Client

Iliana Paleva
Email: <ip97@cornell.edu>

Additional contact

Clare McLeod
Email: <cpm93@cornell.edu>

Student contact

SM Mashuque <sm2344@cornell.edu>

Project Summary

The client has written the following description of the project.

The Team

“takk” is an early-stage SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) startup run by two current Cornell students: Iliana Paleva, a senior in Information Science and Clare McLeod, a junior in ILR. After working for a few years at Cornell’s student phoning program, where students call alumni 6 days a week to ask for gifts and process payments, they realized the need for a better software. The current tech is outdated, not intuitive, and difficult to use. Unfortunately, it’s not just Cornell that uses the current software, but a whole host of other schools with similar student phoning programs.

The Timeline

The idea for a better software first arose in fall of 2018. We are planning on building the MVP (minimum viable product) in spring of 2019 and complete the business plan in the same semester. Come summer 2019, we will fine tune the product and build a customer base with the plan to launch in a first round of programs starting in fall 2019.

Project Summary

A better software will have many moving parts behind the scenes with a more intuitive user-facing front end. After uploading alumni data, including phone numbers, emails, demographic info, and past giving history, among other features - the system must be able to create individual profiles for each caller, automatically dial alumni, process credit card gifts, track gift amounts, reflect program progress in visual dashboards, and pool different groups of alumni based on school and giving history. Additional features may be included or requested as the development team progresses. The system must also be able to differentiate between callers, who see only a specific part of the program, and managers, who can access more in depth data, load calling pools, and review the gifts being processed via callers.

Technology

We are looking for a team to help us develop our MVP in Python (Flask), but we are also open to other languages that students feel are more appropriate/feel more confident in. We have designed preliminary versions of the interface and infrastructure in Balsamiq and Sketch.

Overall, the team would need to have the following experience (or be willing to learn):

• Payment Processing (such as Stripe and other)
• Database management - the software ultimately handles data, so experience with database creation, management, interaction and editing is essential
• Full-stack development
• Creating visual dashboards from database
• Account creation with logins
• Some knowledge of servers and SaaS development
• Some knowledge of connecting dialers to the web/software

As this will be an ongoing project after the semester ends, if we are happy with the results and students feel excited about working on it, we are open to continuing collaboration over the summer.