Volonte is a volunteer application that matches non-profit organizations with potential student volunteers. Volonte targets college students ages 18-22 in particular, as this age group volunteers statistically less than any other group of adults. This project began at Crimson Hackathon and was presented at the ACM 60th Annual Mid-Southeast Conference in November 2018.
Volonte was first referred to as Compassion Companion, a project developed at the University of Alabama's Crimson Hacks 24-hour Hackathon in April 2018. This project won Second Place overall at the hackathon, as well as Best Rookie Hack and Best Hack for Social Good. You can see more information about Compassion Companion here. As a result of the success of the hackathon, two members of the team decided to continue on to fully develop the application.
After conducting user interviews, results indicate a desire in college students for community outreach involvement, but a lack of knowledge, available time or marketed opportunity. Volonte fills this gap by forming a bridge between non-profit companies and potential volunteers on a common platform. The progressive web application (PWA) narrows down potential volunteer to agency matches based on user-specified qualities such as age, gender, location, date, and interest, to provide accessibility to potential volunteers, and event promotion for non-profits. Volonte also integrates popular styles in order to appeal to the college student enjoyment allowing users to be fully immersed in the application experience. In addition to connecting college students with volunteer agencies, Volonte acts as a tool to link non-profit agencies together. This enables and encourages multi-company collaboration on events, fundraising and coordination of volunteers.
Our research and development of Volonte was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery 60th Annual Mid-Southeast Conference in November 2018. Authors delivered a 20-minute oral presentation at the academic conference. The slides can be viewed within this repo under the Presentation tab.
With Volonte, non-profit organizations can form a community of volunteers across agencies, laying the foundation for a variety of collaborative opportunities for outreach. Future directions include the full development and application launch in winter 2019.
- Gabby Hoefer - Initial work - ghoefer
- Anisha Nizar Ali - Initial work - anishanizarali
See also the list of contributors who participated in this project
- Samford University Computer Science Department
- University of Alabama Crimson Hacks
- ACM 60th Annual Mid-Southeast Conference (Nov. 2018)