SantaNet

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  Sign up page

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  Home page

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  Events page

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  Donation page

Inspiration

Ever since the pandemic forced us into lock-down, the world has adopted online platforms. But orphans have been left behind. Each of our teammates works as United Nations volunteers in local orphanages and schools. Unfortunately, since the lockdown, orphanages have experienced a near 50% decrease in corporate grants, and there have been ZERO events since March with minimal social interaction. This makes the children and the elderly susceptible to mental health issues. On the other hand, the youth now have more spare time and also save commute time and an increasing willingness to volunteer.

What it does- fix link

Website SRS - Please look at the document for detailed information

SantaNet is a platform to connect volunteers with orphanages. If you run an orphanage, you can open our mobile app or website and Post An Event. For a given event, you can place requests for volunteers such as therapists, teachers, ASL trainers, college students, etc. The event requests can include requests for donations- which could be monetary or in terms of commodities. The event requests are visible to the volunteers in a Facebook/Meetup event feed fashion. The volunteers can filter the events based on their profession or interests. They can further filter events based on the location (if the positions call for an offline volunteer).

We intend to increase the transparency of the donation system by posting invoices and blog posts about the event. Posting blog posts as well as recognizing the staff involved helps orphanage staff get recognition for conducting more events. Not only will it give a considerable incentive to conduct more events, but it will proportionally equal a larger amount of donors. We want to increase volunteer involvement by issuing certificates documenting the number of hours the volunteer has worked for events through our platform. The volunteers can share these certificates across social media and other platforms.

Game-like format: To further encourage volunteers to participate in more events and bring other volunteers on board, we assign badges to volunteers and post the top volunteers on a leaderboard.

How we built it

We built the website using WIX. We are building the app using flutter. Preliminary designs

Challenges we ran into

We faced a significant discrepancy in what we thought was important versus the focus of the organisations we were working with. All the existing open source applications (built for developed countries like the US) were too expensive and not catered to the requirements of orphanages and other non-profit organisations in developing countries.

We also found that the staff in orphanages were not willing to assist in event creation since they never receive the deserved credit or appreciation for the extra work and efforts. The real challenge was to design a platform that would attract orphanages to join us.

After extensive research via feedback forms issued to our friends we also figured that volunteers preferred short term roles over long term commitments such as 6 to 1 year volunteer internships. Designing an effective short term volunteering platform without comprising the quality of volunteers was yet another significant barrier during our ideation phases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We designed the basic prototypes using Corvid by Wix as well as on Flutter. We conducted our first event in a local orphanage based on the transparent atomic system of volunteer and donor requests.

What we learned

We learnt to thoroughly identify our needs as well as document each process of the design. We also learnt about several features that were missing in various existing apps and websites through an exhaustive competition analysis.

In our conversations with orphanages we were able to identify the barriers that exist, especially for organizing virtual events and inviting virtual donations.

What's next for SantaNet

We plan to add more features using advanced features provided by Corvid and build the necessary functionalities onto our website. We intend to deploy the website as well as our mobile app with the Shri Krishna Orphanage and limited students of our college (who will fill in roles for volunteers and donors).

In the second stage of deployment, we wish to proceed to deploy our solution to local non-profits and NGOs and on-board all interested students from our university.

In the third stage, we plan to publicly release SantaNet and target larger organizations in our state as well as publicise across our social media connections to invite more volunteers, as well as prospective organizations that may want to reach out to us.