HOW WE DO IT: a look at 4Bells

A Caravan project begins with listening to problems and finding solutions together with the community. To illustrate our process, let's focus on 4Bells.

Community convening surfaces pain points
and ideas.

Create prototypes
and solicit
community feedback.

The community selects the best solution.

Develop a technology tool.

Community use drives adoption and surfaces improvements.

We held two separate Generators, one with those working in animal rescue and another on the topic of food recovery. Interestingly, both of these Generators surfaced a persistent issue with managing time-sensitive volunteer tasks.
4BELLS GENERATE

4BELLS DESIGN
Our team went to work with paper prototypes based on what we heard. We invited Generator participants and others to respond to our prototypes and provide more information about features, functionality, and use.


We presented the 20 or so ideas surfaced during the Generator to the participants and asked them to select the one that resonated the most. They chose the genesis of 4Bells: an app that helps deploy volunteers to time-sensitive tasks.
See a Select example, Childhood Hunger
4BELLS SELECT
4BELLS BUILD
We’re building and testing and talking to those who might use 4Bells or help us understand a new use case. With the generous support of Microsoft Citizenship, the first version of 4Bells will be useful to organizations that deploy volunteers after a disaster. We’re learning a lot.


Along with the community who dreamed up 4Bells, we’ll make sure those who need it can find it and use it.
4BELLS USE

Caravan Studios believes that communities should be deeply involved in developing tools to solve the problems they face. And they don’t have to be coders to do it.
We build apps for social good and we build them along with the community who needs them.
WE BEGIN WITH COMMUNITY
WHERE YOU CAN FIND US
It's all in the conversation.
The Dispatch
CARAVAN PROJECT LINKS
Caravan Studios is a division of TechSoup. We make things to increase the public good.
Copyright © 2021 TechSoup. This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.