Let's Collaborate

Collaborate is a web app that connects people to volunteer opportunities that match their skills and interests. They aim to makes volunteering fast, fun and addictive.

Collaborate already had a basic tech platform, but were having trouble extending it cost effectively. They had big plans, so our first engagement was to work with them to imagine all the things they wanted to do later, so we could keep the system extensible in the long term.

Once the dreaming was over, we defined an initial build which would replace what they had, and solve a few major pain points. These included a tuneable, multi-factor matching engine, content loading self services for member organisations and user management tools for the collaborate team.

We started with a basic content model and Drupal's search API, allowing a finely tuned search index to match people's interests and location with volunteering opportunities. We made great use of the flags module ecosystem to handle the relationships, and tweaked Drupal's commenting system to handle the conversations and selection process. Collaborate liked this walking skeleton, so we slapped an open source swiper library on the top and it started to look like something.

The rest of the project consisted of several rounds of tweaking what fields displayed when where, what dashboards appeared for who when, who could do what to who's what when, and making the whole layout stable and pretty. Finally we had a product we wanted to launch, and we rolled it out expecting a few bugs. Nope, they just said thanks. Thank you, Collaborate, for a tiny and efficient project which is already helping loads of people!