Pantry Volunteering Dilemma
Background
The Pantry is having a hard time with three things – volunteer retainment, volunteer monitoring, and volunteer signups. There are places all over America where people go hungry, and Lewisburg is one of them. Without volunteers to help feed people that come to places like The Pantry, there is no way for everyone to be served food. As of now, there is a decent rate of burnout regarding current volunteers, and The Pantry is having a hard time keeping track of new signups, specifically categorizing frequency and level of interest. A platform for the pantry could solve these problems, making volunteering more interesting and engaging, as well as making signups more streamlined and enticing. Hopefully this can solve all of the problems that The Pantry is having.
Executive Summary
A social, profile-based web application with facebook integration would be the perfect solution for the problems The Pantry is having. Every volunteer (that creates an account) would have a profile on the app, and that profile would solve a number of problems. It would help The Pantry keep track of who volunteers when, and with that information, would be able to assess retention rate of these volunteers and frequency of new signups. Making it social would help reduce volunteer burnout because, let’s face it, people love letting other people know that they are volunteering for those less fortunate. Adding a facebook and/or facebook integration would just make that sharing aspect a little easier.
Viability Analysis
The most difficult thing about this proposal would be on the user end of it, ensuring that people use it the way they should. If that doesn’t happen, it will essentially be useless at accomplishing the goals stated above. Creating a database of users with a log of each time they volunteer would not be difficult, and I can’t imagine building a UI for it to be difficult either. Coming up with a way to tastefully display users’ involvement, if available to other volunteers, could prove a design challenge, but would be manageable.
Risks and Rewards
A risk would be creating this platform that could go untouched by many volunteers that either don’t know about it, or don’t feel the need to spend more of their free time on something, considering they’re already volunteering. However, if successful, it could drive more volunteers and help spread word about the cause in general.
Closing
Coming up with the right level of engagement for this platform is essential. At its most basic, this will be a database with a way to display each volunteer and their frequency of volunteering via a graph over time or something of the sort. At its most engaged, it would be a platform for users to track their own involvement as well as others, and help them feel good about the work they’re doing.
Print 
PDF