ENGS 89/90 Reports

Year of Graduation

2021

Project Advisor

Elizabeth Murnane

Instructor

Solomon Diamond and Rafe Steinhauer

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

2021

Abstract

Positive Tracks (PT) is a non-profit organization that seeks to empower and equip teens and young adults to make social change in their communities and beyond using movement based activism to “sweat for good”. Be it collecting signatures, raising funds, or running an education campaign, organizers can host any physical event from an online burpee challenge to a city marathon to achieve their goals. Positive Tracks supports these youth by offering one-on-one advising and online resources. They sometimes can support in other ways such as extending marketing campaigns, connecting organizers to other people or organizations, or matching donations. Positive Tracks has been hugely successful, reaching 81,586 “Positive Trackers” completing 407,585 million miles worth of activity generating incredible volumes of social change and fundraising over 11.5 million dollars for non-profit organizations. PT has significant potential to grow and expand both their scale and their services offered. The current delivery structure, however, does not maximize their impact and doesn’t take advantage of technology available to organizations that offer the majority of their services virtually.

The organization outlined a set of goals to increase their scalability, provide a cohesive branded experience, lower barriers to entry, and build the foundation for an online community accommodating the ideal range of objectives and means to achieving this social change.

After interviewing both long time and new organizers and completing extensive research on state of the art social platforms for good, the PT Thayer team concluded that a client-admin web platform requiring sleek profile creation, and permitting organizers to schedule advisor meetings, request help on particular items, receive auto and manually curated resources, and publish their own event to an event finder page would give the most optimal balance between security, community, autonomy, and support.

The platform itself features a client side on which all users may register for events they are eligible for, and users under 25 can create and publish event descriptions with all necessary details, including date, location, activity, eligibility, fundraising links, etc. Organizers also have a dashboard for each event they are planning where we have invented and categorized types of “tracks” that include essential to-do’s related to Positive Track’s services (such as making the event posting or scheduling advising), private note taking spaces for checklists created by the organizer, and the framework for collaborative spaces. Resources are now branded “tools” and consist of a title, subtitle, description, and optional link.

These resources are one of the more significant components of the admin side, where they may be reused and assigned to many organizers. The admin side also features a sorted collection of events initiated, and submitted for publication. There is also a page for each organizer where they can see assigned resources, the responses to the initiation form, and the event publication.

Apart from the git repository of front and back end code, our deliverable includes prototyped (in figma) designs for an augmented platform going above and beyond MVP. Our code has been structured with these additional features in mind and documentation contains guidance on how to further develop the platform. Our final deliverable is our formalized summary of research and the corresponding explanations of both implemented code and future suggestions.

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