Volunteers at the Food Pantry

Backstory:
Volunteers use Groupme at the moment to communicate with each other and staff. They help with promoting by flyering but can’t really reach other people on campus. The SBU Food Pantry doesn’t have a social media so the volunteers don’t have anything to promote with. 

Motivations:

  • Need to be notified of workplace events
  • Need to communicate with their team
  • Need to be able to create social media or email postings

Frustrations:
They think that GroupMe is not the most effective way of communicating because the app tends to lag and send out notifications later or not even send it out at all. They also think it’s important to have transparency, so that they can communicate with everyone and everyone would be able to see what’s happening. They previously had a social media page, but had to delete it due to the comment section being flooded with unrelated comments. 

Ideal Experience:

  • To have a more concrete way of communicating with each other which could be a new application that we find for them.
  • To have a social media presence by creating new “pages” or accounts with disabled comments for the posts. 

 

Guests that visit the Food Pantry

Backstory:

When guests donate food or take food from the pantry, the staff take the guests’ emails but it’s all done on paper at the moment. The SBU Food Pantry does not have a database that holds all of these emails. 

Motivations:

  • Need to be informed regarding the food pantry
    • Could be via social media, email, etc

Frustrations:
There’s not an effective way for the staff at the food pantry to notify the guests when there are events, closures, etc. They have food drives and they flyer, but they think having a social media presence would be better for promotions. 

Ideal Experience:

  • Be able to notify guests in case of events, closures etc. through an email push notification system.
  • Also could be notified through social media (Instagram, Facebook, etc)

Admin/Staff that work at the Food Pantry

Backstory:
Also communicate through GroupMe which means that there isn’t much control they have over the system of communication.

Motivations:

  • Full control over accounts
  • Can do all things volunteers can do at minimum

Frustrations:
GroupMe provides the same limitations for staff and volunteers. They want to have more control over what “groups” are made for certain events or situations. The staff could manage the social media page and oversee what emails are being sent out, while the volunteers help manage the pages.

Ideal Experience:

  • New form of communication that allows the staff to have more control than the volunteers.