Inspiration
Dress for Success exists to change lives, but too many women never make it through the door. Disconnected booking links, inconsistent referral processes, and referrers left with nothing but a URL showed us a system failing the women it was built to serve.
What It Does
Hack for Success is a referrer platform and self-referral platform that gives every referrer and every woman a single, unified front door to Dress for Success. At the heart of it is a personalised invitation carrying the referrer's own words directly to their client, bridging the gap between need and life-changing support, because we didn't just build a booking system, we built the moment a woman feels seen.
How We Built It
We mapped the end-to-end referral journey from both the referrer and client perspective, identifying every drop-off point and friction in the existing process. We built a mobile-first portal integrating with Calendly and Salesforce, with a personalised invitation system that carries the referrer's own words into a warm, pre-filled email and SMS with one tap to book.
Challenges We Ran Into
Dress for Success is a volunteer-run charity, often led by passionate, experienced people who didn't sign up to learn a new system, so every feature we considered we asked: does this create overhead? Keeping the solution invisible to the organisation while transformative to the client was harder than it sounds.
Accomplishments We Are Proud Of
We are proud that we built something that puts dignity first, and that the personalised invitation feature, where a referrer's own words travel with the referral, is something we believe has never been done in this space. In a room full of technical solutions, we stayed human.
What We Learned
The biggest barriers in the social sector are rarely technical, they are emotional. Technology's most powerful role here is not to replace the relationship between a referrer and their client, but to carry it further than it could travel on its own.
What's Next for Hack for Success
The immediate next step is piloting the platform with a cohort of referrer organisations and gathering real feedback from both referrers and clients. Longer term, we want to expand the personalised invitation model to other touchpoints in the client journey and explore how the platform could be adapted for other charities facing the same referral gap.
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