Blog

In the previous post, we discussed the resources that will be required to finish our app and expand its geographic coverage nationwide. In this post, we will describe what you can do to help make that happen.

Volunteer

One of the best ways to help Johego is to volunteer your time and talents. To that end, Johego is excited to announce three opportunities to join our team! If you are interested in applying for any of our volunteer positions, please click on the corresponding image below or visit our Volunteer page for more information.

Johego is looking for volunteers to serve on its 2016 Board of Directors. We are especially looking for individuals who are experienced with one or more of the following disciplines: finance, fundraising, human resources, information technology, legal matters, marketing, and public relations. If you would like to take a leading role in our efforts to revolutionize community development, please do not hesitate to apply!

Johego is looking for individuals with a strong background in programming and/or mobile application development to assist with finishing our app and expanding its coverage nationwide. If you have a knack for this kind of work and want to contribute to community development in an innovative way, please do not hesitate to apply!

As a 501(c)(3) charity still in its infancy, Johego is looking for individuals with significant fundraising and/or marketing experience to assist with developing a sustainable base of financial support. If you would like to help out with this critical endeavor, please do not hesitate to apply!

Donate

Another way you can help Johego is by making a financial contribution. As we indicated in our previous post, Johego is trying to raise $160,843.13 in order to pay for staff, subcontractors, and IT infrastructure during the coming year. To date, Johego has been supported almost entirely out of our personal savings, which is not a sustainable model.

Although we do our best to minimize our expenses and to seek out charitable grant opportunities, your support is essential for building on our existing work and bringing this project to scale. We especially appreciate automatic monthly giving, since that provides us with a greater degree of confidence about future revenues.

If you are interested in making a donation, please click on the button below or visit our Donate page.

As a reminder, because Johego is a 501(c)(3) charity, your donations are tax-deductible! Moreover, every new donor, no matter how small his or her contribution, broadens our base of support, which is an important metric we can show to charitable foundations and other large donors. With that in mind, please visit our Donate page and make a donation if you are able.

Donate

Raise Awareness

Perhaps the easiest way you can help Johego is by spreading the word about what trying to do. In particular, if you know anyone who may be interested in helping Johego revolutionize community development, we encourage you to facilitate an introduction. In the meantime, if you haven’t done so already, please connect with us on social media:

With that in mind, please share this post on whatever platform(s) you are active. The coming months will determine whether we can generate enough momentum to finish our app and expand its coverage nationwide. Thank you so much for your support!

– Michael

Want to support Johego or learn more? Follow us on social media & let us know what you think:

In the previous post, we explained why we think our smartphone application will be an efficient and effective vehicle for increasing community engagement. In this post, we will be describing the resources required to (1) finish our app and (2) expand its geographic coverage nationwide.

How did we develop our estimates?

Our method for estimating resource requirements was simple, yet rigorous: first, we identified the major tasks that will be required to finish our app and expand its coverage nationwide; next, we categorized these tasks by profession (e.g., programming, marketing, etc.) and subdivided each task into specific action items; then, we interviewed various subject matter experts to develop a low-end and high-end time estimate for the completion of each action item. For example:

After that, we looked at how many hours will be required to complete the tasks associated with each profession. Then, based on the number of labor hours required, as well as the typical hourly wage for such labors, we determined whether it will make more sense financially to hire someone full-time to complete those tasks or to utilize a subcontractor.

Based on this analysis, we believe that we will be able to finish our app and significantly expand its geographic coverage in under one year with a three-person team of full-time professionals: a programmer/mobile application developer, a fundraiser/marketer, and an executive director. During this period, we are planning that data science, data entry, software security, legal, and accounting tasks will be completed by a variety of volunteers and subcontractors. In the longer term, as we expand our coverage nationwide and begin to perform large-scale data analytics, we anticipate bringing on a full-time data scientist.

How much will it cost to finish the app?

We do not expect to obtain the resources Johego needs overnight. Therefore, we anticipate completing our three-person team of full-time professionals over the next several months. Based on that assumption, we estimate that we will need $160,843.13 during 2016 and that our monthly costs will be as follows:

Specifically, we estimate that, with a three-person team of full-time professionals, our annual expenses will be as follows:

How much will it cost to expand the app’s coverage nationwide?

This is much more difficult to confidently estimate, since there are a greater number of uncertainties involved. Nonetheless, here is our approach:

As has been mentioned elsewhere on this website, the social service providers currently listed in our beta app are located in the Washington, D.C. area only. We were able to include these providers by collecting publicly available data from the Internet. Moving forward, we have identified approximately fifty other web-based resources that, if incorporated into our database, will provide geographic coverage of more than 90% of the United States, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Each of these resources differs in its size, complexity, and quality, so it is difficult to generalize the level of effort required to incorporate all of this information, especially because we do not yet know what economies (and diseconomies) of scale might occur from that effort. Nonetheless, based on our experiences with the Washington, D.C. data set and others, we put together the following chart to illustrate the potential effects of scaling on our efforts:

Based on this analysis, we believe that, as we expand and sustain our coverage nationwide, we will need to add a full-time data scientist to our team. This will become all the more critical as we begin to perform large-scale data analytics for the purpose of optimizing volunteering engagement.

All things considered, however, we can achieve nearly nationwide coverage by working with a relatively small number of web-based resources. Moreover, once a particular resource has been incorporated into our database, it will become that much easier to work with that resource whenever it is updated. For these reasons and others, we believe that we can bring Johego nationwide on a relatively short timeframe.

In the meantime, stay tuned for the next post, in which we will share some specific ways you can help make that happen.

– Michael

Want to support Johego or learn more? Follow us on social media & let us know what you think:

Currently, there are more than more than 45 million people in the US living in poverty. However, only one quarter of Americans volunteered in their communities last year. Faced with those challenges, why are we convinced that our application will make a big impact on both?

In a recent survey of 135 countries, Americans were more likely than any other nationality to help strangers, with nearly four in five survey respondents having done so during the previous month. Compared to the level of volunteerism in the US, this finding suggests that there is a profoundly underutilized willingness among Americans to become more involved with community development. Fortunately, we increasingly understand the factors that make people more willing to participate in community-building activities:

• When people feel like they can make a meaningful impact; and
• When people have a personal connection to a particular cause, or to those supporting the cause.

We will be leveraging both of these factors with our application, and the opportunities for scaling are tremendous:

• More than 98% of Americans are “connected to high-speed wireless Internet — surpassing any point in our nation’s history.” In addition, there are more than 180 million smartphone users throughout the US. This means that there are millions of opportunities to increase participation in community development using a smartphone application.
• Furthermore, nearly three in four Americans have a social network profile. By integrating our application with some of the most common social media networks, we will be able to increase the scale and the rate at which our app is utilized.

For these reasons and others, we believe that a well-crafted smartphone application can increase community engagement and, in turn, help build stronger communities through the US. In future posts, we will be describing specifically what will be required to bring our application nationwide and how you can help make that happen, so stay tuned!

– Michael

Want to support Johego or learn more? Follow us on social media & let us know what you think:

In a previous post, we discussed an article from Harvard Business Review, which identified four essential elements of a successful social movement. In this post, we will focus on the fourth of these elements as it relates to Johego: connection to the mainstream.

What We Do

Every successful social movement requires a meaningful connection to mainstream values and interests. For a start-up like Johego, social media can provide an efficient method for nurturing and sustaining that connection. To date, Johego has been using social media to provide updates on our progress and to post content that may be of interest to our supporters. Here are some of the content areas we have been focusing on so far:

• Data Science: Data science being used for good, especially as it relates to community development / poverty reduction. [Example]
• Smartphone Apps: Smartphone apps designed for community development / poverty reduction. [Example]
• Innovation: Other innovative products and services for the poor, especially from small- to medium-sized organizations. [Example]
• Policy: Novel policy approaches to community development / poverty reduction. [Example]
• Poverty: The extent of poverty in the U.S. as well as the personal challenges associated with living under poverty. [Example]
• General Interest: Actionable information for supporters about how to improve their lives: productivity, inspiration, etc. [Example]

Why Your Actions Matter

Ultimately, our success depends on your input. Your actions, even if they may seem inconsequential, actually do make a difference. For example, when one person ‘Likes’ a post on our Facebook page, it indicates to us what types of posts some people want to see. In addition, it increases the number of Facebook users that will see that particular post. To that end, the following plot shows how individual ‘Likes’ have increased the number of people that have seen our posts during the last few weeks:

How You Can Help

Here are a few easy things you can do that will increase our outreach and improve the content we send your way:

• If you haven’t started following us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, please do so.
• If you are already following us, and if you believe in what Johego is trying to accomplish, invite members of your social networks to follow us as well.
• If you like a particular post, then let us know by ‘Liking’, ‘Sharing’, etc. that post.
• If you want to comment on a particular post, publicly or privately, please do so.
• If you would like to see something different that is more relevant to your interests, please do not hesitate to contact us. We really do listen.

That’s it for now. As always, thank you for reading!

– Michael

Want to support Johego or learn more? Follow us on social media & let us know what you think: