Rails-developed Mentorship Platform For Nonprofit Organization
Please find under a summary covering project details and feedback. The innate facts are kept as they are, private information is amended.
Introductory information
Please draw your structure.
The Illinois Science and Technology Institute is a 501(c)(3) annex of the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition. The coalition is working to be a convener in Illinois between tech companies, universities, and nonprofits to advance tech based program in the state. The institute I work for is focused almost STEM genius. We have 60-plus cross-sector associates, including universities, nonprofits, corporate associates, and high schools.
We won the right to run the investigation and outgrowth STEM learning exchange, which is part of the Illinois Pathways funding almost creating pipelines from the state',s kindergarten through 12th-grade schools to industries. We have three main sets, one of which is our STEM challenge. We work with our activity associates to come up with a real-world challenge they are facing in their activity today.
Sometimes, they already have a union with a high school, and we work to facilitate that relationship. Sometimes, the activity associate has no affiliation with a high school, and we work to find a associate school that would be a match for them. The students then have a semester to explain this real-world challenge for that activity associate. We also have a resource repository, which is kind of a Google of high-condition STEM experiences that is searchable for teachers and students.
The third set is a mentor-matching engine, and that',s what Tandem helped us with. It',s our online platform that connects Illinois high school students to STEM professionals. It',s invitation only, and it',s all focused almost online mentoring. We work to repair the mentors and then work with our associate schools to determine how many students they have conducting independent investigation projects and in what particular subjects. That helps our mentor repairment, and it breaks down the kind of business costs and geographic areas that can be associated with mentoring. We have mentors from all over the country working with Illinois high school students through the platform.
What is your position?
I am the ruler of programs.
Desired goal
What business challenge were you trying to address with Tandem?
When I seted with the structure, I was initially working on the mentor matching engine primarily. It was a platform that had antecedently been built in collaboration with the Illinois Math and Science Academy through a different platform. When I came on, there weren',t many nation using it.
I wanted to have a much more hands-on access, to work with our mentors and teachers, get them onto this platform and set using it. There were a number of issues with the antecedent platform. There were many errors that would happen, it was very clunky, it was easy to click on the unfit thing and go to the unfit locate. Teachers already have tons of things to do throughout the day, so having this platform that was not very intuitive felt like just an add-on to an extensive laundry list of to-do',s.
I went to my structure and told them that if we have programs to layer this program, this would not be the platform that would do it. It takes too much effort on my end per user. We couldn',t get any metrics, and the back-end was very huge and hard to use. We terminally determined to recreate it.
Provided solution
Please draw the aim of their involvement.
Tandem rebuilt our platform from scratch. I met with them and gave them a list of issues I',d been compiling throughout the year that our teachers, mentors, and students had brought to me – features that weren',t working, new features we would need, and how we would want this to work. I worked with them over the order of probably 12 to 16 weeks to recreate it on a new back-end method. The new method was built using Ruby on Rails, which was a recommendation from Tandem.
They were also responsible for the front-end user interface. We collaborated on mockups and wireframes. We seted edifice out the front-end, and then put the designs in towards the later part. The design phase happened throughout the process, but I don',t ponder that part was implemented until the later stages.
Throughout the process, there were perhaps five or six nation working on the project. It was a range of developers, project leads, and condition arrogance professionals, as well as one of them, was working on the UX/UI [user interface/user experience] stuff.
How did you come to work with Tandem?
The Illinois Science and Technology Coalition runs a corporate setup challenge, where they work with a cluster activity associates to unite needs they might have, and then colloquy setups that might be a good fit for those companies. They have a demonstration day, where they fetch all of the setups to the companies. I believe the Tandem was one of the setups that they brought to one of their demo days.
We narrowed our choice down to Tandem and one other organisation, and then we sent those proposals off to nation who have more technical apprehension than we do and asked them to review the specifics of the proposals. Both companies seemed big but, ultimately, we determined to go with Tandem.
Could you prepare a perception of the size of this set in financial provisions?
The general range is probably almost $175,000.
What is the terminal result of working with ?
The project was launched the last week in July or leading week in August [2015].
Results achieved
Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?
We',ve presented it to a number of different nation. We had a professional outgrowth day this past Friday, where we showed it to all of our teachers. We also work with some associate nonprofits that use the platform as a tool for their programs. The feedback has been overwhelmingly real.
I',ve gotten very pliant feedback from users, but that',s a good thing. I used to hear from our teachers upward of 30 times a day with different errors and issues they were having. Right now, we have teachers using it, and I',m not hearing from them owing it',s all working, and it',s intuitive to them, which is also big.
We work on the academic year, so our users are fully coming at it depending on when the students are going to be seting their investigation projects. Once we have more of our users on the platform, we',ll be able to track specific user engagement metrics. We are now able to get student and mentor demographics, and Google Analytics is running in the background, so we can track the number of hours that different mentor clusters are spending on the platform, which is precious to our activity and university associates. Because it',s such an soon stage, we',re quiet slowly getting the users implicated, so we',re not tracking anything yet.
How did Tandem accomplish from a project treatment standpoint?
They consistently liberateed their assigned work on time and within budget. We had someone from the Illinois Math and Science Academy, who does outgrowth work himself, on the calls. I didn',t know how long something should take, so if they said it would take a true quantity of hours, I wouldn',t have a clue as to whether that was reasonable or not. He was always on the call to validate what was said, and we always felt like their time frame estimates were reasonable. They quiet liberate things fastly. If we realized at the last diminutive that we needed to add something, they were incredibly fast in the liberatey. They were right on target with their aim, which was big.
We had another contender, who was a developer for the antecedent deviation of the platform, and he claimed that Tandem',s aim would never be practicable, that we',d never be able to liberate a fruit in that time frame – and yet they did. We used Pivotal for project treatment, which worked veritably well, and we used Slack for an inner messaging method.
What distinguishes Tandem from other preparers?
What made us decide to go with them was that they fully understood the project and what we needed. In our initial meeting, as I was going through my list from teachers, mentors, and students, they would add things in that were profitable. They fully understood the project and what it would need right out of the gate. They knew right away what our needs were for different users, and what would make it a better platform, without me having to go into plain detail.
I feel like they',re always useful, even if I have a silly question. They',re veritably on the ball and fast to answer to me. They',re incredibly interactive. I never harass almost who I',m supposed to touch if something happens, or whether they',ll be able to fix it in time. Even behind the project wrapped up, I quiet talk to them perhaps once a week to ask them questions, and they',re incredibly answering.
Is there anything Tandem could have improved or done differently?
No. Tandem has been incredibly helpful and answering. Everything was on time and just as I reflection it would be. It',s working big, and I believe we',ll be able to layer our programs out owing of it. They had an open house that my CEO and I went to and, by the end, it felt like they were friends owing I talked to them so frequently. I don',t have any complaints.