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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 a an academic club, greek organizationsorganization, etc.)

Consistent Volunteers

• Bullet 1
• Bullet 2

Volunteer Organizations

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

Volunteer Organizations

• Forced to flyer or send out e-mails through mass listing in order to promote events
• Bullet 1
• Bullet 2

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User Interviews

Once per semester volunteer

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Goals

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Targeted Content Delivery

Both the short-term and long-term user expressed concern for the lack of ability difficulty to find things they were interested in. The single- most important thing factor to both of the aforementioned user classes in deciding upon a service opportunity was that the type of activity aligning with their pursuitsinterests. 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 hiscommitment 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.

Ability to register events, event details, and event categories

The 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.