Inspiration
Our inspiration for creating iVol was to provide a platform that would bridge the gap between organizations in need of volunteers and individuals seeking meaningful ways to give back. We recognized the potential impact of volunteering and wanted to make it easy for anyone to find and participate in volunteer work that aligned with their passions and values. With iVol, we hope to empower more people to get involved and create positive changes in their communities.
What it does
iVol connects users to volunteer opportunities that are catered specifically to them. Users are given the ability to sign up for an account on the app, log in, choose causes they are passionate about contributing to, whether it be social, environmental, or health, and be presented with various nonprofit organizations that are actively looking for volunteers and posting out opportunities for people to engage with. Users are then allowed to favorite or pin the causes/organizations they're most interested in volunteering for and will be notified when new opportunities drop.
How we built it
The frontend of iVol was built using Xcode and Swift. The backend services were primarily built with Firebase and some more Swift.
Challenges we ran into
Some challenges we face while developing iVol were the time constraints. We had a surfeit of ideas that we would have loved to execute, but due to the hackathon being limited on time, we were not able to incorporate every idea into our app. However, they are still features that we hope to add onto the app outside of the hackathon as well. Some other challenges we faced were merge conflicts, ensuring storyboards are all accounted for, using external libraries, and getting up to speed with a new language like Swift since it was relatively new to all of us.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
While we are immensely proud of each other for creating iVol in a language that is new to us, we are most proud of having the chance to create an app that has the potential to make a real difference in people's lives. We are proud of creating a platform that makes it easy for people to get involved with causes they care about and connect with like-minded individuals.
What we learned
While creating iVol, we all learned a great deal about UI/UX design, app development using Xcode, and Firebase's application development platforms.
What's next for iVol
Up next for iVol are plans to add location-based preferences where users get to filter organizations by location and radius in miles so that they have the option of volunteering as close to home as possible. We would also like to give users the ability to contact organizations they are interested in by implementing a messaging platform on our app, as well. Along with that, we would like to incorporate volunteer history records which allow users to log and keep track of their service hours within the app and create a leaderboard where they are able to showcase their volunteering hours and see others' progress in giving back to their communities. All nonprofit organizations and companies that want to be hosted on iVol must go through background checks to prove their legitimacy and ensure everyone has access to real, safe opportunities.
Discord: tigershark22#4536, fatimaasif#0637, zara.amer#6866, cuddenberg#1817
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.