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Problem Statement
It is an unfortunate reality that not every child has presents under their Christmas tree. The amazing people at the Durham, NC Volunteer Center have a program, Share Your Christmas, that matches needy families with donors who can put something special under their tree. They need a new app to help them connect recipients and donors easily, and at scale.
Ideally they would also like to have it generic enough to also work for Thanksgiving (turkeys) and the start of the school year (backpacks full of school supplies for kids.) Along these lines, we're initially calling the project Share Your Holiday ... hopefully we'll think of a better name along the way!
Even though their current manual process is extremely terrible, other cities have expressed interest in this so this group will potentially be helping kids from all over the country!
The bottom line is this: the more recipients that get their wishes fulfilled, the better. In a city the size of Durham, it's unrealistic for one organization to do all the marketing, connection, and delivery of goods. Sharing the work among different, interested organizations makes the job easier. Churches, community groups, non-profits, companies, unions, and other groups can take an appropriate size share of recipients, market the need to their own members through established means (newsletters, email), and do the appropriate follow-up.
This is efficient but requires a strong, shared information system. In particular, it should ensure:
- The Volunteer Center can easily add recipient family information into the system
- They can then partition the list into sublists for sponsoring organizations
- The organizations themselves can publish this list to their members
- Members can see enough information about the recipient families or members to select one apprpropiate for their donation, either online, through a printed list, or other means.
- Recipients are connected to at most one donor
- The Volunteer Center can shift unconnected recipients from an underperforming organization to a better-performing one if needed.
The current process is largely manual. The Volunteer Center gets a large recipient list from Durham Social Services, broken down by families. Each family has a list of its members, their age and gender, and what they'd like for Christmas. The center doles out these printed lists to agencies, which then pretty much work on their own.
By making this a Ruby on Rails application, it'll be much easier for the sponsoring organizations to track their list. They can market to their own member list directly from the system by uploading their email list, or they can use more traditional methods like a signup sheet on a bulletin board. Donors can either use the system directly to find an appropriate match, or give their information to a sponsoring org representative, who can sign them up for them. They can have their match rescinded later if circumstances arise, and the recipient can be rematched.
By doing this all online, there is less chance for communication and follow-through error.
We expect that a good working system will increase participation. It'll make the process easier for donors to connect to a family. It'll be easier for unconnected recipients to be assigned elsewere.
There's currently no good way to track a campaign's success. With this system, because every match is tracked at some level, we can tell definitively how many recipients are served, how many remain unconnected, and how effective organizations are at targeting the right size sublist. By examining closer where the holes remain in the system, they can be effectively targeted.