Southeast partners with over 50 local nonprofits that are serving their city. The problem was how to engage and connect their 25,000+ weekly attendees to serve with these partners to make an impact in their community. Southeast needed a way for their partners to post opportunities and aggregate those opportunities for their members to participate.
We successfully designed, built and launched a mobile app to run Southeast's Unleashed engagement initiative, with over 500 members registering for serving opportunities on the first day of the app's launch. We also built a robust admin management web platform for organizations to be able to track their stats, approve registrants, and modify opportunity schedules on the fly.
Southeast Christian Church is one of the top 5 larges churches in the United States with 11 campuses. Located in Louisville, KY, they have a passion for serving their local community and spreading the love of Jesus locally and globally.
Given the wide range of demographics using the app, our primary goal was to make the app as user-friendly as possible with an approachable design aesthetic for any generation. Clear navigation, large buttons, and intuitive interactions were key to making the app a success for both the organizations and users.
During the discovery process, we sat down with the Southeast team to identify the key goals that would make the app a win for everyone involved. We had to plan for key features of both the website and app, and how to present those in a way that fit the device the user was using.
After hundreds of sticky notes were placed on the wall, we had a clear path to creating a truly unique solution with ideas that came out during our time together. What started as a hope to build something that would bring a community together finally had an achievable vision and direction.
Diving into our UX Design process, we wanted to see what paths a user could take from simply being curious about serving to actually committing to helping others in need. Our User Flow diagrams mapped out all the screens involved to help individuals see all the available opportunities, find one that fit their skills and passions, and allowed them to easily sign up for a service opportunity.
After architecting the right flow and identifying all the screens needed, our design team went to work crafting an interface design system that would bring life to the app and website. Using large, impactful imagery, we wanted the user to be able to see themselves making a change for a community in need.
This project involved building out several different platforms that all had to work together. We started by creating a web administration tool using ASP.NET where Southeast's partners could post and manage their serving opportunities and Southeast could view reports about user engagement and partner participation.
Then, we created a modern REST API using OAUTH authentication to power the mobile app. By utilizing the latest technologies like Entity Framework and AutoMapper we were able to build out the API quickly and reduce the amount of code that needed to be written. We also heavily utilized caching to make the API responsive and scalable.
Finally, we developed the mobile app for iOS and Android. By leveraging Xamarin Forms we were able to achieve over 90% code reuse between both platforms saving development time and reducing future maintenance costs.
