[HN Gopher] Show HN: Civic - Online Hub for Causes
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Show HN: Civic - Online Hub for Causes
Hi HN! Matias and Jessica here, we're the founders of Civic
(https://civicapp.co/), an online platform that connects people to
causes in their area. That could mean everything from volunteering
opportunities to activism and politics. Every year, over 180M
Americans contribute to social causes, yet doing so takes a
significant amount of time and energy -- information on how to get
involved or take action often spreads through disconnected pages,
newsletters, and word of mouth. Civic plans to solve this by
creating a hub for people to find and organize events, connect, and
donate to causes around them. We just launched our MVP in NYC,
focusing exclusively on events. I (Matias) started working on Civic
while still in college, where I also spent a lot of my time in
politics, having worked with ActBlue and a presidential campaign. I
also served as a hyper-local elected official in DC, where I
represented about 2k constituents to the city. Jessica is a full-
stack software engineer and spent 5 years working at Google before
joining us. She's fully responsible for our tech and is the reason
why we're able to build this at all. During my time in DC, one of
the most interesting things I observed was how the causes that were
most likely to get people engaged were the local/neighborhood
issues that affected them directly. Yet, because of their local
nature, those causes were also the ones least likely to get
publicity. That plus the general lack of a true online hub for
civic engagement led us to start Civic. The MVP is rough around
the edges and we're definitely looking for ideas and feedback on
how we can improve! Some of the features in our dev pipeline
include an onboarding process to customize the content seen by each
user (causes are very broad); easy and streamlined, no-fee
donations to organizations; social "spaces" based on location and
interests where users can meet and discuss issues with others; and
much more! For those curious about revenue, we plan to monetize by
introducing donations. Right now, over $300B are donated by
individuals to non-profits in the United States each year, much of
which goes through outdated platforms that charge high fees. We'd
target smaller, local organizations that aren't well served by
existing platforms, and would follow the same model as GoFundMe and
a few other companies, allowing users to add an optional "tip" to
Civic after each donation. From our research, this tends to lead to
tips of about 6-8% per transaction. You can check out our MVP
here: https://civicapp.co/ We'd really appreciate any and all
feedback (especially related to features, new and existing), please
let us know what you think! :)
Author : mab477
Score : 23 points
Date : 2022-03-16 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I think it's wrong to ask us here. Since you launched in NYC, the
| rest of us don't get much value from the app right now. I would
| go to the ones who are attending the events in NYC and talk to
| them and see what they are doing.
|
| Apart from that it's a nice idea, I guess.
| mab477 wrote:
| That's fair, but we figured folks here could still picture what
| our platform would look like in their area and share any
| feedback/suggestions!
|
| That being said, we're hoping to expand our coverage soon, it's
| just a matter of having the resources (or user generated
| content) to cover enough of the activity in any given place. We
| also figured some of you must be in nyc ;)
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| In that case honestly anything worth talking about from a
| civic sense, there are already facebook groups and change.org
| and just general forums. Not sure what this is adding beyond
| that. Is it the web app which is special here?
| hirundo wrote:
| In this polarized time you are going to quickly be faced with
| choices of which causes to platform ... or not. This is bringing
| much conflict to other online hubs. Do you have a plan for how to
| makes such calls? Will they be your personal editorial decisions?
|
| If so I suppose your policy can simply be that you accept causes
| with goals consistent with those you have already accepted, and
| prospective submitters can read about those for more clarity.
| technobabbler wrote:
| Hmm, maybe it's worth stealing a few UX ideas from Meetup? Your
| site is civics-focused (which is really cool), but otherwise it's
| a pretty standard events platform, and there's a lot of design
| and research that went into the other ones. Specifically:
|
| 1) The map takes up a lot of screen space but that's arguably not
| what is most important in this context. If you live in NYC, I
| would expect that getting around isn't going to be the make-or-
| break factor of whether you're going to an event. Meetup doesn't
| even have a map, and Yelp has a small overview map; both let the
| actual listings take up most of the space, because that's what
| people are looking for (interesting events, not primarily the
| closest one by 0.5 miles)
|
| 2) Allow people to browse not just events but also groups
| (associated nonprofits), along with a brief description for each
| and a "learn more" link. Maybe even some brief metadata (# of
| members, # of events hosted in the last 3 months, maybe even user
| reviews...)
|
| 3) You talked about the onboarding process in the works. Meetup
| is pretty good at that, allowing you to select multiple interests
| (tags) and showing you only the relevant stuff.
|
| 4) Being able to subscribe to tags and/or groups would be
| awesome. Most users probably would only care about a few groups,
| not all the events happening around them
|
| 5) Your filters are a bit confusing. What is the difference
| between Government, Voting, Campaigns, and Demonstrations...?
| Maybe more useful categories would be things like "Public
| Meeting", "Protest", "Community Gardens", "Arts & Crafts", "Food
| Kitchens", etc... like the specific activities people can engage
| in, as opposed to making people try to guess whether an event is
| more "Campaigns" or "Voting". I think breaking down "politics"
| into specific subcategories is something that people in the field
| (on the hill/work for a politician) might do, but to the general
| public, being able to (for example) separate thanksgiving help at
| the soup kitchen vs chalking for a politician is probably more
| useful.
|
| 6) For the search bar, also allow broader searches ("protests")
| and suggest them in the placeholder and autocomplete. Searching
| by exact event name is useless because there's no way people
| would know what nonprofits call their events.
|
| 7) Have some measure of popularity or importance, whether it's a
| heatmap or a count of attendees/group size, etc. I think the
| biggest job (and the hardest thing to do) for events sites is
| dealing with the signal to noise ratio, and presenting the most
| interesting events -- whether by algorithm or human moderation --
| as opposed to a long list of tiny events with like 3-4 people
| attending that most people won't be interested in. The default
| view of a new user shouldn't be, "here's 200 things happening in
| your town, good luck choosing one" but rather something like
| "here are 3 top picks for today, and 2 more later this week...
| plus browse by category or popularity"
|
| Some other minor stuff: Your images are loading with the wrong
| aspect ratios. They are being forcibly resized to squares in your
| popups... it's a small thing but has a big visual impact. Your
| Share button is way more prominent than your View More. Your
| addresses aren't clickable.
|
| Overall though, really glad to see this sort of thing springing
| up. Thanks for building it, and hope it takes off!
| ultimatessjoten wrote:
| I love this idea and think there could be a lot of value
| generated here.
|
| Here's a brain-dump of feedback items (both UX and feature
| requests):
|
| - I'd like to search by various data fields (event name, location
| / zip code, date)
|
| - When updating the results list, I'd like to see the map auto-
| snap to all the events (currently, when I select "this weekend",
| there'll be more events in the list than visible by default in
| the map)
|
| - The "Show more" tooltip is a bit redundant with the stuff in
| the sidebar, and its alignment is a bit off
|
| - The form to create a new event is 11 steps long - without an
| indicator, I might lose my patience and give up... perhaps
| there's a way to batch a couple questions in a single screen, or
| display a step indicator
|
| - If the "Show more" tooltip is displayed, and I switch to a
| different event type, the tooltip should be hidden
|
| - I appreciate the ability to subscribe to an email list, but I'd
| also like to set up a profile / event preferences / email & push
| notifications
|
| - I'd like to be able to tag myself & others at events
|
| - I'd like to be able to follow up on past events to see the
| outcomes, guests, etc...
|
| - I'd like to see if there are any business and/or local gov't
| sponsorships for events
|
| - I'd like a calendar integration for any events I "follow" or
| "plan to attend"
| _august wrote:
| This is awesome. Like a citizen app for making change. Would love
| an app with proxmity notifications / show upcoming events along
| my interests. & more volunteer opportunities mapped.
| mab477 wrote:
| Thanks August, really appreciate it! Love the idea of proximity
| notifications and agree with volunteering, we're definitely
| looking to add more opportunities in that area (there's a lot
| to work with)
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