no price increases on computers, costly incentives or expansion into unrelated areas.

If we can increase consistency in volunteering then FGT could benefit from having more volunteers. This could lead to increased refurbishing activity and better use of their Community Hub.

We would suggest starting with a small pilot (4-6 weeks) with some volunteers. We would then look to see;

How many volunteers are returning and being consistent. How many hours volunteers are giving and how many missions they’re completing. How many mentoring and Community Hub activities. How much time staff are spending using the platform.

The current version is a standalone hackathon demo with fake data. To deploy this would require centralised storage, secure login and data protection. It would also need staff validation.

Next Steps 🌱

We would next move onto piloting Level Up with a small number of volunteers. We would then look at feedback and research whether the system is actually making a difference to engagement.

In the future we could integrate this with FGT’s new volunteer management software. We could provide more flexible engagement stats and streamline processes for staff.

Overall we want to help FGT increase their impact without affecting their mission or overloading their small team.

Final Thoughts 💚

Free Geek Toronto already give technology a second life.

We wanted to give volunteering a journey to keep coming back for.

Every Contribution Counts. Every Level Matters.

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