fundrAIse, a name we came up with on our third day here at Inspire. We knew we wanted to help non-profits and do it with AI. Thanks to our community partner, MeaningfulWork, we started to establish the project scope and began initial research in our first two weeks. We have had many meetings with various members of their team, which helped us familiarize ourselves with their existing projects and understand how they are hoping to help non-profits by integrating AI into their platform.
Starting with more than 15 ideas on the whiteboard in the first week, we quickly narrowed them down to 3, thanks to our streamlined collaboration. Our team is able to build off each other’s experience and learn from the strengths that our diverse academic backgrounds give us. These brainstorming sessions open doors for an inclusive workplace environment where all team members are contributing ideas from different perspectives. This leads to finalized ideas that are formed from a variety of backgrounds.
One of the biggest challenges we have faced so far is getting in contact with non-profits. Since there are generally very few people on staff and so much work to be done, it is difficult to get responses and set up interviews with them. To gain insights from non-profit organizations without having done these interviews, we have relied on previously completed interviews that our community partner has held. Learning from their existing insights, we have started to understand the problem. Most non-profits receive a one-time donation from their donors and find it difficult to engage them for a long-term commitment. From our research, we found that donors want to receive personalized impact stories regarding how their donation was handled so they can continue to donate to the most impactful causes. However, non-profits find it hard to do personalized outreach and give recognition to each donor given their limited resources. This is where conducting our own interviews will give us more insights in the coming weeks. This will help us narrow our project scope even further and gather information on what their main pain points are.
Another challenge we have faced is the team’s varying skill levels in the technologies that we plan to use (AWS, typescript, LLM’s, etc). There has been a steeper learning curve for some members of our team as we try to quickly familiarize ourselves with the tech stack.
Our team now understands that when identifying problems, it is necessary to communicate with the user groups that are experiencing these problems, as opposed to speculation regarding their difficulties. When attempting to understand a problem without having experienced it, it is difficult to fully grasp the perspective of the user groups that are facing the problem. By learning from the user groups that experience the problem, we will develop a better understanding of the problem.
During the first two weeks of Inspire, we have forged meaningful connections amongst our team and have started building a relationship with our community partner. We are enjoying the work that we create and we look forward to continuing on our journey with Inspire. Maybe we can get fundrAIse to write our next reflection? 😉