JCKZ | Devpost

Volunteer Page
Tree Page
Funds Page
Profile Page

What is your chosen theme and problem statement?

Giving Back Question 1: Problem Statement: Volunteering is one of the best ways to give back to our community. What creative ideas do you have to make volunteering easier, widespread and more beneficial to those in need?

What does your hack do?

GivingBack will be developed with an innovative approach to these 2 separate approaches, an enhanced volunteer referral system, and a streamlined volunteer mechanism. We believe these functionalities can all be captured within a single mobile app.

How does your hack answer the problem statement

Our hack answers the problem statement by targeting the crux of the problem statement, namely the need to make volunteering easy, hasten the process of acquiring volunteers and generate benefits for beneficiaries.

The Volunteer and Referral System (VaRS) within the app is a gamified solution that enables users to both find activities they wish to volunteer in and refer volunteering activities to others. The user may swipe left or right to decline or accept the displayed volunteering activities respectively. When a user swipes right, details of the volunteering activity will be shown and the user can register to participate in the volunteering activity chosen. Users can also share the activity to their friends via the application.

The application features will help make the volunteering onboarding process easier as users will just be required to press one button to sign up for a volunteer activity that they are interested in and they do not need to fill in forms to sign up for a volunteer activity like a traditional process.

The app also collects user behaviour data, such as the most common types of volunteering that users participate in, the most common type of volunteering that users share with others and the duration of users spending on specific types of volunteering events, etc. and leverage on Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence to create a hyper-personalised dimension to our apps usage through VaRS. These dimensions will be used as parameters for our ML-based recommender system. With all the user data, we are able to recommend volunteering activities that users will be interested in, which will definitely result in a higher conversion rate for participants joining the volunteering activities that we list on our application. These processes make volunteering easy and fast.

Referral systems are found to be very effective at encouraging involvement in volunteering events. Research has shown that when volunteering, humans like to do volunteering activities together with family and friends.

Furthermore, by using the referral system, the user is able to gain additional points and rewards too. As such, he would be encouraged to “pull” friends in and participate in volunteering together. This helps increase the number of people participating in charitable causes, increasing the speed of volunteer organisations acquiring volunteers.

Several activities are also displayed as “trees” on a page of the app. These “trees” are meant to gamify the presentation of the total amount of charitable work done so far. They will also have different thresholds and produce different tangible outcomes depending on the needs, which is modifiable by each volunteering organisation. Users may choose which tree they wish to participate in.

Various organisations/individuals will pledge to participate in volunteering activities which are needed by the community when the threshold is achieved. When a tree blooms, all volunteers that have contributed to the specific tree will receive either an email stating that the tree has bloomed, and their contribution has allowed the community to receive the specified gift from the pledged individuals. This system paints a picture for volunteers to see the fruits of their action, and encourages other parties to participate in the events, thereby generating benefits for various organisations.

How did you build your hack?

We built our hack with a strong consideration that we wanted the application to make volunteering easier, widespread and beneficial for those in need. We built the frontend of our mobile application using ReactNative, because it is widespread and convenient in use, and the backend using Flask and SQLite as they are lightweight and fast in terms of processing speed.

What are some difficulties you overcame?

We initially faced difficulties in scoping the application features to help make the volunteering onboarding process easier and volunteering activities widespread among the community.

We researched incentives to encourage volunteering as we understand that everyone has different volunteering interests and it was difficult to devise a system that would cater to everyone’s interests.

Hence, we eventually decided to implement a recommendation system that recommends relevant volunteering activities to our users which will increase the chances of users signing up for the volunteering activity.

Additionally, users can share the volunteering activity to their friends via our application.

What was your biggest learning point from LifeHack 2022?

Our biggest learning point from LifeHack 2022 is understanding the volunteering industry better and the problems it faces. We also learnt to strengthen our design thinking skills to think of user stories and volunteering use cases and devise solutions to meet the needs of volunteers and volunteer organisations.