Jeffrey Chan, Ryan Lacey, Amruth VentkatramanVenkatraman

User Classes

Event Driven Volunteers

• College age
• Volunteer once or only a handful of times per semester
• May have external motivations for volunteering (requirement of an academic club, greek organization, etc.)

Consistent Volunteers

• College age
• Interested in long term service opportunities
• May have specific vested interest in target organization

Volunteer Organizations

• Range from large, national organizations (eg. Habitat for Humanity) to smaller, community efforts (eg. locla church)
• Forced to flyer or send out e-mails through mass listing in order to promote events

User Interviews

Once per semester volunteer

This user was a member of a fraternity that requires every member to do some form of community service each semester. The user is not particularly enthusiastic about doing community service – that is, he will not go out of his way to get involved. His requirements for what he is willing to do are rather specific. He wants to do something one-off that he will enjoy and does not require a large time commitment. Upon being asked what the biggest challenge was to finding something he would do, he remarked that “It’s really hard to find something I’m interested in doing for a short period of time. If I could find a place to teach computer science I’d do it, even if I had to drive an extra 15 minutes.” He also indicated that getting involved in events with friends would make the experience much more enjoyable. The user voiced frustration with current systems for finding interesting opportunities after dealing with MIT’s PSC service digests.

Weekly hospital and church volunteer

Larry is an aspiring pre-med student at an undergraduate university. As a pre-med student, he has an extremely busy schedule with a full courseload of classes as well as labwork. Larry hopes to find weekly health-related community-service opportunities that will fit into his busy schedule. He often has to read through hundreds of emails to find a health-related community service opportunity for the semester and must repeat his search every new semester due to schedule changes. The biggest problem is that older postings are difficult to recover since they are buried under thousands of more recent listings.*
*Unfortunately, many of the health-related opportunities fail to specify the exact job that he would be doing with the hospital, which is drastically affects the enjoyability of Larry’s community service experience.

Soup kitchen coordinator

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Goals

Targeted Content Delivery

Both the short-term and long-term user expressed concern for the difficulty to find things they were interested in. The most important factor to both of the aforementioned user classes in deciding upon a service opportunity was that the type of activity aligning with their interests. For our short-term user who did not care for doing community service, this was paramount for him to be even slightly excited about helping others. For the long-term user, given the nature of his commitment to the activity, being passionate for the work was a priority as well. Users should be able to identify their interests with the intent that the opportunities they are presented with are ones that they find exciting and worthwhile.

Easy to view database of opportunities

The long-term user remarked that a system in place like that used for the externship program at MIT would be useful to get more information on community service. In the particular example he gave of volunteering at a hospital, since each hospital puts its volunteers in different capacities with different time commitments, it becomes hard to keep track of the opportunities that work well with one’s requirements. This example generalizes to any number of community service events in different fields, where the interested party is looking for a subset of details about the event often not listed elsewhere.

Standardized Event Listings

Parents Interested In Giving

• Have children that have either grown up or simply grown out of using certain toys
• Do not want the clutter of unused toys in home, but also do not want to create waste by throwing old toys out

Families Interested In Exchange

• Children may be interested in the toys they have, but want others
• Parents may instill values in children to prevent spoiling (ie a little sacrifice on the child's behalf is required for the child to get something they want)

Familites / Organizations Interested In Receiving

• Many low income families may not be able to afford toys they children want
• Day cares and other organizations dealing with children
• Do not have the resources to give 

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User Interviews

Middle aged father of college student

This user was a father in his mid fifties whose kids moved out years ago. Until recently, he had held onto all of his kids’ toys from when they were in kindergarten. He mentioned that they held on to the toys for sentimental reasons, but that they were cluttering and taking up a lot of space in the upstairs floor of his house. About a month ago,  after talking to his kids, he decided to give away the toys so that others could enjoy the toys that his kids had. The only option he found for giving away his toys was to give it to a maid that cleaned the house every three weeks. He mentioned that since he was giving away a bulk of things and was a working professional, he did not have time to go through and catalog everything he wanted to give away. Instead he trash bagged a bunch of the toys and gave them to the maid, feeling that since she was interested in free things she would be willing to go through it.

Lesson Learned:

• Disappointed with the lack of a system for recycling toys among people in an area
• Felt that as someone giving away free things, the recipient should be willing to go through the contents and find what they were interested in
• Would be willing to list a couple items on a marketplace if it existed if he was giving away a couple things
• Didn’t want to have people coming to his house to collect the toys (didn’t feel comfortable with strangers coming to his house)

Mother of six

This user has six children, some of which are now well into adulthood. Her children acquire most toys as gifts from relatives or as hand-me-downs from her friends. She didn’t go out of her way to acquire many toys herself because the toys took up a lot of space in her home and she didn’t want her children to be spoiled. If possible, she would keep toys outside in an attempt to conserve space in her home. The user found it unfortunate that many donation centers, like Goodwill, would not take in some used toys because of liability issues (eg. stuffed animals being a risk for bed bugs).

Lessons Learned:

• Would like an alternative for exchanging items that donations centers would not take
• Active in peer-to-peer toy exchanges and enthusiastic about broader opportunities
• Preferred receiving hand-me-downs and passing on used toys over buying and selling in yard sales and similar venues

Daycare director

The user does not have the budget to provide enough toys for his children’s enjoyment. He would like a cost-friendly manner in which to acquire toys for his kids. Unfortunately, saving up for each toy for the kids is not a worthwhile investment since kids quickly outgrow or mistreat toys. His biggest problems is finding age-appropriate toys which are in good enough condition in an inexpensive fashion. He mentioned that he had to ensure that it was important to ensure that toys from organizations such as the Salvation Army or Goodwill were clean enough for the kids to play with.

Lessons Learned:

• Felt that it was important for cleanliness/quality of toy to be upheld
• Would like to know which toys correspond to which age kids
• Would like to know when toys of this type are available at places like Goodwill

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Goals

Bulk Donations

The giving parent expressed an interest in being able to give lots of toys away at once, without having to sort through them himself. As he was the one giving away stuff for free, he felt the onus for cataloging was not on him. On the other hand, in the interest of the receiving parent, he or she may only wish to accept specific toys rather than the entire set. Ideally, this process would minimize the donation of gifts to receiving parents that would not use or throw away some of the toys.

Anonymity in Exchanges

Interviewees did not necessarily feel comfortable with people they did not know coming to their houses for numerous reasons, including security. They were more comfortable with a shipping system where they got reimbursed for shipping costs or having a way to orchestrate a meetup in a place midway between the two parties involved.  

Quality of Goods

A concern arose over ensuring that they toy exchange did not become a means for people to offload junk onto others. While it is understandable that not all toys exchanged would be of "like new" condition, a certain level of cleanliness, aesthetics in appearance, and retained functionality would be necessary for a product to be exchangeable. The donation of poorly maintained items could result in bed bugs or the transmission of diseases, which may make the receiving parent hesitant to partake in a toy donation programThe service should offer a way for organizations to register events for interested volunteers to view. Considerations for differentiating events include: the category of the event (eg. environmental, homeless, food, education, etc.), time (what period of the day), repeatability (one time event or recurring), and the type of activity. Olga the Organizer raised the issue that often times volunteers are unaware of the types of commitments they are making, which sours their attitude towards the event. Creating well defined events should help the organizations target the volunteers they are interested in and avoid having these problems arise.