Sunday 26 October 2014

Meet Team Wolfpack

Chrislynn Soong, Catherine Lin, Fayomi Djimeji, Henry Feng and Sree Nair are Team Wolfpack. We are group of passionate youths from the Office of Ethnic Affairs Young Leaders Programme and together, we started the Volunteer Me App Project. 

The Volunteer App aims to connect the right volunteers to the right organisations in the palm of your hand. Our project has a focus on encouraging youth volunteerism. We understand that this has never been done before in New Zealand. 

Currently, we are seeking support from organisations to kick start the development of the App. We are also sending out market validation surveys to members of the volunteer sector to have a feel of what they want out of a recruitment platform such as ours. 




The Team:

Chrislynn Soong (Pack leader)
Catherine Lin (Accounts)

Fayomi Djimeji (IT Support)

Henry Feng (Design)


Sree Nair (Communications)

The Problem

According to the quarterly statistics on volunteering and donating in New Zealand released by the department of internal affairs, there is a downward trend in volunteering in New Zealand.  This is especially more pronounced amongst young people between the ages of 14 -25. Volunteering has always been associated with adult involvement. There is a clear disparity in the involvement of youth involved in social causes as compared to people in an older age range.






This is because most volunteer opportunities are targeted towards older people and Volunteering has been painted as an older persons task. The younger people as a result feel disconnected and are not attracted towards the volunteer sector.  Volunteer management is not a novel idea. It has had an online presence over the last decade. However, volunteer management groups in New Zealand have not caught up with the technological advancements to further engage Generation X.  Just having an online presence is not sufficient in creating a holistic and interactive volunteering experience that the youth currently crave. 

The Solution

Our approach to the problem was to apply a combination of technology, creativity and gamification to our App to revolutionise the Volunteer Sector. The Volunteer Me App would be interactive, fun and accessible to all, with an added focus on youth. To make the App attractive to youth, we adopted gamification to our model. Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems. This novel way of problem solving has not been experimented in the volunteer sector in New Zealand as yet. 

Each volunteer would have their own profile on the App. The profile will feature and track the volunteer's progress. Badges will be allocated to each volunteer reflecting on the number of times the volunteer has volunteered, organised events and shared events. 











The issue with indecision will be resolved with the App. The whole goal of the App is to make the process of volunteering easier. We do this by categorising areas of the volunteer sector and displaying them in a fun and vibrant manner. With this layout, youths are able to pick areas that interest them. 
An added feature is our geographical tracker which pin points the real time location of the volunteer and where the nearest volunteer events are found that fit their time commitment and interests.  
INCORPORATION

After seeking advice from legal professionals about protecting and capitalising on our Intellectual Property, Team Wolfpack incorporated 'Wolfpack Interactive Limited'. We saw the potential in our project and took steps to ensure its longevity. We considered issues of sustainability of the App and ownership and decided to go ahead with the incorporation. We learnt about business strategies and working within the framework of a company. All of us are directors of the company and have an equal shareholding in the company. There are implications with holding such high responsibility but we were all well informed about the processes before we went ahead with the incorporation.

The Impact We Made

MARKET VALIDATION
In order for us to progress with our designs and ideas, we had to validate them. We prepared surveys for both charitable organisations and volunteers. We used survey monkey as a platform to reach our target audience. We have collected over 74 responses from volunteers and 8 responses from charitable organisations. We are still in the process of procuring more volunteers for our survey. 

We also made a video collecting the responses from High School and University Students regarding the Volunteer Me Project. Due to a technical error, we are unable to upload this to the blog. 


SURVEY MONKEY




FACEBOOK

Another way of measuring the interest of the the public or impact of our ideas, we set up a Volunteer Me Facebook page. Here is a link to our page: Volunteer Me . To date, we have had 146 likes to our page and that number continues to grow. 

PLEDGE ME


We recently set up a Pledge Me account to collect funds towards our project. Here is a link to our pledge me if you would like to support us: Pledge Me

VOLUNTEER NEW ZEALAND

We met up with Ruth Garner from Volunteer Canterbury and Vanissa Dhiru, Chief Executive of Volunteer New Zealand on the 4th of September 2014. Through the meeting, we were able to better understand the volunteer sector in terms of volunteer engagement. We were also able to measure the interest based on the response from Vanisa. Vanisa enjoyed the idea but challenged the team further by sharing her experiences with project management. From this experience, we were able to redefine what our goals were with our project and to be more realistic.