SkillsMatch

SkillsMatch is a workshop funnel which Bay Area Rescue Mission uses to engage volunteers more easily who wish to become involved in hosting workshops for developing skills in which they are experts.

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Inspiration

World Population Review estimates that there are over 422,000 individuals in San Francisco between the ages of 18 and 44. The interests and professions of this population run the gamut; from art teacher to bank analyst. Millennials and Gen Z bring tremendous diversity and experience to our city. In addition to their desire to succeed professionally, they also want to mobilize around causes they believe in and positively impact their communities.

Organizations that work with homeless populations often offer extensive job skills, vocational, and management training that allow individuals to develop new abilities and set themselves up for future success. However, these programs are at times restricted by the availability and expertise of facilitators.

SkillsMatch unites the supply and demand for skill-specific workshops. Professionals can develop programs related to their professional discipline or area of expertise, and organizations can request specific programs to supply their guests with the skills desired. This application connects the two sides with suggested or offered workshops and provides the organizational guests access to resume workshops, art classes, voter registration sessions, and dozens of other opportunities for professional and skills-based development. Furthermore, by connecting guests and volunteers, we hope that our app humanizes the issue and creates a personal sense of urgency to confront homelessness in our communities.

What it does

SkillsMatch is a workshop funnel which Bay Area Rescue Mission uses to engage volunteers more easily who wish to become involved in hosting workshops for developing skills in which they are experts. In addition to this funnel architecture, we provide integrations with social media platforms through which volunteers can share the workshops that they have hosted, and can share kudos with other volunteers and friends who engage with Bay Area Rescue Mission.

There are two broad categories of users in SkillsMatch. Driven by the desire to give to their community, individual volunteers can create profiles to offer workshops that meet their areas of expertise and skills. Organizations can request workshops that meet the needs and desires of their guests, ranging anywhere from art classes to voter registration.

Some users can include Alex, a local yoga instructor. Deeply interested in mindfulness and healthy eating, Alex hopes to offer courses to those who do not normally have access to such resources. Josie is an analyst at a regional bank that has recently developed a new financial literacy workshop. A colleague of hers recently facilitated a resume workshop at a local NGO, and suggested that Josie and the bank offer the new workshop at that organization as well. From the organization side, Seth is an outreach coordinator for an NGO. The guests at his organization have expressed the desire for interview prep, so Seth wants to connect with local professionals who can host sessions on communication skills and mock interviews. Each of these users will use SkillsMatch to connect with one another and organize skill-based workshops to increase the interaction with and benefit the guests.

How we built it

SkillsMatch was designed and demoed using Figma. The implementation of SkillsMatch centers around a simple API which uses the concept of a template for a workshop (known as a workshop) and an instantiation of that template (called a workshop Request). Workshop requests will be created and stored in a table which Bay Area Rescue Mission users will query for volunteers who wish to host workshops. These requests can either be based off of pre-existing workshop templates, or can be entirely novel workshop requests which the volunteer has asked to host. The Bay Area Rescue Mission user will have the capability to view workshop requests in their own dashboard, giving them access to information about the volunteers who have requested to host a workshop. They will also have the ability to add new workshop templates to the workshops table based off of workshopRequests they believe have promise.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenges that our group ran into mostly surrounded the problem of creating urgency through a tech-based solution. Eventually, we rested on the conclusion that urgency for helping the dispossessed can be created through their humanization and engagement with them. Our software needs to both facilitate engagement, as well as create urgency that did not exist prior to our users discovering the product.

Some specific mechanics that we implemented to foment urgency among our user base is the introduction of guest stories and social media integration. Guest stories provide a very real illustration of the people to which volunteers would be teaching workshops, as well as their motivations for becoming engaged with a given workshop. Social media integration allows our volunteers to share their Bay Area Rescue Mission engagement with their peers. Millennials are often motivated by the ability to share volunteer or activist activities among their social circles, and the support of these mediums will encourage sustained engagement.

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