FB’s mission is to give power to community to bring people closer together.

Iam also assuming that this is not a separate FB mobile App but rather a part of Facebook web and mobile app for Volunteers. Through this product, FB users can see and volunteer for any event of their choice (mostly in the physical world, not online)

Before we start designing, need to undersrtand the organizational goal. Other than building ths features to further the mission, Is this to drive Engagement on FB? So the app features we build will drive Engagement & Retention metrics.

CUSTOMERS:

– Charity / Cause page admins

– Users who want to help people in their community from time to time (not on an ongoing basis)

– People who want to join a cause and register for a volunteering on an ongoing basis

– Corporate teams who want to spend one day every quarter to help out a community group

 

NEEDS:

VOLUNTEERS CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Discover Volunteering Opportunities > Understand Details around the opportunity > Enroll > Share experience, recruit more, share photos and motivate

– I want to know when there is an opportunity to volunteer with details

– I want to review information and enroll for a volunteer opportunity for a date thats appropriate for me

– I want to share the volunteer event and possibly recruit some of my friends to volunteer with me

– I want to post pictures and updates from the volunteering opportunity

For the MVP, I will pick the Discovery stage where the users will be able to discover the volunteering opportunities on Facebook Volunteers app.

SOLUTIONS:

– Search for Volunteering Opportunities around me and choose from the results

– Custom Search where I can pick topics of my own interest and personalize search results

– Trending Volunteering opportunities around me

– Register in a general pool of Volunteers with the topics close to my heart and get notified when an opportunity opens up

– Open Calendar of Volunteering opportunities that the user can visit and enroll

– Admins of the Charitable Org / Community Org pages can create an event and create invitations. Facebook can show those events to users who indicated interest in volunteering and can “I want to help’ button.

 

To prioritize, I will define the Engagement metric further. The primary Success metric of this feature (in it’s new product phase) will be ‘No of users who volunteer for Volunteering opportunities’. Hence I will choose and prioritize the last solution above which will allow Charitable / Community Org Admins to create events and invite users to join.

What: A platform for volunteers and NGOs to connect.

Why: Huge no. of volunteers and authentic NGOs which lack connectivity with each other.
Who: Organizations and Individual volunteers

How: Android App Priority (user-base) powered by Facebook, Inc.

User Groups:

Organizations which seek funding for cause related to Old People and Malnturitioned children

Indiviual contributors (School children, College students, Young, Old People)

Organizational Contrbutors.(Private Organizations, Government Organizations, NGOs, Civil Group)

Volunteering App features:
Organization / Individual
1. Crowdfunding for a cause – Payment portal with individual and organization login and rewards as Facebook badges on how much you donate.

2. Food and Shelter Supply – Location-based “Drop food and shelter from home or call us if you know anybody who might help us” facility.
Individual
3. Part-time job  – Location > Choice on Internship, Certificates, Letters of recommendation from Facebook.

4. Full-time job – Location > Choice of Service
Orgnaization:
5. NGO networking – Location > Connect demand / supply of NGOs around you for sharing in times of emergency
Individual:
6. Education – About Us, Our Causes, International and Local issues, Health, Greenhouse Emission
Individual/Organizarmtion:
7. Government Schemes – Select Country >  Select Location > Select Government Donation Schemes
NGOs:
8. API integration with NGOs of the world, WHO, UNESCO, REDCROSS, etc can be set up to know about international issues and help donate money on a larger scale.
NGOs/Org/Individual:
9. API integration with Facebook App, Instagram App, WhatsApp App (all three are owned by Facebook, Inc.) so that you can post about issues of your concern.
NGOs:

Organization / Individual:
10. API integration with E-Commerce Websites like Flipkart, Myntra, etc to pre-order and deliver items on a large scale (Example : Pre-Order 500 pair of Kurtas and Pyjamas for the elderly in Gurgaon’s Sector 12 based Arrogyam NGO). Symbiotic profitability with both the business.
Org/Individual:
11. View Personal Stories – Persona-based story of a girl who was acid-attacked in Bangalore needs donation for surgery, etc
Org/Individual:
12. Monthly Donation Options – Audit the causes and donate whatever proportion you want to donate for.

Assumptions/Background

• It’s safe to assume that this would be part of the core experience of FB rather than a separate app, correct? Yes.

• Mission of FB is to connect people; at FB you build tools for ppl to create communities. Volunteerism is one of the characteristics of strong communities, because doing something to help a person within my community brings me closer to them, so it make sense that facebook would invest in a feature like this, certainly from a mission perspective.

Users

• Let’s consider the two user groups involved in volunteering and a few different segments:
  • Organizations (non profits)
    • Size of org: small, medium, well established (Red Cross)
    • Topic: eg. animal rights, human rights, environmental
    • Geography: local, statewide, nationwide, international
  • Volunteers (people)
    • Experience: little experience with volunteering, average, a lot of experience
    • Age: child, adult, senior

 

I’d suggest to focus this future on serving volunteers because if we can serve them well they’ll be able to offer their time to non-profits. I’d suggest on focusing on the adult volunteer with little-average experience with volunteering.

User problems

 

• As a potential volunteer, it’s difficult to find non profits willing to take volunteers
• As a potential volunteer, it’s difficult to find non profits that would need the skills I have
• As a potential volunteer, it’s difficult to know the time commitment needed to help and how that fits with my schedule

 

For the adult working population, I think the biggest problem is finding volunteer opportunities that would fit their schedule.

 

Solutions

• When a user likes activist content, serve “similar” organizations pages at the top of their newsfeed “volunteer opportunities near you” that are specific to that “topic”
• Based on users’ professional skills section from the profile, expose which orgs are searching for those skills with a tile in newsfeed
• “Volunteer Page” with “call for help” and “ready to help” cards:
  • Non profits could fill out “call for help” card with very clear info: when, what, who, for how long. All events would be in a new page on Facebook called “volunteer opportunities” that the user could filter by date & time available and amount of time.
  • Volunteers could fill out “ready to help” card with clear info: what they were interested in, how long, skills.

 

I’d prioritize the last solution of the volunteer page with cards offering and requesting help. This is the best solution because it answers to the user needs of time and availability preferences as well as selection of the volunteer topic they care about.

 

Success metrics

• Mission metrics:
  • Attendance at events: conversion from acceptance of volunteer opportunity to actual attendance”
  • Retention: # of times a person attends an event
  • Quality: satisfaction with the events
• Product health metrics:
  • Number of new event cards created
  • Number of new event cards accepted
  • Retention: how many cards were accepted by one user in the last month
  • Activity funnel: viewing, engaging, accepting, attending

Clarifications

Am I right assuming this app is for connecting people wanting to volunteer to organisations searching for volunteers? Yes. 

 

Good. Now that that’s clear, I’m going to star talking a bit about the vision and goals for this product. Then, I’m going to talk about our users and some of their pain points which will help me brainstorm some possible solutions. Sounds good? Yes. 

Goals

The goal of this product is to connect volunteers with good causes. This is absolutely aligned to Facebook’s mission of bringin the world closer together by giving people tools to build community. This is precisely what this app is striving for, this is the tool we need to create those communities and it’s for a good cause.

 

As a business goal, I’d say we want to work towards engagement. We want users to use this product a lot to aim towards the app and wider company goals.

Users

Let’s now think a bit about the different users we might have for this app. Two obvious ones come to mind:

• Volunteers – people looking to volunteer somewhere
• Organisations – people searching for volunteers

Within those 2 groups I can think of ways in which we can segment them:

• Volunteers
  • By expercience
    • First time volunteers – have never volunteered before and have very little knowledge of how volunteering works and what’s out there
    • Occasional volunteers – have had some volunteering experience in the past and want to do it again
    • Active volunteers – are experts in volunteering and have done it several times before and are actively doing it now
  • By demographic (age)
    • Children
    • Adults
    • Elderly people
• Organisations
  • By size
    • Small orgs – individuals or very small organisations
    • Medium orgs – medium sized organisations
    • Large orgs – very established eg. Greenpeace
  • By imact area
    • Local orgs
    • International orgs

Having discussed a bit the different users, I’m going to focus on designing for the volunteers because without volunteers we can’t build the communities we want to. Is that okay with you? Yes. 

 

Also, I’m going to focus more on first time and occasional volunteers because those are the segments which seem to need more help in finding the right volunteering option for them. Does that sound good? Yes. 

Use cases and pain points

Let’s think about some use cases for volunteers:

1. A volunteer what’s to see which organisations are looking for volunteers
2. They want to be able to see all the relevant information about the organisation
3. They want to be able to register their interest and maybe sign up for an informative meeting
4. They want to start volunteering in an organisation of their choosing

For this product I’m going to focus on the first 3 use cases which will enable the 4th.

 

Let’s now think about some pain points volunteers can experience:

1. A volunteer what’s to see which organisations are looking for volunteers
   1. Not sure which cause they want to volunteer at
   2. Not sure what’s in their area or within a reasonable distance
2. They want to be able to see all the relevant information about the organisation
   1. Not sure about the level of commitment required by organisation and if it’s compatible with my availability
   2. Not sure about what type of work is required and if they have the right skillset for the work
   3. Not sure about the size of organisation, what’s the cause and how they are helping
3. They want to be able to register their interest and maybe sign up for an informative meeting
   1. How can they get closer to organisation to see if it’s a match with interests
   2. Providing all necessary details to org.

Possible solutions

1. Search engine for volunteer opportunities
   1. Quiz to understand user’s interests, availability, available locations, etc. that will retrieve best results
   2. List of “top rated”, “hot right now”, “new opportunities”, etc. to explore
2. Organisation “enhanced” page
   1. Topline info showing cause, size of org, areas of opperations
   2. Volunteers experiences section
      1. Showing rating, photos, videos and comments
   3. Calendar with activities for users to book onto

I will prioritise these solutions based on a simple prioritisation framework that will consider value added to user and simplicity of implementation being 1 low and 3 high.

 

	Value	Simplicity	Total
1.1 Quiz	3	3	6
1.2 “top rated”, etc. list	2	3	5
2.1 Page with topline info	3	4	6
2.2 Volunteers experiences	2	2	4
2.3 Calendar view to book	1	3	4

After prioritising these I’d recommend we build a page showing organisations to users that best match their interests. Then we will also build a simple organisation page with the necessary information for the volunteer to make their decision.

Trade offs

• By focusing on first time and occasional volunteers I am consciously not designing for active volunteers to help them enhance their volunteering experience.
• The design is not especifically made for volunteers of all ages. Eg. children might need more security when browsing and deciding on the organisation.