Project Background
Non-profit organizations have quite a challenge: serve the most people possible with the least funding. To do so, organization managers must run tight ships; they must find ways to spend most of their money on the people they serve and not the business operations that support them. For this reason, computer systems at non-profit organizations are typically older, possibly donated machines that nobody really has time to upgrade or setup to serve the people who are serving the general public.
The Central Mississippi Chapter of the American Red Cross was no exception. Despite its federal funding, the computer systems available to the Red Cross served only basic, generic purposes—email, office applications, and website hosting. The Red Cross handled volunteer information the old-fashioned way, by storing pieces of paper in filing cabinets. If a client could not speak English, a volunteer would search through thousands of applications by hand to find a volunteer who could translate and hope that he or she was available and could be contacted using the information on the form, which could be years old. This system was very low-tech, easy to learn, and did not cost much to implement, except time.
When Hurricane Katrina ransacked the Gulf Coast in August, 2005, time ran out. Red Cross Shelters swarmed not only with people escaping the catastrophe, desperately needing aid, but also with people who desperately wanted to help. This was no time for paper forms; as soon as clients and volunteers would fill them out, they would be lost in the confusion or lost in the already uncontrollable collections in the filing cabinets. To compound the matter, there was more work than any amount of volunteers could handle, and none could be spared to sort through piles of papers. The Red Cross made attempts to have volunteers enter the data into spreadsheets, but the lack of consistency among spreadsheets and the ease with which spreadsheet data can be lost became more of an aggravation than an answer.
To remedy their situation, the Central Mississippi Red Cross contacted the Computer Science Department at Millsaps College. Dr. Donald Schwartz, chair of the department, suggested he have some of his students build a system as a service learning project. Senior computer science majors Adam Huffman and Jonathan Spencer accepted this challenge as the curriculum for CSCI 3752 Advanced Topics in Database. The result of this class was a working implementation using PHP and MySQL, codenamed “Canadian Blue Minus”, which they demonstrated for the Red Cross in December, 2005. As their senior project, a requirement for graduation from the Department of Computer Science at Millsaps College, Adam and Jonathan decided to improve upon the current system and build a working server to host the application, which they would deliver to and setup for the Central Mississippi Chapter of the American Red Cross. The improved system, now called iVolunteer, is being continually expanded and refined to serve the needs of volunteer-based organizations everywhere.