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CommunityHERO

How do we allow volunteers to easily find and sign up for relevant opportunities, while at the same time allowing organizations to effectively manage those opportunities?

CommunityHERO is a cross-platform app that allows volunteers to explore and sign up for volunteer opportunities that are relevant to them. A live test-case for this app presented itself in the form of a small-town, volunteering event, involving multiple organizations. With a commitment from the organizers to use our app to manage the event, we had 3 months to design and develop the product before the event.

Research

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Interviews

We talked with event organizers and volunteers to identify their needs, motivations, and current pain points.

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Affinity mapping

I took all of the interview data and synthesized it down to several key ideas for our app.

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Personas

We quickly put together personas based on the interview data. We identified different levels of organizer and volunteer; those willing to lead and those simply wanting to give their time.

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MVP Definition

With a short time frame, we used a lean startup approach to our product and put together an initial hypothesis for our app that hit all of the event’s needs and use cases.

Key User Goals​

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Volunteer:

• "I have limited volunteering time. I want to help out with opportunities that speak to me the most."

• "I want the sign up process to be painless. I just want to help in any way I can."

• "I would like reminders and calendar integration for any upcoming projects I've volunteered for."

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Organizer:

• "I want to break down my project by sub-tasks and let people sign up for them."

• "I want to be able to communicate with my volunteers to notify them of any details and changes."

• "I want to find the right people for the job."

Solutions​

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I designed a light onboarding process to find out volunteers’ interests and strengths based on a broad set of categories. Volunteers could inform us if they were willing to lead activities.

Our intelligent matching algorithm served up recommendations based on volunteer interests and geo-location, defaulting to geo-location if no interests were defined.

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We provided a quick way to organize and sign up for opportunities by task, and also provided organizers a way to track headcount and filled opportunities. As a volunteer, If you didn’t know what you wanted to help out with, but wanted to still help, you could do that too.

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We also provided a way for leaders to communicate and get in contact with volunteers, as well as check in volunteers on the day of the opportunity.

Findings​

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The event was a success and the app was used to manage and direct 300+ volunteers during the town-wide event. We were able to use the knowledge we gained to scale the app up for use by larger organizations and institutions in our area.

Project Details​

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My Role: Lead UX Designer, UI Designer,  User Researcher, Design Studio Facilitator

Team: CEO, PO, 4 app developers, 2 designers

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