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Social Career

Build a sustainable cooperating platform for NGOs and volunteers

2016-2018 @ 社職 Social Career

Social Career

Social Career is a non-profit technology company which aims to create an increasingly volunteering-friendly environment to encourage the public contribution to the society.

Challenge


There are several competitors in the current market, and one of them is using the ticketing rewards to attract volunteers; and the other one is providing a train services to NGOs, which included volunteer-recruitment and training. 


Challenge 1

We should make our product stand out in a crowed of these competitors, and encourage the public, especially skill-based volunteers, to contribute their time and talents back to society.


Challenge 2

Initially, we had limited insight into the factors that volunteers consider when seeking out volunteer opportunities.


Challenge 3

We don't know what the typical challenges are when NGOs recruit volunteers.


Our goal for the project

  • Creating an increasingly volunteering-friendly and innovative platform to help NGOs in their engagement with volunteers

  • NGO could easy to capture the volunteering hours and manage their volunteering recruitment

  • Give volunteer fast and easy to use experience on searching and applying volunteering opportunities

  • Creating the social impact by volunterring hours generation

My Role


Role

UX Architect


Duties

From the outset of the product design to February 2018, I led the UX/UI design of the volunteering management platform for NGOs and volunteer side with both web & native app versions.


Collaboration team

Closely collaborated with Business team, PM and IT team


Features of the platform 

Client-side

  • Volunteering job posting

  • Member check-in management system

  • Volunteers' social impact analysis dashboard


User-side

  • Volunteering job searching

  • Calendar

  • Personal profile with Social CV


QR code checkin.

Research Methodology


At the outset of the project we didn’t know specific goals for the platform of NGOs and volunteer side. So I interviewed several NGOs to understand their needs on volunteering management, the current types of volunteering opportunities and their working modules. 


For understanding the preferences of the volunteers, I recruited 10 volunteers who aged from 15-55 to have an in-depth interview. I have also done an online survey to figure out the volunteering motivation of the users.



Discovery


Volunteers’ needs and expectation:

  • Beginners want to have recommendations

  • Want to have fast submission and the application could be confirmed within expected period

  • Don't want to disclose their mobile number in a group whatsapp

  • Meaningful images and descriptive volunteering info could gain their motivation to submit the application

  • OLE students need to commit volunteering hours


Problems that NGOs are facing:

  • Choosing volunteers by luck

  • Volunteers always forget to commit the service

  • Spending long time to trackback volunteering hours in traditional way

  • Difficult to consolidate the feedback from volunteers to fulfil the project funder requirements

  • Lack of channels to recruit volunteers

  • Various types of volunteering modules:

    • Group volunteering at one location – e.g. visit nursing home, bazaar volunteering

    • Remote volunteering and individually – e.g. graphic design, typing work

    • Regular / one-off servicing

Social Impact


In the past two years, Social Career has been used by more than 300 NGOs and over 10,000 volunteers, resulting in the generation of 100,000 volunteering hours.

Social Career was honored to receive the Hong Kong ICT Startup Bronze Award in the Social Impact category. All credit goes to the outstanding Social Career team. I am delighted to be a part of this team.

Highlight Solutions for volunteers




Highlight Solutions for NGOs


Unfortunately, due to non-disclosure agreement, I cannot show the product screenshots of this part.


Simplified application approval process

  • For some daily regular volunteering services, NGOs have heavy workload on manage human resources. Therefore, I have designed a calendar viewer for them to review the applicant list; and design some functional tools which were fit to their working process to deal with their daily volunteer management works.


Provide impact data

  • Funders always require NGOs to reach some KPIs. A dashboard was designed for capturing volunteering service data to help NGOs understanding the trend of volunteering development, and to create more successful volunteering programs; resulting in creating a bigger social impact.


Record hours features

  • Fast check-in function / QR code check-in function – this is suitable for volunteers check-in at an event, it can automatically to capture the accurate volunteering hours.

  • Simplified user interface for volunteer who has done remote services to report volunteering hours.


Instant messenger

  • Provides IM function which can automatically create group chat for communicating with volunteers, and helps to protect the privacy of the volunteers, e.g. mobile number.

  • NGOs could also share volunteering post in the IM to target groups of volunteers.

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