Volunteer Me (14)

Landing Page
Event Page With QR Code
Organization Page
Volunteer Profile Page
Hour Verification

The Problem

Volunteer hours are frequently used as a form of social currency to prove how hardworking or caring someone is. Oftentimes, they even come into play during interviews for jobs and other opportunities. However, as more and more people volunteer, there becomes an issue of verification: how do you or an organization know that someone actually spent time volunteering? In case you're wondering, yes, this is a real issue. Intellijent.com surveyed 1,600 college students, finding that around 60% lied on their college application. A large portion of these lies were concerning volunteer hours. It may not seem like such a big deal, but this greatly diminishes the work of real volunteers who contribute countless hours towards improving their community.

Our Project

In comes Volunteer Me, a minimalistic social network for displaying and verifying the hours that a person has spent volunteering.

How it Works

There are two entities in said network: organizations and volunteers. Organizations are able to create events, and when they do, Volunteer Me will generate a qr code unique to that event. Upon completion of the event, volunteers can then scan this qr code, leading them to a page where they can claim that they worked a certain number of hours. Obviously, this isn't foolproof - if the process stopped here, someone could just share the qr code, and then anyone could have verified hours with that organization! That's why, after this claim has been made, organizations must accept or decline these hours, adding a personal touch to the verification process. In addition, every volunteer has their own page which totals their volunteer hours and events. This encourages other people to volunteer, creating a healthy sense of competition while benefiting society.

Our Tech Stack

To build Volunteer Me, we used the Sveltekit framework with Tailwind for frontend/backend, and postgresql for our database.

Our Next Steps

There are a lot of improvements that can be made to Volunteer Me, from UI issues to the flexibility with which organizations can manage events and users. To expand and keep the site running, we could either start running ads or have bigger organizations pay for us to manage their events/volunteer hours.