What do we believe might be true?

By leveraging de-centralised (blockchain) technology to issue, send, and store volunteer credentials, organisations will be able to onboard volunteers more efficiently, and with greater trust across the sector thus unlocking greater volunteer movement and participation across the whole sector.

Volunteering for humanitarian organisations isn’t an easy or fast process. It can take weeks for a volunteer to onboard and have one’s credentials like First Aid Certificates checked etc. Only then can they begin the important work of volunteering. On top of this, every organisation’s volunteering onboarding is disconnected from one another – to volunteer for the Australian Red Cross and Oxfam, a volunteer needs to prove their identity and credentials twice. This is slow and cumbersome for everyone involved.

So, what if there was a way for volunteers to have cross-organisational credentials issued and verified by any humanitarian organisation?

Using Matt’s deep research and design strategy experience, the Traverse team worked together to carry out a systematic approach to validating or invalidating the hypothesis.

1. User interviews with volunteers to understand why they volunteer, the process for being vetted, and how they share, store, and manage their credentials.
2. User interviews with volunteer managers to understand how and why they vet volunteer candidates, and the difficulties with a sector-wide approach to doing so
3. Mapping the results of the interviews to a Lean Canvas to articulate clear value propositions and unpick the riskiest assumptions of the organisation’s hypotheses
4. Behavioural research using Webflow to validate the research uncovered in the interviews and iteratively learn about which problem/solution statements resonate with inbound audiences (and whether a revenue model could sustain the service).

Volunteers aren’t ready for Web 3.0

Most volunteers store their precious documents in two ways: in a folder in a draw in their house, or, if they have digital copies, somewhere in a cloud service. The idea of a de-centralised, blockchain-based solution to storing their credentials was met with fear and uncertainty. De-centralised technology does not currently match a volunteers’ mental model of the ubiquity of access to their digital records and they certainly wouldn’t pay for the ‘privilege’ of being fully in control and responsible for their credentials. In fact, they, like most of us, are happy to pay a cloud storage company to keep hold of it for them.

Volunteer managers like to do their own training and vetting

Talk to two different organisations and they’ll tell you that their First Aid Training is the best. As it turns out, fighting fires in the deserts of Western Australia need very different skills to those required for fighting fires in the bushland of Victoria – even though, technically, the credentials received for this style of training are the same, nationally accredited ones. The deeper we dug, the more we understood the nuances that exist within the training and vetting process – something that desktop research did not reveal. Blockchain as a suitable technology would not overcome these nuances alone.

What does this big picture look like now?

With some very clear foundational research insight, the team revised and re-scoped the initial hypothesis. What was left was a much clearer problem/solution fit. But, would it be compelling enough for enough people willing to pay enough to sustain the service long-term (aka Product/Market fit)?

It's like money, but alive

Using visual signals baked into our culture from the use of money, the design of the credential immediately communicates something of importance, despite the lack of it's physicality.

The design included animated watermarks that were generated based on the tilt of the device and the blockchain ID making it tamper-proof.

A live webflow website geared for learning

Having understood what people said were the barriers, it was important for us to validate them using behavioural research methods. For this, Matt spun up a webflow website that aimed to articulate the solution to the problems that we knew existed.

Designed, built, & copy-written within a day, the Webflow website was launched within 24 hours and hooked up to Google Analytics so the team could get visibility on visitors behaviour.

Within 48 hours, the team had their first inbound customer.

It may not be sexy, but Australian Red Cross saved hundreds of thousands of dollars of further technology investment

Whilst Matt and the team were able to make efficient progress towards validating and invalidating the original hypothesis, the goal of any small business is to be self-sustaining. And, with the new problem articulated, some commercial modelling showed very clearly that the market size, and potential pricing model for the sector, was not going to be big enough to support the team beyond the funding that the Australian Red Cross had allocated to the project.

Although not as glamourous, saving money (especially in the humanitarian sector) is just as valuable as generating it. And, like many tech-led innovation projects before them, Traverse no longer exists. At the time of writing, Humanitech are re-grouping and continuing their research in to how they may use cutting edge technology for good, and now, because of this work with Traverse, they can deploy their saved capital to new, different initiatives that may have bigger and broader positive social impact.