Relinkd

Relinkd helps nonprofits find, match, and manage volunteers through a simple, intuitive interface—streamlining outreach, tracking engagement, and using data to improve recruitment and impact.

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Inspiration

Every day, nonprofits in BC struggle to find the right volunteers. They post on Facebook, send mass emails, and hope someone shows up. It’s slow, imprecise, and leads to coordinator burnout.

Volunteers are not a nice-to-have. They are the mission. Without them, programs don’t run, communities don’t get support, and impact stalls.

Yet most nonprofits manage their most critical resource with spreadsheets, emails, and memory. There’s no system to find the right person quickly, reach them efficiently, or track what’s happening.

We built Relinkd to fix that.

What it does

Relinkd is an end-to-end volunteer recruitment and coordination platform built specifically for nonprofits.

Here's how it works:

  • A coordinator describes what they need in plain language
  • Relinkd’s AI asks follow-up questions and matches them with the best volunteers based on skills, availability, location, and requirements
  • Top matches are surfaced with clear reasoning for each recommendation
  • With one click, coordinators send a personalized SMS to volunteers
  • Volunteers reply YES or NO, no app required
  • Responses update automatically in a live pipeline tracker

But Relinkd goes beyond matching.

  • It continuously analyzes outreach performance, showing who responds and where drop-offs occur
  • Coordinators gain clear visibility into what’s working and where gaps exist
  • When roles remain unfilled, Relinkd generates targeted recruitment posts tailored to the exact volunteers needed

This turns outreach from guesswork into a clear, data-driven process.

How we built it

We built Relinkd using:

  • React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS for the frontend
  • Express.js (Node.js) for the backend
  • Supabase (PostgreSQL) for database management
  • Claude Haiku (Anthropic) for AI chat and matching
  • Twilio for SMS integration
  • Cloudinary for media storage and Pexels API for high-quality imagery

Challenges we ran into

  • Building a reliable post generation pipeline that produces high-quality, tailored recruitment content. This required coordinating multiple components, from extracting meaningful gaps in data to structuring prompts that generate useful and relevant posts
  • Making sure the generated outreach content felt specific and human, not generic or templated
  • Translating natural language requests into structured, accurate matching logic
  • Handling real-time SMS communication and asynchronous responses
  • Building a dynamic pipeline tracker that clearly reflects live state changes
  • Turning analytics into insights that are actually useful for coordinators

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Built a complete end-to-end volunteer recruitment system
  • Implemented AI-powered matching with clear, explainable results
  • Created a seamless SMS workflow with real-time updates
  • Developed a pipeline tracker that gives nonprofits visibility they’ve never had before
  • Turned outreach data into targeted, automated recruitment content
  • Designed a product that is practical and usable in real-world nonprofit settings

What we learned

Relinkd taught us a lot over these past 24 hours. We worked with several tools and technologies that were completely new to us, especially SMS integration, AI-powered content generation, and real-time databases.

We learned that generating good AI output is not just about calling a model. It takes structuring the right inputs, understanding context, and refining outputs until they are actually useful.

We also gained hands-on experience with Supabase and Twilio, and saw how complex real-time systems can be when everything needs to stay in sync. Getting automated workflows like sending messages, updating pipelines, and triggering AI generation to work smoothly was challenging but really rewarding.

Most importantly, we learned that the best technology feels invisible. The goal is not to add more features, but to make complex processes like volunteer coordination feel simple, fast, and natural.

What's next for Relinkd

  • Smarter matching models that improve with usage data
  • Automated follow-ups and reminders for unresponsive volunteers
  • Expanded analytics dashboards for deeper engagement insights
  • In-platform messaging alongside SMS
  • Volunteer onboarding to grow and maintain the network
  • Integrate LinkedIn recruiter to search for volunteers to expand from current database

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