Volunteer alliance App

• Main Author: Chan, Nikki Pearl Yun Ling
• Other Authors: Miao Chun Yan
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/70435
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

As the population across the World starts to age, the number of elderly increases rapidly as well. This leads to a rise in elderly issues such as suicide, loneliness and deteriorated physical & mental health. On the other hand, for volunteer organisations, they often lack manpower in running volunteer jobs due to low volunteer rates. The purpose of the project is to solve this gap by making use of the huge available manpower present in the elderly age group to fill in for the vacant volunteer jobs. This will be done via the development of the VolunteerAlliance application. In order to understand the current problem better, research was done on senior volunteerism issue, benefits and motivational functions. Research has found that senior volunteerism could bring about health benefits to the elderly such as improve self-esteem and longevity. In addition, by researching on motivational functions to further understand the factors that could affect volunteering rates, customised features for the application were developed to attract and encourage elderly to take up the volunteer jobs. Therefore, the issues could potentially be resolved on both the elderly side and the organisation side through the use of the application. VolunteerAlliance was implemented on Android and iOS platforms as they are the two most popular operating system used in the market. A web application was also created for organisations to facilitate the creation, approval or rejection of the applications. A survey was conducted after the completion of the main features in VolunteerAlliance. The purpose for the survey is to gather feedback and responses from elderly regarding the application. Overall, the responses gathered were positive, and most elderly users felt that the application could help to reduce senior volunteerism issues and raise volunteer rates. The suggested recommendations of features hopes to improve the application further by mitigating the senior volunteerism issues and using social motivational function to encourage more elderly to participate in volunteer jobs.