As members of SASE, we are passionate about volunteer work as it is one of the five pillars. Over the past 5 past years, there has been a 29% decrease in the private sector and an increase in the demand for environmental volunteers. Knowing this, we saw an opportunity for a network of nonprofits and volunteers to capitalize on the needs in this industry. For individuals, finding community service opportunities can be a struggle, knowing that they want to contribute but not knowing where to start. For nonprofits, there is a lack of conversion and retention for volunteers to continue to participate. This is an area where we thought we could create an app to best help the two parties, providing incentives for individuals and nonprofits to keep providing to the communities.
We created a dynamic Non-Profit Network. This means functionality for organizations to create, organize and promote opportunities that they are hosting and for individual users who are seeking these opportunities to not only learn and register for these opportunities but also track their history and gain badges for volunteering.
Organizations can manage their opportunity entries by deleting, marking them as complete and confirming volunteer hours for those who attended
Frontend: NextJS, React Backend: NextJS, Prisma, MongoDB
User Authentication with NextAuth, Relationships with Schemas and understanding Prisma and MongoDB's intersectionality.
Enabling organisations to add tags which then lead to users earning specific badges.
Learning and managing new frameworks to create a cohesive application.
This was the first ever hackathon any of us had ever taken part in. We sought to challenge ourselves. We learnt frameworks and languages that none of us knew or were comfortable with. Another thing that we all learned was teamwork and managing the project as a team.
AI will be introduced in producing analysis for organizations so that they can better understand their volunteer demographics in order to have a greater conversion rate. Additionally, AI can be used to personalize opportunities for the users to allow them to engage in service activities more.
We will further incentivise users by adding more statistics and awards to their profiles and adding global leaderboard functionality. We will create a more social experience for all users of Terrarium by adding a global feed to enable posting, friending, and sharing so that users can engage with each other and foster a local community.