Civic Champs

Currently, there is a lot of friction in the volunteer process, from matching volunteers to opportunities, to onboarding, to tracking and reporting, to on-going engagement.  Each part of the process is often manual and, consequently, done poorly or not at all.  This leads to a poor experience for volunteers which reduces volunteerism and reallocates nonprofits time from high impact work to clerical tasks.

We will address these issues through the introduction of Civic Champs, a mobile-first platform that automates the volunteer management process. This includes automated volunteer hour tracking using geofencing, actionable insights, and automated volunteer engagement. 

The result: there are 436,000 nonprofit organizations in the US that rely on volunteers. Based on our interviews, the average time spent by these organization on clerical aspects of volunteer management is 750 hours/year. Reducing the time spent by 90% represents 294 million hours/year that can be reallocated to higher impact activities.

Our initial focus is solving the pain point nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have with volunteer hour tracking. A study reported that over 40% of NPOs rarely or never use electronic member or client reports and that figure is even larger when it comes to volunteer management as organizations tend to invest first in donor management software. Tracking hours is important because hours are required for grant applications, court-appointed community service, and help tell the story of NPOs to funders. It is the primary impact metric many NPOs use today.  Unfortunately, most volunteer organizations still rely on paper logs. This means organizations must either manually transcribe the information into a database, which takes a significant amount of time, or they lose the information.  In addition, manual data entry is fraught with input errors and data loss (e.g., you lose a sign-in sheet).

The primary population whose lives we aim to meaningfully improve are the recipients of nonprofit services.  By increasing the bandwidth of nonprofit organizations (NPOs), they can more effectively serve their recipient populations.  In addition, we believe strongly that volunteering provides an avenue to bring communities together and bolster empathy and understanding of nonprofit recipient populations.  

We also work directly to meaningfully improve the experience of both volunteers and nonprofit staff members.  By automating the volunteer management process, we can give NPO staff members back their time so they can focus on higher impact activities. We believe this in turn decreases staff turnover by eliminating the drudgery associated with the clerical aspects to volunteer management. 

For volunteers, we help to improve their experience by making it easier to connect with organizations they would enjoy; a stronger sense of connection with the NPOs through recognition via our automated engagement platform; and an easy way to track all of their volunteer activities.  

Civic Champs is a mobile-first platform that allows nonprofits to better engage and manage their volunteers.  Nonprofit organizations sign-up with Civic Champs and ask their volunteers to download the Civic Champs app prior to their volunteer event to help track their volunteer activities.  A volunteer will then be prompted by the app to check-in and check-out of volunteer events with a single tap. This is done through geofencing technology that allows the app to know when a volunteer has arrived or left a volunteer site and sends a push notification to the volunteer. Administrators for an organization can also create volunteer events by simply dropping a pin from anywhere they are, creating a geofence for the organization, to allow the organization to capture hours from off-site events. For volunteers who do not have a smartphone, a kiosk mode will be available to administrators to sign-in volunteers on-site.  

This data forms the backbone for our volunteer insights CRM that not only tracks volunteers’ hours by activity but also provides insights such as when volunteers are most engaged, percentage of volunteers who return after an initial visit, etc. The platform will also create set-and-forget auto outreach campaigns for organizations to reach their volunteers based on specific event triggers (e.g., new volunteer, birthday, 100-hour milestone, etc.). This will free up time and resources for non-profits and help them cultivate stronger relationships with their volunteers, leading to more volunteer hours. 

We are also extremely excited about future opportunities to add functionality to the platform such as scheduling and micro-donations. Adding scheduling will remove some of the barriers to volunteering for volunteers, by providing individuals volunteer opportunities and the ability to sign-up for those opportunities in-app. It will also decrease the amount of time that organizations spend on manual scheduling volunteers that call in or email. Micro-donations also provide an exciting opportunity by allowing a platform for organizations to convert their biggest advocates into monetary donors by providing volunteers an outlet to donate to the organization that is as easy as buying a new outfit for your avatar in a mobile game. 

We believe that Civic Champs represents the opportunity to have a significant positive social impact by reducing the barriers for volunteers, increasing bandwidth and impact for organization, and improving the services provided to individuals that rely on these organizations.  

Civic Champs is innovative as we are a mobile first platform that utilizes geo-location and geo-fence technology and automates the volunteer management process. This is particularly important for non-profit organizations as it affords them the opportunity to forgo investing in infrastructure and allows them to leverage the technology that is already in volunteers hands every day, their phone. 

In addition, Civic Champs is unique in that we are a cross organizational platform. This means that volunteers have a single application that can track their volunteer efforts and help them keep in touch with the organizations that support the causes that they care about. This also presents the opportunity to assist volunteers with discovering volunteer opportunities that are important to them, and because we use geo-location and incorporate scheduling, we can also provide volunteers opportunities that fit their needs in terms of proximity and availability. This new application of existing technology will allow Civic Champs to provide an innovative two-sided platform that benefits both volunteers and nonprofit organizations. 

The technology stack that we are utilizing to develop and deploy our application is as follows:

Front-end: React-Native for cross-platform mobile support, Redux for caching, Expo for mobile integration, and AWS amplify for AWS service integrations

Middle: Node.js deployed in AWS Lambda / EC2, serverless framework for cloud deploy and various other AWS services – S3 for storage and hosting, Cognito for authentication

Backend/database: PostgreSQL with PostGis extension in Amazon RDS

This allows our application to utilize geo-location and geo-fences to automate the check-in/out process based on when a volunteer enters a geo-fence for a volunteer event. It also gives us the ability to automate engagement for nonprofits and communicate with the volunteers on the platform. 

The two main problems that we are solving are to increase the amount of time that nonprofits have to focus on their cause while increasing the accuracy of hour tracking and to increase volunteerism by increasing engagement and removing barriers. We believe that we can address the first problem through decreasing the time that nonprofits have to devote to volunteer management. Volunteer coordinators will no longer have to take sign-in sheets and waivers, decipher handwriting, and transcribe them into a digital format that they can use for reporting purposes. Instead volunteers will check-in/out though the Civic Champs app which feeds back to a simple reporting dashboard so the organization can get the impact metrics they need with a single glance. Nonprofits will also no longer have to deal with the arduous process of sending reminder or engagement emails as we plan to automate that process for them. Both of these aspects mean that the nonprofits will have more time for their cause. 

For volunteers, the main metrics that determine their level of volunteerism are working for a cause they care about, proximity, and availability. We hope to execute on all three phases by offering a cross-organizational platform that can allow for discovery and curated volunteer experiences based on their interests, knowing where the volunteer is and what volunteer opportunities are near them, and by knowing when those events are so that volunteers can select events that fit their availability. These three facets will allow us to increase overall volunteerism.

We currently have 16 pilot clients, with a total volunteer count of roughly 8,000. In a year we plan to have 150 nonprofits, and assuming they have similar characteristics as our pilot clients, that will represent 75,000 volunteers. In five years we plan to have 25,000 non-profits with 12,500,000 volunteers.  These volunteers and NPOs in turn serve an estimated population size of 150,000 currently; 1.5 million in one year, and 250 million in 5 years.  

Our overarching goal is to create the platform for volunteering. It will be where nonprofits come to track, report, schedule, engage with, and recruit volunteers. It will be where volunteers will come to check-in, discovery opportunities, communicate with organizations, share their accomplishments, sign-up for events, and track their volunteering efforts. 

Over the next year our goal is to prove out our impact model by demonstrating that having a volunteering platform with scale in one geographical location can not only be accomplished, but that it provides mutual benefits for both nonprofits and the volunteers that serve them, which in turn provides improved services to the individuals that rely on these nonprofits. 

In five years, our goal is to replicate the impact model in our initial test market, Bloomington, IN, in over 100 cities in the United States with the potential for international expansion. With this type of reach and the ability to make volunteering a more frictionless experience, our goal is to increase overall volunteering on a national scale. 

The biggest barriers to accomplishing our goals over the next year are getting exposure to and trial by nonprofits and creating a seamless way to track and engage volunteers that don’t have a smart phone or technology adverse. While we have gained a significant amount of traction in a short amount of time, we expect that there will be difficulty in reaching some nonprofits and there may be some apprehension around changing the way “things have always been done”. Our ability to change the mindset and convince nonprofits that benefits of using the platform far outweighs any perceived risk will greatly impact our success in overcoming this barrier. 

There is also the barrier that some volunteers don’t have a smartphone or may be diametrically opposed to any new technology. Unlike some technologies that can simply claim that those individuals aren’t part of their target market, we can’t ignore this cohort as every volunteer is important to our two-sided platform. 

After demonstrating the ability to overcome these short-term barriers, one of the largest long-term barriers we will face is securing the funding necessary to scale our platform to more cities. With more nonprofits and more volunteers on the platform, we will need more support staff to satisfy current users and to engage new users. Needless to say, that comes with significant cost and in order to be successful in the long term we will need to secure financing to support that growth. 

To overcome the possibility that some nonprofits may be reluctant to incorporate new technology, we think that it will be important to demonstrate the benefits that the platform can provide. We are initially doing this by offering consultative meetings with nonprofits, listening to the issues they currently face and showing how the Civic Champs platform can help eliminate those issues for them. Approaching nonprofits in a consultative fashion has helped create buy-in and make these organizations more willing to adopt as they feel they are part of the solution. 

The second short term barrier that we are working to overcome is the fact that not all volunteers will have smart phone or may be technologically adverse. We have addressed this by providing three different ways to use Civic Champs.  Apart from our mobile application, we also have an administrative feature for staff members to manage volunteers.  In addition, we have a web-based kiosk that NPOs an load onto any web-enabled device.  This ensures all volunteers can use our platform.

Finally, to address the longer-term financial barriers to growth, we have begun conversations with VCs and seed funding companies to provide funding, as well as tapping some of our current investors as follow-on investors. We are also testing alternative approaches to growth such as partnering with community foundations to provide the platform for member organizations. 

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We currently have four full-time employees, two full-time contractors, and one part-time contractor. 

We believe that our team is uniquely suited to build this company as we have individuals with significant experience in each of the four vital facets to our company. Driving our strategy and overall company direction, Geng Wang, our CEO, is a proven serial entrepreneur with multiple successful exits - RentJungle.com acquired by The Rainmaker Group in 2014 and Community Elf acquired by Topanga Partners in 2016. Geng is also a former McKinsey Engagement Manager with an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Michael Jeffery, our CTO, leads our engineering team. Mike first started coding at 10-years-old.  He has also spent the last 10 years working in enterprise software development.  Mike enjoys hackathons, game jams, and start-up weekends and has won three events in the past year.  

Ryan Underdahl, our COO, has 8 years of customer service and sales experience. Prior to Civic Champs, Ryan worked as both a Manager and District Manager in the fine jewelry industry where he managed, trained, and developed sales teams ranging in size from 4 to 75 sales professionals. Ryan also holds an MBA for Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

Chris Borland, our Head of Product, is also a serial entrepreneur.  He previously co-founded Information in Place, a game development and e-learning company best known for being selected by NASA to develop an MMO called “Astronaut: Moon Mars and Beyond.  Chris was also the founder of FeetHere, a mobile ad platform that pays app developers for driving foot track to physical locations.  

We are currently partnered with the United Way of Monroe County to both support their volunteer initiatives and their partner agencies.

Our application is absolutely free to all volunteers. We plan to sustain our business through a SaaS model, charging our nonprofit partners a monthly fee to use the platform and gain access to the administrative functions. We plan to use a tiered pricing model to ensure that we have an affordable service for any organization regardless of their size. We will also offer add-on services, such as micro-donations, that nonprofits can opt into to provide them with additional tools in order to serve their volunteers and the individuals that rely on the services they provide. Long-term we are also looking to explore partnerships with corporations to support their volunteering initiatives.  This would provide us with another revenue source.  

Until we reach the scale that our SaaS model is self-sustaining, we plan to fund our work through a combination of grants and investment capital. 

There are two significant benefits that we believe we can benefit from by being a Solver. The first being access to grant funding as well as other prizes and access to follow-on investors to financially help scale Civic Champs. The second, and more impactful benefit, is the exposure that Solve can provide. We believe that by being a Solver, it will provide us access and exposure to nonprofits that can help overcome the barrier of a lack of exposure and will give a certain amount of credence to the benefits that we can provide to these nonprofits.

We are also excited about the potential to partner with others within the solve community. By having the opportunity to interact with like minded individuals who are passionate about having a positive and lasting impact, there is the potential for unlimited creative problem solving and finding unique was to help each other and the world. 

Finally, as the Solve community has an international presence, we believe that we could learn a lot about the dynamics of nonprofits and volunteering in other countries, offering us the ability to scale our solution internationally most effectively. This could be through having density in international communities, like we plan to do in the US, or simply by providing our platform to individuals who volunteer and contribute to improving the quality of life in impoverished, 3rd world countries. 

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There are a number of interesting partnerships that we would like to pursue. The first is with organizations like Blackbaud and Bloomerang who’s primary focus is donor management. We believe a partnership with this type of company will allow non-profits the ability to track their constituents from volunteer efforts to becoming donors. This will also provide a benefit for donor management companies as those that volunteer for an organization are far more likely to become volunteers, and by accepting micro-donations, we can supply them with a lead list for their fundraising efforts. 

The second group of potentially interesting partners are companies that are predicated on AI for employment matching, such as Ideal and Apli. We believe we can benefit from a partnership with these companies as we want to offer curated volunteer opportunities to volunteers on our platform, and the goal is to provide them opportunities that truly resonate with them, not just bury them with options. By partnering with an AI employment matching company, we can make our volunteer matching system smarted with also potentially providing opportunities to the partner company to provide non-profits with employees that are suited to their organization. 

Finally, we are interested in the possibility of partnering with certifying organizations such as Good Hire or Backgroundreport.com. As we will be providing certification tracking, it would be beneficial to have a partnership with an organization that does background checks. 

One of the fundamental facets to our two-sided platform is to be able to create a superior user experience for both volunteers and nonprofits. Part of that experience requires the integration of artificial intelligence into smart scheduling, engagement with volunteers, offering curated volunteer experiences, and micro-donations. 

For smart scheduling, AI is required in order to determine when volunteers are most available, what shifts have the highest probability of being filled, and determining how many individuals to schedule. This will be predicated on the number of volunteers that have already signed up and the reliability of the volunteers that have already signed up. 

For offering curated volunteer experiences, we will need to use AI and machine learning to make recommendations based on the users stated preferences and using the experiences of similar users to provide recommendations that have a high probability being engaging for them. 

For volunteer engagement, we'll use AI to provide two-way communication with volunteers to ensure that volunteers can interact with organizations outreach attempts without requiring additional capacity from the nonprofit. This will allow volunteers to feel more engage, nonprofits to retain volunteers, and prevent some of the miscommunication that can happen in the volunteer process. 

Finally, for micro-donations, we will incorporate artificial intelligent to determine the cadence and timing of donation requests. Not only can we optimize the additional revenue for nonprofits through AI, but we can also reduce the number of unsuccessful solicitations to volunteers as they may be perceived as intrusive and could alienate volunteers.

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Civic Champs reimagines how the volunteering process should be, and we are committed to providing a more frictionless volunteering experience. One barrier we currently face in accomplishing that task is the speed with which we bring our feature set to both nonprofits and the volunteers serving them. Through our interviews with nonprofit organizations, we are confident that our product roadmap for the next six months contains necessary functionality for these organizations. 

If we were to receive the Morgridge Family Foundation Community-Driven Innovation Prize, it would allow us to expand our engineering capacity which would accelerate our product roadmap by three months. This is important as it would provide us the time to pilot our minimum necessary feature set with nonprofits by the end of October and would allow full scale implementation before the holiday season, when organizations experience peaks in volunteering. In addition, it will allow volunteers and nonprofits in our initial market to get acclimated and comfortable with the platform before Martin Luther King Jr. day, which is a national day of giving and the largest volunteering day of the year. By accelerating adoption in our initial market, it will increase our ability to offer Civic Champs in additional markets and make volunteering a more frictionless experience for more people.

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