GiveCard

Project Brief

A hackathon held over a single weekend sponsored by GiveCard. Focused on providing financial freedom and cash free donations for the homeless and those in need.

Role

Team project, I facilitated group brainstorm, discussion, and was in charge of visualization for concepts. Our group ended up winning first place overall with an additional award for best presentation in the hackathon.

The GiveCard dilemma

The CEO of GiveCard encountered an interesting problem one night when out with friends. A homeless man asked for help but there was no cash to donate on hand, thus GiveCard was born. The company is now focusing on how to enable donations in a cash free world. Through donations and other means, they want to give the homeless financial autonomy and improve their quality of life.

48 hr timeline

Our goal

Our task for the hackathon was to analyze the current GiveCard experience and suggest improvements for both GiveCard donors and the homeless that would be part of the program. We needed to complete desktop research, define the issues, ideate on solutions, and then create a presentation to give to the GiveCard executive team for critique.

Empathizing
with the homeless

Research gave our group insights into a stigmatized population. While some may think homelessness is a related to laziness or addiction we learned that many homeless individuals lacked a proper network or stable financial situations prone to be easily impacted by a lost job or single unfortunate circumstance. These situations were especially common in high cost of living areas where one event could lead to a lifetime of homelessness that was hard to break.

The donor

Locked to a classroom and lacking the ability to go out and contextual research we did the next best thing which was talk to our fellow hackers. We wanted to know what has stopped those of us from donating previously and what would be our motivations for helping. Our insights below:

-Donors want to naturally help but usually unsure how
-Worry how the money will be used
-Best time to donate is in the moment
-In person donation can lead to discomfort
-Younger donors typically never have cash on hand

The journey

Empowered by our insights and knowledge of the GiveCard system, we mapped out both the donor and a homeless person's journey from first hearing about GiveCard to after donation initially occurs.

Current issues

Combining our research and evaluating GiveCard's current customer journey we uncovered problematic situations for the donor, the homeless, or both depending on the situation.

Homeless often avoid shelters due to high crime rates and gang recruitment so effective awareness of GiveCard through shelters could be challenging.
GiveCard wanted to show the homeless online to donors to promote empathy however many of the homeless feel shame for their situation and having an online profile could be a violation of privacy and impact recruitment.
Limited balance checks to a dated pager system may work for a pilot but isn't a long term solution. It also required the homeless to have a phone and many don't.
With limited stores accepting GiveCards debit card, there was a high change the homeless would get to a checkout only to learn they could not use their card.
Exposing what the homeless were spending on could open up their actions to criticism and unnecessary privacy violations.

Issue #1
Awareness and stigma

Invoking empathy for the homeless isn't as big of a hurdle as reducing the stigma for understanding why homelessness happens is. Many people in our class assumed the homeless suffered from addiction and mental health, which while true for some, does not apply to the entire population or define it.

We saw a huge opportunity in addressing this stigma head on through an advertising campaign. By doing so, we hypothesized that the likelihood for donation would increase however this would need to be tested within context.

Issue #2
Pagers and receiving cards

GiveCards current proposal was to give out cards and then pagers for the homeless to check their balance. This was problematic as the pagers could get lost and were potential for theft.
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Our group had an idea for placing vending machines as a way to provide both a source for the homeless to check their balance but also a way for potential donors to learn about the program and purchase a preloaded card for a recepient.

Issue #3
GiveCard merchants

Due to the very limited amount of stores supporting GiveCards debit card there was high probability for unfortunate experiences. We wanted to severely limit the likelihood a GiveCard recipient would be denied at check out.
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Adopting a similar strategy employed by other credit companies, it was important to identify merchants supporting GiveCard. It was also equal importance to make this identification similar as others so GiveCard recipients didn't feel isolated or different from anyone else that might shop there.

Issue #4
Driving donations

Originally GiveCard had intended to expose recipients online in an effort to increase empathy, however we saw this more as a risk to reducing attraction for signups and increasing privacy concerns.
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Instead, GiveCard could partner with companies with similar business models like RoundUp. This way GiveCard could gain traction with an established customer base to reduce time and effort spend on obtaining donations or developing an app.

Still to do

During our final presentation to the GiveCard team we acknowledged that due to the accelerated timeline and other limitations our research and assumptions could have holes that need further addressing. Below were the items we saw as areas for future interest and resourcing:

We assumed the homeless are either already using this card or would use this card. This is an assumption that would need to be validated through a pilot and determined if there were other issues we didn't cover.
While GiveCard solves one issue, the problem of homelessness is made of a variety of system problems compounded into one. GiveCard would need to ensure they are truly solving a real problem for the homeless.
Edge cases and negative impacts need to be thought of to determine risks of the program. GiveCard should make sure they aren't creating more issues and uncover potential abuses and outline areas for negative impact. Focusing on only the positive can lead to unidentified risky situations the team should be aware of.

How did we do?

Our team received two awards! One for overall best presentation and another for best visuals. We were commended for focusing on solutions other than creating an app as well as identifying problematic areas the GiveCard team had not thought of. It was a great experience and rewarding to help a company focused on a good cause.

GiveCard

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