We need to get more interaction from our website and drive donor, participant, and volunteer involvement
A well designed website which would drive individuals to action, properly marketed with strong SEO, and information gathering technology would motivate action and provide information we could use to increase connectivity to the community.
We are a very small start up and I am not technically informed. It is highly important in today's economy to have a positive cyberspace presence to share our mission and encourage participation. We compete with very large and established non-profits and currently are not getting noticed which is a shame because we have so much to offer. This website and gathered information will allow us to identify and serve those who are searching for our services.
SVdP has a workforce of nearly 700 employees and lacks a suitable means to deliver consistent and current information about policies, benefits, and other resources to our staff. Many of our employees work remotely and/or lack computer access which makes information delivery especially challenging.We are looking for a smart-phone-accessible intranet solution that will offer employees greater access to information and promote employee engagement in a variety of areas.
Project champion: Alisha Cantwell, HR Manager
Thank You--we are hopeful for a partnership!
Developing a 15th Night Homeless Youth "Choose Your Own Adventure Video Game" to educate middle school students about resources available to them prior to choosing the streets or while experiencing homelessness. We ask our 2020 hackathoners to develop the tech for a web based choose your own adventure game where a player is encouraged to find resources over the course of 14 days and prior to their 15th night.
The City of Eugene has been working on a video game for the 15th Night homeless youth organization that will educate youth and adults about the challenge youth face and resources available in our community. A Mario Cart Video Game tournament was hosted in late 2018 to raise money to develop a "Choose your own adventure" story and develop the tech for the game. We are looking to run another tournament at The Graduate in February (youth and adults).
We are currently working with Wordcrafters in Eugene to run a community competition to develop a choose your own adventure written story. The story would inform youth (as well as adults) about the life skills and knowledge to stay off the street and/or how to get off the street. The Choose Your Own Adventure Story line would take the reader through the experience of living on the street, learning about community resources and development assets, and options other than the street. The winning entry will be awarded $750.
We would like to announce the winning entry at the kickoff of this year's 2020 Hack for a Cause and then ask the hackathon participants to develop the digital version of the choose your own adventure story for a web based game.
The online game will be used in middle school classrooms as an education module that would include a conversation with the 15th Night's Youth Advisory Council. This game would also add another tool to the homeless youth tool box.
The story and tech will be designed and written so that any community could utilize the game and insert their own specific resources for food, safety, clothing, shelter, etc. For example, Food for Lane County maybe our community food resource but the story and tech would contain a placeholder for [food]
Lane County is home to 3,2178 nonprofit entities with overlapping interests. At the same time, the number of new residents moving into the area is rising. How do we connect nonprofits and city leaders with overlapping interests and also residents looking for ways to volunteer tap into local challenges.
We envision an open source mobile app which empowers individuals in their communities to find each other and join forces on the aspirations and causes that mean the most to them in their city. We hope to create a white label app for cities/communities to use/customize to plug in their own aspirations, goals, projects and information.
Project champion: Eugene Innovators Group
We realize that creating an app during the hackathon timeline is unrealistic. We hope to map out the scope of the app, design possible functionality, identify potential areas to troubleshoot, and layout a clear path forward for future volunteers working on the app. Thank you for all that you do for the community!
This simple service for our community is incredibly complex on the logistics side. Can we simplify the "back end" details to allow maximized time for teams to support our volunteers and clients? Problem cliff notes: a busy spreadsheet needs to connect 15+ delivery drivers with a changing 100+ client summary weekly.
We currently utilize a spreadsheet for all coordination of deliveries and dietary communication, but we are not utilizing it to its fullest capacity. Much of our week is spent manually sorting and producing delivery routes & communicating these details to the volunteer delivery drivers. We suspect that there are functions which we are not familiar with which could reduce error and allow our team more time serving clients & volunteers directly. Our service has increased 30% this year and we right now a limitation to serving our best or more is that we are quickly out growing this process and need to learn the next generation of tech!
BRING relies on donations of good reusable building materials from individuals and businesses from all over Lane County. Because we offer a unique service, our donor (and customer) base stretches to every corner of Lane County, often times requiring donors to travel dozens of miles round trip from their homes to bring us stuff. While we do publish a list of the types of materials we generally accept and sell, our in-take staff reserves the right to refuse a donation if there is any reason that we think it may not be reusable: not the type of thing we take, broken, hazardous to staff, out of style, over supply, etc. There are many reasons we may not accept an item. Our problem arises when a donor has traveled to BRING to donate an item or load and finds out that we are unwilling to accept their donation. This can cause frustration and anger, and resentment of our staff whom are just doing their job which reflects badly on our brand. It may even result in a loss of a donors use of our service, of which we rely on. Additionally, we realize the waste of fuel resources, especially when traveling from further distances. We would like to solve, or relieve, the problem of a donor traveling to us only to hear that we will not accept their donation.
We envision a "Tinder for Stuff", if you will. Where a donor may access a portal to send us photos of their stuff before actually driving to our site. Our staff could decide ahead of time if the item is something we want. We could create a likelihood we will take this score, and send different types of feedback to the potential donor. This could dramatically decrease the amount of unproductive trips made to BRING, help us educate our donors on the types of things we take and reasons why we do not, and reduce unwanted fuel over-consumption. We are open and flexible to the solution to our problem, but this is one way we know technology could assist us. The power of technology is infinite!