Koha Tree is the evolution of
Shoebox Christmas.
Shoebox Christmas is a volunteer led organization that started in Wellington, New Zealand and over the last 9 years, has grown to cover all of New Zealand.
Shoebox Christmas delivers donated Christmas presents, wrapped in a shoebox, to kids who could do with an extra smile on Christmas Day.
They do this by working alongside low decile schools, pre-schools, Women's Refuge, and community organizations. Volunteer gifters can sign up on the Shoebox Christmas website, once their profile is created, they are matched with a child and given the important dates and the drop off information for their gift.
Until now, founder Pera, with a small group of volunteers around the country, has run and organized the annual round of Shoebox Christmas. This involves correspondence with the schools to gather children’s information and correspondence with gifters who have signed up.
There is a large amount of manual processing required as schools will contact Pera and the team to action specific details they can’t manage themselves.Pera wanted to develop a new platform where people could create accounts and self manage their Shoebox Christmas experience. This platform would also allow the processors of gifts (schools) to create their own accounts and organize their own Shoebox Christmas ‘project’ to be able to manage the correspondence between themselves and the matched gifters.
This new platform would also open the opportunity for wider thinking in allowing people to sign up for other community projects in their area (winter coat drives, food drives, stationary starter packs etc.) and the flip-side of that would allow those same people to be able to organize their own projects on the platform for people to sign up to as gifters.
This would ultimately create a scalable user-generated ecosystem (Koha Tree) that offered more opportunities for community empowerment.
The complete Koha Tree team was made up of myself, 5 developers, a PO/BA (Pera) and an illustrator/animator.
We decided for the pilot to design and build for web using React. In time mobile native apps could be developed if required, but this decision gave us a strong responsive foundation, and we knew web was widely used by the majority of our initial users (schools).
As we were all working on this outside of our normal day jobs, the timeframe was set for a pilot in 2 years at the end of 2022.
I began my research through conversations with Pera and two of the other existing volunteers on the process of Shoebox Christmas today. Identifying assumptions early and documenting their pain points gave me the initial understanding I required.
The restrictions on the current process of managing Shoebox Christmas led me to start researching examples of comparative platforms that scale.
Uber and
airbnb stood out to me as obvious examples. Both required the need to allow users to join and book a service as well as allowing users to be able offer their service in return. This was the flipside I mentioned earlier.
The fact they were both location and time-based gave me further inspiration when thinking about possible solutions.
The pain point of manually managing correspondence at particular times in a Shoebox Christmas project led me to check out how
Mailchimp handles emailing, filtering and scheduling.
Gofundme provided inspiration in the way they represented a cause, displayed a call to action and represented the people involved.
Pera and I discussed a customer journey map and the assumptions on the screens and tasks that may be required as an organizer to manage a Shoebox Christmas project end to end.
