A cloud hosted checkin application (SPA) for Santa Maria Urban Ministries in San Jose, California.
The application is used at the intake desk to service client needs. It helps manage the services provided to low-income families & homeless individuals in the downtown community. These are some of the services managed by SMUM-Checkin:
- Food Pantry
- Clothing
- Hygiene Supplies
- Christmas Gifts for Children
- Thanksgiving Turkeys
SMUM-Checkin manages client registration and facilitates the provision of available service by the volunteers. Since each service has a period of availability, minimum frequency, and target recipients, the software handles all of the calculations — offering the volunteer a simplified number of choices to offer the client. The interface reduces the complexity by displaying easy to understand service buttons. A push of a button logs the service details in the system and in future will print out a client receipt (see Future Development below).
This is an ongoing development project created and supported by volunteers. We are seeking to involve software developers from San Jose and the surrounding communities. We are offering young developers an outlet for volunteering to their local community by doing what they most enjoy doing.
We are reaching out to regional high schools to build long-term relationships. We want partners help promote this Tech Volunteer Program to students and the broader community. We believe this is a great opportunity to introduce tech students to the idea of helping build tools for communities in need.
Our goal is to have near continuous development of improvements and new features. A few of the planned features can be seen below.
A future version of SMUM-Checkin is intended to integrate with a receipt printer. This will reduce errors, improve security, and speed up the time it takes to help each client.
We hope to also integrate the management of service programs offered at SMUM. Santa Maria Urban Ministries offers a number of program including an After-school Homework Center, ABC Playtime Preschool, ESL Classes and more. We hope to integrate the registration and management into the system.
Another feature that we are considering adding is the ability to reach out to volunteers and clients via email and SMS. This would provide SMUM the means to inform stakeholders of changes in policies, programs, schedules, and special community events.