Volunteer Mentorship Program

Overview

Role

This was a semester-long academic project in which we had to find and work with a participant group, observing the organization and their situations of interaction. The project required us to employ various methods of research, and be able to synthesize the information into a design proposal that benefits the client.

Researcher, Interaction Designer

Team

Alvin Leung, Kai Lee Macbain

Tools

Figma, Adobe Illustrator

Ethnography Research

Over the course of the semester and this project, my team and I had partnered with Free Geek Vancouver, a non-profit organization that aims to reduce the environmental impact of electronic waste. Our first task was to conduct ethnographic research with our participatory group where we spent a day at their building, recording our observations of the staff members and the volunteers. Prior to the day, another teammate and I had worked together to think of and prepare questions for interviews. On the day, I had conducted interviews with various staff members and volunteers.

Syntheses

After data was gathered from the ethnographic research, I created an affinity diagram to help organize and draw connections between the vast amount of data. Doing so gave me better insight into various pain points, the volunteer recruiting process, and reasons why returning volunteers do so.

Understanding Our Users

In order to further our understanding of our clients and their experiences, we created several journey maps and personas of various stakeholders. I primarily focused on synthesizing the data to create the different personas and journey maps.

Initial Concepts

With a better understanding of our clients and their frustrations, my team and I began brainstorming possible areas of opportunity to design a solution for. We came to understand the importance of volunteers to our clients as they made up the majority of their work force, yet Free Geek were struggling to maintain the interests of the majority of their volunteers. As such, we decided to focus on ways to help with volunteer retention. The three of us narrowed down all the possible design interventions and saw the greatest opportunities around building up volunteer’s skill sets, easing the onboarding process, and allowing for more convenient scheduling. After further brainstorming on design solutions for each of the three opportunities, we had our initial three concepts:

Reframing the Design Problem

We presented our initial ideas to our clients where they were well received. The three concepts were also given positive feedback from the class, but there were comments about how they revolved around similar concepts. Before finalizing our design intervention, we revisited all the information we had collected. After looking back at the data synthesized, we had identified four key takeaways:

Volunteer retention problem
Difficulty managing volunteers as a resource
Underutilized volunteer workforce
Financial limitations

And with this understanding we reframed our design problem to:

Create a sense of growth within the established Free Geek community to improve volunteer retention.

Looking back at data collected from interviews with volunteers, we found a commonality that returning volunteers shared interests in personal growth and skills, as well, the current system yielded minimal interaction between volunteers. Additionally, due to being understaffed, staff members had a great amount of work that they had trouble finding time for. As such, we decided to integrate the first two concepts together to design a system that allowed for growth while establishing relations between volunteers while simultaneously freeing up staff time.

Value Proposition

With the lack of staff members at Free Geek Vancouver and the reliance on volunteers as a resource, the volunteer mentorship program builds a self-sustaining community within the organization. Additionally, having the more experienced volunteers mentor the newer ones frees up staff time, allowing for the necessary time needed to grow the organization.

Final Concept

The volunteer mentorship program is a formal system which allows experienced volunteers to take over the training and managing of other volunteers, freeing up staff time needed for other important jobs. The mentorship program allows newer volunteers to grow their skills through a skill tree made up of various skill sets from the various Free Geek departments. Working together with experienced mentors until confident in their abilities, volunteers are able to take a test where they are awarded a corresponding badge if they are deemed proficient and able to complete the task autonomously. Volunteers who have earned a particular badge are then able to sign-up as a mentor for other volunteers also looking to learn that skill.

The volunteer mentorship program is tied together with a volunteer management app which allows volunteers to sign up for shifts, workshops, and tests. Furthermore, the app would include additional features to allow volunteer to observe the skill tree, available shifts, and manage their profile.

Reflection

Working to design the volunteer mentorship program has taught me many crucial aspects of developing a design intervention. Having to work with a client demanded a great amount of research to truly understand the user and their day to day experience, which allowed for a foundation to find an opportunity to make an impact. In specific, this project has taught me how to properly conduct ethnographic research and methods to organize and draw connections between large amounts of data such as affinity diagrams. Furthermore, by having to work with a client, this project has taught me not only how to frame a design problem to help guide a solution, but how to present your design as being the best solution with methods like a value proposition.

However, around the time of developing our final concept was when the Covid-19 pandemic had escalated which resulted in us no longer being able to stay in contact with Free Geek Vancouver. As such, we were not able to receive thoughts and opinions from them on our value proposition and final concept. We had also designed and planned a co-creation workshop that we were unable to conduct. However, based on the information we had gathered and synthesized, as well as our check-ins with Free Geek until then, I believe that the volunteer mentorship program was a design solution that not only met the goals of the organization but would have yielded a positive impact. Overall, this project has greatly taught me how to frame and understand a design problem, understanding who benefits from the design and how, and how to present a finalized concept.