Richmond ARC Site
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We built the for a local charity - Richmond ARC in the first-ever back in July 2017. This hackathon is all about giving back to the community. This is a special kind of hackathon. We don't go out and pitch our own ideas. Instead, hackathon organizers invited a couple of local charities and asked them to present their issues and problems to participants. We then picked up the problems that we care about the most and would love to contribute to and kicked off the working session with that charity.
After talked to different charities and understand all the issues they were facing, I picked up the Richmond ARC site's issue to work on. I chose it for a couple of reasons 1. I love the mission - helping people with disabilities to get more job opportunities 2. I love the team - a couple of people who have already shown strong interest in this project are beautiful human beings who not only have technical and business analytical skills to take on the project but also a strong sense of community and deep compassion for other humans.
After talked to the head of Richmond ARC, we got to know that the Richmond ARC website has a couple of serious issues. All those issues seriously hurt Richmond ARC’s ability to fulfill its mission.
The site is not very organized, it’s hard to navigate to find donation pages and find job listings.
It doesn’t have a payment system to process donations. It’s a manual process for donations.
The site is not responsive, not mobile-friendly, mobile bounce rate is very high.
The site doesn’t have event scheduling functionality to help users to book event in ARC Park online. As a result, it’s a very costly and inconvenient experience for both sides. Because Richmond ARC has to hire and pay employees to spend a large amount of time on the phone with users to book events and do a lot of manual work behind the scene.
Here comes the dilemma. If those problems were for a well-funded organization, it wouldn’t take them very long to fix all of them. However, Richmond ARC has a limited budget and two employees for their IT department. They don’t have enough resources to redesign or rebuild Richmond ARC official website. We talked within the team and decided to work on a couple of key features that could solve all the issues within time and their budget. By budget, I don’t mean we charge their money for our labor cost. I am talking about servers, databases, and other web services. We were doing everything for them for free.
After discussion, here are the four major features we would love to deliver on the brand new ARC site we were going to build.
Mobile responsive.
Easy Donation process through the website including an online payment system.
Event scheduling system.
Improve design for a list of job opportunities page and donation campaign page.
In order to deliver it on a weekend, we had to be really creative and used whatever tools that we can find instead of building everything from scratch. I learned this from the team. We divided tasks and everyone tackled one specific feature that we would like to build.
After trials and errors, we picked up Shopify as the platform to host websites for 14 dollars per month. We used Network For Good as our donation payment backend. CheckFront was chosen for our event scheduling system backend. The good news is that most of them have discounts for 503 c non-profit organization. The cost we estimated at the time was around 70 dollars per month to maintain the site. The tools we chose are very intuitive and easy to use. Everyone can just drag and drop to publish their new content. They don’t need to hire engineers to maintain it. We were very proud that Richmond ARC finally chose our product as their official site among all other competitors. It’s their official site now. You can check it out . We were in the local news as well. You can read the article .
With all my heart, I would love to say thanks to all noahsark’s team members. James, Nichole, Gaurav, Arijit, Yasmine (my best friend), and Nichola’s daughter!! You are all truly beautiful and caring human beings who show tremendous compassion and love to other people. It’s my pleasure to work with you all! Go team !
If you want to learn more about it, let's catch up! Send me a message or shoot me an email at
