How It Started
During my Junior year of high school, I noticed that many of my peers, including myself, struggled with finding local opportunities to earn community service hours and volunteer. This was a big issue, as students were required to earn a certain number of hours to graduate, and the more opportunities students participated in, the more they'd have to reference in college applications. To solve this problem, I founded the Community Contribution Program, or CCP for short. I built and managed a Google Classroom page on which I sought out local volunteering opportunities and listed details for students to learn about what was available to them and how they could earn hours. As time went on I collaborated with local organizations like Save The Bay and Partnership for Providence Parks (P3), organizing a beach cleanup allowing 15+ students to earns 3 service hours while removing 118 pounds of trash from the Blackstone Park waterline in Providence Rhode Island. I later pitched the organization to the board of Rhode Island high schools, in which 8 schools across the state expressed interest in adopting the platform into their curriculum, and I was later personally recognized by the National Honors Society with a personal innovation commendation for CCP.
Problem
Solution
My Role
Impact
Tandem is currently still in development, and once completed, I plan to initiate beta testing with local high schools, launch the full subscription model, and then begin pitching to school districts. Here's what I have so far:
• Full PRD and end-to-end UI/UX mockup completed for both account types (supervisor & student)
• Working prototype in active development
• Competitive pricing model built from direct market comps
• TAM/SAM sizing completed for U.S. high school market
• Launch metrics, school partnerships, and user data to be added post-ship
The user journey begins with the onboarding/sign-in page, where they can create either a student or a supervisor profile or sign in to an existing account. When creating a student account, students need to input their full name, email, create a password, school name, grade, and agree to the terms of service and privacy policy. When creating a supervisor-type account, supervisors need to input their full name, email, password, organization name, and organizations EIN for confirmation, as well as agree with the terms of service, privacy policy, and supervisor code of conduct. Supervisor accounts have not yet been developed and will not be deployed during the first launch of Tandem v1.
Users can then begin searching for local opportunities using either the Map View tab or the Discover tab. In the Map View tab, users can view local service opportunities offered near their location. Users can tap on any opportunity to read details or register. When registering for an event, it's automatically added to their schedule tab, and the user is taken outside of the app to the organization's official site where they can officially register for the event. The map view is powered by the Mapbox API and by accessing users' location data.
In the Discover Tab, users can find new volunteer opportunities and organizations offering opportunities near them. Tandem considers users' interests when recommending opportunities, allowing each recommendation to be personalized and tailored to what each user is most likely to be interested in. Users can switch between the Events, For You, and Orgs tabs to read about and add organizations to their favorites or read about and register for opportunities.
In the Schedule tab, users can review all of the events that they've registered for in a live calendar format. Here, users can see how many events they have upcoming (within the next 30 days), how many hours they are currently registered to complete, and how many events they're registered for in total. They can also see the details of each event they're registered for, view an event in the map tab, or even unregister for an event.
Lastly, in the Service Log tab, users can request service hours approval from the supervisor of any given event. Once the student inputs the organization's name, event title, date of the event, hours completed, event description, and supervisor's name and email, Tandem sends the request directly to the supervisor's inbox, where they can electronically sign for approval. Users can see their requests that are verified, pending approval, or rejected, and once approved, the hours will be added directly to the students Service Log, where they can download their entire log for a semester into an organized PDF and share with their guidance counselor, eliminating the paper trail of separated supervisor approvals which they normally have to organize themselves.
Users can also review their profile in the Profile tab, where they can view their profile metrics: total completed hours verified, total completed events verified, and any requests awaiting approval. Users can also sign out in this tab.