Inspiration
As a university student in Singapore, I often found it difficult to find short-term, meaningful volunteer opportunities that could leverage my specific skills, like design or coding. The existing platforms felt clumsy, and the opportunities were often for general manual help rather than skill-based tasks. I was inspired to create a solution that bridges this gap, connecting the passion and talent of students with the real needs of local non-profit organizations (NPOs). The name "Kampong Connect" was chosen to evoke the spirit of community and mutual help that defines Singaporean culture.
What it does
Kampong Connect is a mobile-first web platform designed to make skill-based volunteering hyper-local and accessible. It serves two core user groups:
- Students: Can create a simple profile highlighting their skills, browse a map-based or list view of volunteer gigs from local NPOs, and apply with a single click.
- Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs): Can easily post short-term, specific needs (e.g., "Design a flyer," "Build a simple webpage," "Translate a document") and get matched with motivated, skilled students from their community.
In essence, it's a marketplace for social good, making volunteering more efficient and impactful for everyone involved.
How we built it
We embraced a rapid-prototyping approach suitable for a hackathon environment:
- UI/UX Design: All screens, user flows, and components were designed and prototyped in Figma.
- Front-end: We built a fully responsive web application using fundamental web technologies: HTML5, CSS3, and vanilla JavaScript.
- Back-end and Database: We chose Google's Firebase as our backend. We used Firebase Authentication for secure user sign-up/login and Firestore as our real-time NoSQL database to instantly manage and sync listings between NPOs and volunteers.
- Version Control: The project was managed using Git and hosted on GitHub.
Challenges we ran into
The 48-hour time limit was our biggest challenge. We had to fight scope creep and focus only on the core features. Initially, we wanted to add a real-time chat feature but decided to postpone it to ensure we could deliver a polished core product. Another challenge was populating the platform with realistic data for the demo, which required us to manually research and create profiles for several local NPOs.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are incredibly proud of shipping a complete, end-to-end working prototype in just one weekend. We successfully built a dual-user system where NPOs can post jobs and students can apply for them, with data syncing in real-time. The most rewarding accomplishment was creating a clean, beautiful, and intuitive user interface that makes the platform a pleasure to use, which was our primary goal as a designer-led project.
What we learned
This project was a tremendous learning experience. On the technical side, we gained deep, hands-on experience with the Firebase suite and responsive web design principles. On the project management side, we learned the art of ruthless prioritization. Most importantly, we learned how to quickly validate a problem and build a user-centric solution under extreme pressure.
What's next for Kampong Connect
The journey for Kampong Connect is just beginning. Our immediate next steps are:
- Gather Feedback: Conduct usability testing sessions with students from local universities and managers from NPOs to refine the user experience.
- Build Key Features: Implement a simple rating/review system to build trust and a notification system to alert students about new opportunities.
- Forge Partnerships: Reach out to university career centers and volunteer clubs to establish official partnerships and onboard a critical mass of users.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.