TechPoint S.O.S: Community-Based Nonprofits - Team #3

Indiana-based nonprofits have experienced a lack of steady volunteers, which has only been exacerbated by COVID-19. Our team's unique solution, "Benefit Indiana," tackles this issue head on.

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Benefit Indiana Community-Based Nonprofits Team #3

Overview

Many nonprofits in Indiana have struggled to acquire a steady amount of volunteers to help with their organizations. This has only been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, because of a lack of in-person volunteering opportunities. Our team's unique solution, Benefit Indiana, tackles this issue head on.

Benefit Indiana is a website created both for people looking to volunteer, and for nonprofits looking to bring awareness to their volunteer opportunities. By utilizing a unique matchmaking questionnaire, volunteers are able to be paired with a nonprofit fit just for them, based on interests, skills, time availability, and location. Nonprofits benefit by raising awareness of their nonprofit overall, and by acquiring volunteers that are interested in their mission.

As nonprofits begin to accept in-person volunteers again, it can be a challenge to know which Indiana nonprofits need the help and where to find those personalized volunteer opportunities. We came up with a go-to-market strategy that relies on online traffic and nonprofit awareness. See below for more detail.

Team Members

Shelby Benton Project Manager & Designer, Senior in UX Design @ Purdue | Shelby was the Project Manager of the team and Design Lead. Her managerial duties included outreach with the coaches, communicating project milestones, creating meeting agendas, and making sure the team stayed on track. As the Design Lead, she created UI mockups of the site based on research, conducted user testing, and iterated on the team’s solution. She was able to utilize her front-end development skills to code the HTML and CSS of the website through the Heroku platform as well. Shelby also formatted all of the team’s submission materials in order to create a cohesive brand.

Patrik Bauer Business Development, Junior in Econ Consulting @ IU Bloomington | Patrik reached out to several nonprofit organizations to distribute surveys used for data analysis. He also researched several potential advertising revenue generation models. Patrik created and compiled multiple ideas for the team to pursue in the future, which he used to complete the portion of the abstract regarding what the team would pursue in the next five weeks.

Pragyan Dey Business Development, Senior in International Studies @ IU Bloomington | Pragyan collaborated on the creation of the business model, value proposition, customer profile, buyer persona, and SWOT analysis. He also conducted research on the scope for monetization, as well as partnerships with university career centers and social work departments.

Julia Lucas Business Development, Sophomore in Engineering Physics @ Rose Hulman | Though her major is more science-based, Julia was able to hone her data mapping and design skills in this project. She co-led the team on the Go-Squad, helping research the problem space, understand the market by doing research and making surveys, and putting together visualizations to communicate the results. She also completed the customer portion of the Abstract and edited the final video deliverable.

Maggie Reeves Software Developer, Junior in Law and Public Policy and Informatics @ IU Bloomington | Maggie collaborated with the Pro-Squad on front-end development using Heroku. She worked to design and format the website using HTML and CSS code.

Caleb Warner Software Developer, Junior in Computer Science @ Purdue | Caleb was the back-end expert on his team. He used his computer science background to research platforms and frameworks the team could use to accomplish their mission of creating a publicly available website. He not only set up the website project along with the online project repository, but he also utilized his Java programming experience to create a working program that retrieved, processed, and stored information that volunteers and nonprofits might submit on the website.

How did we decide on this customer segment, problem, and solution?

The team began the five-week project by conducting general secondary research into the community-based nonprofits sector, and gradually narrowing down a specific problem and customer segment. The following key processes outlined below helped inform the creation of our solution.

Environmental Analysis

The team decided to gather some broad information about our markets by doing basic research on the issues both nonprofits and volunteers are facing in light of recent events. We found several trends and culprits for the volunteer shortage. On one side, nonprofits are facing budget cuts as well as restrictions for volunteering activities due to COVID-19. On the other hand, due to the high level of unemployment, volunteers have less of an incentive to work without pay. Please see the “Environmental Analysis” document for more specifics.

Customer Personas

Given that our project connected two key demographics, volunteers and nonprofit leaders, it was necessary to research and reach out to both, in order to fully understand our problem scope. We interviewed nine individuals who had volunteered at nonprofits in the past, identifying their motivations and hindrances in volunteering, as well as their frustrations in their search for volunteering opportunities. From these interactions we developed a deeper understanding of our clients’ needs. We also researched the sources of nonprofit funds, another problem they are facing with COVID-19, and found that older generations and retirees are the largest contributors to both nonprofits and COVID-19 efforts. We created a customer persona for both demographics, as shown in the “Customer Personas” document.

Customer Profiles

After conducting interviews, the team developed a survey for volunteers to complete in order to better quantify and communicate our research. The surveys helped us prioritize the most important aspects of the website, and to gauge people’s general interest in the idea. We collected 17 responses in total. To see a detailed description of each question with graphs, please see the “Customer Profiles” document. Key insights/takeaways from this research are below:

  • Current websites with similar aims are not reaching the volunteer sector, despite all of our volunteers using the web for most aspects of their lives
  • Passion and interest along with flexible hours/time availability proved the biggest motivations for wanting to volunteer for a specific nonprofit
  • Time availability and inability to find opportunities proved key factors our site would need to tackle
  • Every respondent we reached reported that an idea like ours would be helpful to them
  • The most useful tools were evidently the ones that would solve the biggest problem in the volunteering search: timing, interest, and awareness

Value Proposition Canvas

From the customer data collection and analysis, we were able to develop a value proposition canvas outlining the key features of our site. For more detail see “Value Proposition Canvas” document. Key features are highlighted below:

We decided from the results to address 3 main problems:
  • Inability to fit volunteering into schedule
  • Lack of motivation to volunteer (fit interests/skills)
  • Lack of awareness
We would solve these problems in 3 respective solutions:
  • Create a timing filter or tool
  • Create an interests-matching program
  • Create a localized nonprofit information page (landing page)

Business Model

Now that we had an informed and concise approach to our idea, we began to consider how it would grow and reach consumers. We planned to reach out to local organizations and services, because having a more definite source of publicity would help our plan progress. After all, a great solution is futile if it is not utilized. This is where we started to consider purchasing ads online to increase website traffic and solve our central problem more effectively by increasing awareness. Our research uncovered other web-associated costs we had not considered.

In order for our solution to be beneficial to nonprofits, we need high traffic of volunteers on our website. Because of this, our business model relies heavily on the use of advertisements to get the word out. With enough funding, our publicity would help nonprofits be found easier, so they can benefit their community without the stress of limited awareness. Please see the “Business Model” document for in-depth information.

Revenue Model

Our business model allowed us to identify a solid plan for beginning revenue acquisition. Nonprofits would pay to be featured on the landing page of our website. They can pay for a single feature, or pay per click, or per thousand as long as they stay on the homepage. We would also receive a small fee from donations made through the website. This money would be channeled into overall advertisements for our site, helping both the nonprofits and us increase our online presence.

How did we build and iterate on the solution?

Project Management

Outside of meeting every other day as a team, we used several communication interfaces for our project, both between the team and in gathering information from our clients. We utilized Slack heavily for formal communications, along with GroupMe for more casual mobile messaging. For bookkeeping and individual progress updates, we used Trello. This tool allowed each of us to make personal checklists of needed action items discussed each week in Monday meetings and keep other members updated on our progress. When reaching out to potential clients, we made surveys using Typeform. This program allowed us to easily transfer data into Excel to be analyzed and communicated.

Prototyping

To begin the build process of our solution, the team discussed key research findings that would inform our design decisions. Collaboration between the Go-Squad and Pro-Squad was essential at this step in our process. We needed to know the interfaces that we were prototyping aligned with the needs of our users and target market. After identifying the main functionalities of our site, we brainstormed how it would work, as well as how it would look. With the help of our task flow, and a few paper sketches, we were well on our way to creating lo-fi mockups that were then tested with users. The team utilized Figma for collaborative prototyping.

User Testing

What | Basic usability testing, with post-test interview

With Who | Tested with 4 users (two on the nonprofit side of our interface, and two on the volunteer portion of the UI)

Goals | By going into testing with several goals, we knew what we wanted to get out of it, which streamlined our iteration process. These goals were:

  • See how users navigate the website and its intuitiveness
  • Discover points of confusion
  • See if users understand the basis of the website’s functions
  • Figure out what specific features users would want out of a website like this

Insights | Insights that we received from this testing allowed us to iterate on our designs. Some insights are as follows:

  • Overall, users understood main function of website
  • Would be helpful to include specific data points as to how the nonprofits have benefited Indiana
  • Include a “Match Me” button at the top, prior to the featured nonprofits
  • Add central Indiana to location options
  • Add number to matches on results page
  • Add warning that user will lose their results after they exit page

As user testing was happening, the team began coding the bones of the website. We saw it necessary to begin the development process early, which benefitted us as the weeks of the challenge drew to a close and we were ahead of schedule. After iterations had been made subsequent to testing, the team was ready to solidify the design and move forward with finalizing the website code.

Key Metrics

  • Interviews with Volunteers | 2
  • Interviews with Nonprofit Leaders | 2
  • Survey Responses | 17
  • User-Testing Participants | 4

Technical Details and Diagrams

The technical architecture of the project begins with Heroku. Heroku is a platform as a service which means that it provides the hardware and basic software needed to run our application all in the cloud. On top of the Heroku platform is the Spring-Boot substructure. Spring-Boot is a web application framework that handles online HTTP requests and automatically serves them from our project directory. This means that we are free to write our own code within Heroku and Spring-Boot. They do the heavy-lifting so that we can create a fully functional, publicly available website in as little as five weeks.

Further information about the technical nature of our product can be found in the documentation provided in the readme file as well as the Javadocs created for our project.

Link to GitHub repository | https://github.com/CalebWa/tpx-nonprofits-03

Link to Website | https://tpx-nonprofits-03.herokuapp.com

Key Tools, Libraries, and Frameworks

Heroku | Our responsive website was built, compiled, and hosted on the Heroku cloud platform. By using Heroku, we are able to receive connections from all around the world.

Spring-Boot | Within Heroku, we utilized the Spring-Boot framework to take care of the server-side difficulties of creating an online website. Spring-Boot allowed us to process any connection we receive over the internet.

ClearDB MySQL Database | To fully retain all the information that nonprofits submit to our website, our solution utilized the ClearDB MySQL Database add-on. This database add-on gave us an easy way to store and retrieve all the nonprofits that we pair with volunteers.

Github | We hosted our website using GitHub. GitHub is widely used and well-known, so it only made sense that we would make use of this platform. Some teammates had used it in the past, so we were familiar with its capabilities.

Java | We coded the back-end of the website using Java. This choice was driven by the fact that we needed to process any information sent to us by volunteers and nonprofits, and we were already using Java in Spring-Boot.

HTML/CSS | We coded the front-end of the website using HTML and CSS. This was the most obvious choice for our teammates to use because of our experience and background coding in these languages.

Skeleton | Skeleton is a UI framework that allowed us to create a responsive website that is able to be viewed on all devices. Our website heavily utilized columns and rows, so Skeleton came in handy when formatting.

Figma | By using Figma, the team was able to create UI mockups collaboratively. This streamlined the design process and allowed all teammates to be informed of important design decisions.

Flaticon | Flaticon is a library database of free vector icons. Our site used images from this library to aid in the visual communication of the website.

If the team had another 5 weeks to work on this, what would we do next?

We had only five weeks to create Benefit Indiana, so the team has identified several areas in which development of the product could be expanded, both on the product development and business development sides.

Future Development Ideas

We determined that future growth of the website could be broken into front-end and back-end modifications. Please see the “Future Project Plans” document for more details. These are as follows:

Front-End
  • Create a more streamlined website design
  • Better align UI with user expectations (with the creation of new features)
  • Add option for donations
  • Design web traffic tool so nonprofits know how they’re acquiring volunteers from our site
Back-End
  • Create user profiles in order to save responses from volunteers
  • Email nonprofits their inputs, with the option to buy a feature ad
  • Add traffic analytic tool for nonprofits
  • Match by specific volunteer events/opportunities rather than interests in general

Future Business Ideas

The team created several ways in which we would be able to acquire more revenue streams, and develop a more in-depth business model. These ideas are as follows:

  • Reach out to service clubs, schools, and organizations in order to increase promotion
  • Acquire government grants for advertisement costs
  • Create a more complex business/ad structure
  • Calculate web and publicity maintenance costs

Completed Items

  • Environmental Analysis
  • Business Model Canvas
  • Value Proposition Canvas
  • Customer Personas
  • Customer Profiles
  • Future Ideas
  • Task Flows
  • UI Mockups
  • Website
  • Database

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