Since the very first days of the war, our MobiDev team has been actively supporting the army and volunteering. And the volunteering experience brought our Design team leader, Kate Zagorovskaya to the idea of the platform Dopomoga Poruch (Help is Nearby). Together with her colleagues, she has turned her idea into reality.
Let’s look back to the process of the platform creation, and learn more about Kate’s vision on the future of “Dopomoga Poruch”.
How did the idea of “Dopomoga Poruch” come to your mind?
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Kharkiv has been shelled and bombed horribly, and I had to move west, to Kremenchuk. The number of displaced persons was growing rapidly, and a lot of them needed help. With the desire to help in mind, I started searching for ways to join volunteers in Kremenchuk. And then the main challenge turned out to be that volunteering organizations usually engage people for a full day. This option didn’t work for me since I work full-time. Thus I decided to volunteer by myself. People contacted me in response to my posts in local group chats on social media. And after my working hours or on weekends, I made purchases (mostly that were various medications and products) for these requests.However, communication remained the main challenge since I was not always available to respond to people’s requests.
My personal experience along with other volunteers’ feedback pushed me toward the idea of “Dopomoga Poruch” – a platform that easily collects all the requests from people who need help, categorizes them, and helps volunteers effectively organize their volunteering activities.
And people don’t need to perform any specific steps to become a part of “Dopomoga Poruch”, right?
That’s right. We’ve also simplified the registration process. You log in via Facebook, and can forget about the irritating procedure of creting a unique username, a password, providing an email, etc. This approach also helps us make sure that the registered user is a real person.
What makes “Dopomoga Poruch” different from other volunteering platforms?
The key difference of “Dopomoga Poruch” is built around the way we display the requests – they are tagged to the location on the map so that volunteers can easily collect requests for the particular district / region and then build an optimal route for delivery. Also, all the requests are separated into categories: Medications, Products, For kids, Shelter, Transportation, and Other.
Which ideas do you plan to implement for your platform in the future?
Currently we are actively testing and promoting our platform. The next huge step will be mobile app development. Our dev team has chosen the tech stack that allows us to make an app both for iOS and Android quite rapidly. And we hope to make this platform easily accessible and convenient for more and more people.
It was crucial to launch “Dopomoga Poruch” asap so that people got one extra tool to effectively support each other. And since we understood the particular importance of both mobile and web compatibility, Flutter for Web was considered as the optimal component of the technological stack. It will allow us to reuse most of the web platform code for a cross-platform mobile app in the future and cut the development timeline.
