January 29, 2024
Continued Support for Adopt-a-Family
Northern Village is proud to support the Children's Foundation's Adopt-A-Family Program that connects families who need help during the holiday season in Guelph and Wellington County, with donors who give the gift of hope and joy by shopping for gifts and grocery cards. With the jolly determination of dedicated volunteers, staff, community workers, and donors, the Children's Foundation brings hope and joy home for the holidays for children, youth, and families in the community!
The Challenge
Northern Village created the back-end software that runs Adopt-a-Family in 2021 (see original writeup). The system works by having social-service agencies submit families; donors then register on the website; the backend administration matches donors to families, and makes sure that everyone is informed along the way. Since originally creating the software, the following improvements were needed:
- Improve ability to find duplicates with inexact matches
- Add "Gifts ready for Pickup" and "Gift Picked Up" statuses
- Add ability for donors to register themselves on the website, and log in to see the progress of their donations
- Expand the definition of genders
- Add donor confirmation of dropoff date
- Block access in off-season
- Reset Families, Workers and Donors each year
- Generalize text areas so they can be updated through Admin interface, including dropdowns for municipalities, grocery stores, text in emails, intro text on main pages
- Make display of phone number constant
- Have age dropdown include months, and sort by age.
- Various formatting changes and updates
The Solution
Northern Village reviews the system with Children's Foundation in the off season to see any updates that may be needed. Also, we make sure that the software is kept up to date to ensure that the latest security patches are in place.Some of the specific solutions include:
- Searches for duplicates were enhanced with adding fuzzy search. Initially on names of family, and then later extended to the names of children as well
- Added statuses "Gifts ready for Pickup" and "Gift Picked Up" and generate emails to inform workers of those changes in status
- Add Donors as a type of User, so that donors can log in, see the families that they are adopting, download PDFs for printing
- Delete all Families, Donors and Workers from the database, starting with a new database each year
- Create admin area to allow the entry of text for main page, worker and donor pages, and all emails that are sent by the system as well as Terms and Conditions
- Have the ability for admin to configure Ages, Agencies, Family Types, Genders, Grocery Stores, Gift Card, Municipalities
- Strip any non-numeric character to save as numbers, and format on display as ###-###-####