Advocate
A Social Marketplace for Community Service Experiences
May 01, 2015 | 1 minute read
When you wake up on a Saturday and have some time to do good in your community, where do you turn? While you can check Facebook for upcoming social events, or GroupOn for cool weekend outings, there's no where to turn to find community service opportunities. Advocate aims to change that.
Made With Love In Providence
I co-founded Advocate in the spring of 2014 with my good friend Josh Shiau. At the time, I was a Senior at Brown University studying Computational Biology and Josh was a Senior in Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design.
We worked through the summer of 2014 while interning at IBM Design to build and launch a beta product. Starting in September 2014, we began piloting the beta with 20 high school students. For the next several months, we worked with these students to test the platform and ensure the system was stable and meets the primary needs of this user group. Josh led the design efforts, and I led the engineering efforts to build out our web and mobile applications.
The Advocate Beta was very successful, however in May 2015 we decided to fold the project down and take full-time offers at IBM Design. None-the-less, Advocate remains my first true taste of entrepreneurship, and was my introduction to UX Design and building web-applications. It has deeply informed my work ever since.
A Sampling Of Our Product Development
Volunteer Experience
Advocate was a two-sided marketplace. Non-profits posted events for which they needed volunteers, and prospective volunteers signed up to browse events.
After creating an account, users browse events they want to volunteer for.
We made sure to consider the fact that many volunteers would be using our app from a mobile device.
Event Manager Experience
On the day of an event, the event manager uses our mobile app to manage volunteers on site, such as checking them in and out.
Event Summary
After an event, event managers can access a history of who attended in order to help them plan for their next event.
