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SOS-COVID-19 web platform
Inspiration – The Problem
The COVID-19 Pandemic is not just a health crisis – but a humanitarian one too. The crisis has exacerbated already existing vulnerabilities and inequalities, whilst more and more people are being pushed into unemployment, poverty and further exclusion – making the work of those in the front lines, striving to fulfil ever-increasing needs, more essential and urgent.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, many help requests from front line institutions like NGOs, nursing homes, hospitals were left unattended while there were people and private entities that couldn't find an effective way to support. There was just too much disorganisation and no structured way existed that would help match need and abundance in an effective and efficient way.
Our Solution
The SOS COVID-19 platform easily connects help and supplies requests from NGOs and other institutions (hospitals, nursing homes, administration and others, based on need), with private and public entities that can fulfil different types of requests. The solution allows to standardize and streamline the process of requesting help, creating a searchable bottom-up collection of requests and a pool of donors.
Once that the agreement between the help requestor and the fulfiller has been closed their contact information is shared privately between them, so they can close the request in the least time possible. The platform allows creating and searching for urgent requests, bid to participate in those opportunities and post additional help.
It is a One-Stop-Shop – providing an easy & transparent exchange of help and promoting efficient social collaboration, at a time when it’s most needed!!
Platform Development – Using powerful technology to create social innovation
Upon inception, the team lead, Marina, approached her alma mater, the IE Business School, who backed up the initiative right away – putting her in touch with an international digital company to build the solution (Volteo), and a law firm to support all necessary legal documents on a pro-bono basis (ECIJA). Finally, the Spanish foundation iHELP joined the team and became the necessary legal recipient for the initiative.
The MVP has been built based on the Servicenow platform (https://www.servicenow.com/). Both companies, Volteo and Servicenow are providing their resources in an altruistic way. A free of charge service contract has been signed between iHELP foundation and Volteo for the purpose of the project.
The Servicenow platform is an off-the-shelf yet highly-customisable cloud platform with many established benefits: it is flexible, fast, secure, reliable, compliant and most importantly, scalable.
Key functionality is already in place in the MVP which has gone live and a strategy is in place with enhancements to prepare the platform for the Pilot phase, which will include some of the following features: Basic user verification Demand & Supply match recommendations to users Web and mobile app Gamification rewards for donors
A roadmap has also been put in place to prepare for Market Readiness and Growth.
Our targeted impact to the crisis – and beyond!
The solution is highly scalable and adaptable to the needs of each ecosystem in which it is applied.
Therefore, with minimal modifications to the platform and with a marketing strategy that can easily be adjusted to new locations, the aim would be not only to roll this out across Europe but to also make this available across the world. It has the potential to reach and support millions of people.
Beyond the COVID-19 crisis, the SOS platform can be applied in any kind of crisis situation (epidemics, earthquakes, climate change, conflicts, migration etc) to optimise essential tasks and processes.
Our EUvsVirus Hackathon journey…
Or otherwise, what happened when 6 strangers from different backgrounds and different countries met with a common goal and a common passion? Well, magic of course!!
Marina brought us together through her passion and inspiration to act and fuelled our common vision. She also brought with her amazing partnerships, a great, live MVP and 9 early adopters!
What we did: had lots of teamwork! developed a value proposition built a lean start-up business model created on marketing strategy fleshed out a growth roadmap agreed a strategy to launch a pilot
What we need in order to continue our SOS COVID-19 Web Platform journey
Implementation is the most important part of any start-up project! We need support to grow this project and make it meaningful.
More specifically, our key needs and goals are: Endorsement: In order to become a trusted platform we would need institutional endorsement Funding: We would need €300K to start-up the NewCo (not-for-profit) and provide a 12-month runway StartupTeam: We would need to build a core team to launch the solution in 30 days
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