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Inspiration
While talking with NALAM Founders, we learned their big mission to create bright futures for vulnerable girls in South India. However, they have a pressing issue of lacking strategy to attract and engage young donors, especially in the United States, at large scale to support high-costing projects. The current donor outreach is offline, limited, inefficient through local events. Meanwhile, we learned that there are numerous young professionals who want to make a social impact but hesitate to take action due to lack of transparency with traditional donating channel, and lack of interpersonal bonding experience that make them feel rewarded. We want to help NALAM, as well as all other non-profit organizations to achieve their mission with digital solutions.
What it does
The LightUp app allows donors to have an immersive donation experience that provides transparency, emotional fulfillment, and interpersonal bonding they are looking for to really take actions. The digital platform also helps to widely spread NALAM's projects to both individual and organizational donors.
How we built it
We designed and built our clickable prototype through Figma. To ensure the technical feasibility of our solution, we researched and listed frontend and backend development tools and APIs. You can find high-level system design flow and chart, created by our teammate Ines, to illustrate how different parts of the product work (https://www.figma.com/file/9XvuKEy18ybCfp0EuQaA8S/Nalam?type=design&node-id=46%3A7709&mode=design&t=LXDutu5Mn9IKWFgt-1).
Challenges we ran into
Digging deep to core user needs - We listed a few hypotheses around what a young donor needs to be converted and continuously engaged. With time constraints, it's difficult to gather sufficient user feedback to validate all of them. Defining our MVP scope - We initially had started off our scope to focus on only the transparency need of the digital users. It wasn’t until after we interviewed our teammate Ines, who is a representative of our target users, that we realized the target users requires strong emotional bonding and a sense of fulfillment to keep engaging.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Creating a digital solution is not easy, especially within just 24 hours! Each of our team members have very personalities and backgrounds, but we shared a simple goal to help our client achieve their mission. Though just met at the hackathon, we collaborate seamlessly, and each delivered our sections with excitement to each meeting!
What we learned
It's always the most important to start from user. Designs and Technologies are great solutions that make a huge difference for a real pressing problem.
What's next for LightUp
Our immediate next step is testing key features in our app with user feedback to validate our hypotheses. In the long run, with our app's core User Interface developed, our next steps are looking into scalability strategies. 'Light UP,' can be an applicable model successfully deployed using the tools we've listed to craft an immersive user experience on the frontend while ensuring efficient data management on the backend. Our solution provides a valuable blueprint not only for NALAM but also for all nonprofit organizations striving to overcome the challenge of enhancing donor engagement. In addition, we also want to explore an innovative business strategy to engage large donors like companies and local organizations, by exchanging individual customer's engagement with financial donations from big companies.
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