Voluntext

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  Logo for voluntext (we made it)

Inspiration

We wanted to make a social good program that helps willing volunteers to be informed and coordinate disaster relief and community aid efforts in nearby areas over a simple text message interface.

What it does

The project use a twillio api. It has a twillio phone number that volunteer can send a text to it and get their name and zip-code recorded. It has a web app for the organization to signup and post their events on their dashboard. The manager for each organization would be able to send message to all the recorded volunteers in nearby area with the information of events and see if they are willing to help. The volunteers would get available volunteer opportunity in surrounding area via text message.

How we built it

We used the Firebase's Realtime Database for our database management. We registered our domain (which is voluntext.com!) with domain.com, created the web app using react.js and hosting it through Firebase. We also use the twilio API to send and receive text messages.

Challenges we ran into

Everything is challenging! Halfway through development we realized that the front end and back end were incompatible and we had to regroup. But we had fun tackling the many challenges

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to complete and make our project work!

What we learned

A bunch of stuff - new languages, new APIs and features, handling back end servers and databases... the list goes on

What's next for Voluntext

We want to improve the user interface as this was just a POC and there's a lot of room for improvement. We also want to implement validity checks and text sanitizers. It would also be great if we were able to implement text analysis to better handle text messages from potential volunteers.

Built With

• firebase
• node.js
• react.js
• twilio