Project Overview
For our final project at Atlas School, we were very excited to create a tool that would serve a real need at an Oklahoma nonprofit so many of our peers and instructors already know and love -- Techlahoma.
Techlahoma's mission is to enrich Oklahoma's technologists of all backgrounds through education, connection, and opportunity. They've got thousands of members. They host conferences, they run a coding bootcamp, and they support 18 different volunteer-run user-groups.
... and that's just scratching the surface!
They do so much good for the tech scene in Oklahoma, and we wanted to do something good for them. So we approached them to learn more about their technological needs and learned that as their organization grows, so does the need to quantify their impact. If we could help them build up good data on who they were serving with their programs, it could really help in the grant application process. And that could help them have an even bigger impact in the future!
We wanted to help them get good data about who was attending their volunteer-run technology meet-ups and user groups. And we wanted do it in a way that didn't put any extra work on the plates of the volunteers. They already do so much!
So we set about to design a tool that would incentivize their constituents to check in to events and optionally share more information about themselves. We wanted it to be easy, fun, and rewarding — and most importantly, we wanted it to work with the existing systems Techlahoma already used for reporting.