Besa Volunteer Platform

Elevating a volunteer platform through intentional design

Technologies: Figma, Heroku, React, Ruby on Rails

Services: Content Strategy, Design, Development, Project Management, UX/UI

The Challenge: Creating Room to Grow

Besa is an organization that connects community members with meaningful volunteer experiences in Columbus and throughout Ohio. They work with nonprofit and for-profit organizations to activate volunteers to support local nonprofits and community events.

Besa is a longstanding client of Buckeye Innovation. We worked on several projects with them to improve the functionality of their volunteer platform. Over time, it became clear that their previous platform could not meet their goals for growth. They wanted a better way to recommend volunteer experiences to people. An overhaul of the entire volunteer platform was the best option to best serve their clients and develop the infrastructure for future expansions.

The Process: Strategic Organization and Collaboration

First, we conducted focus groups to pinpoint the team’s pain points, which included functionality concerns. The volunteer experience cards were listed with the most recent opportunities at the top, with no option to customize the information presented or filter by type of experience.

We met with the Besa Team weekly and conducted individual collaboration sessions to keep our visions aligned. This was especially important due to the sheer number of pages in this redesign; we needed to think strategically about how to arrange information to create the best user experience for volunteers and staff members alike. Ultimately, we decided to organize the home pages first. From there, we split experiences and shifts for the most intuitive user interface.

We prototyped the new user experience by connecting static mockups of each page in Figma before we moved on to web development. This allowed our developers to move very quickly once they received the files!

The Impact: A User-Friendly Platform that Supports Organizations and Volunteers

The new Besa Volunteer Platform has the needs of its users in mind. The platform now has a filterable Experiences page to find specific experiences or shifts. Users can choose to view opportunities as either a calendar or a list to see each experience or shift. Users can even toggle between multiple volunteer communities in which they are active. The platform can also recommend new volunteer experiences based on other similar opportunities a user has volunteered with in the past.

We also completed an overhaul of reporting for staff and partner organizations. Now, businesses and nonprofits can more easily monitor their metrics and volunteer experiences on an admin dashboard.

The overall result is a more curated experience for potential and recurring volunteers in their communities. It is easier than ever for community members to find volunteer opportunities that are relevant to them. The volunteer platform puts dedicated people in touch with the causes they care about most.

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