Volunteers’ Experience at Instituto Recomeçar in Potencialize

Danilo and Camila volunteered in the 7th edition of Potencialize, Fundação 1Bi’s volunteer program, which provides free technology and management consulting to NGOs throughout the country. Below, they describe their one-month volunteer experience at Instituto Recomeçar.

The project carried out by volunteers from the Potencialize program aimed to support Instituto Recomeçar in its mission to reintegrate people leaving the prison system into society. The 7th edition of Potencialize was the first edition in which the volunteers participated. When they registered, the team and NGO they would work with had not yet been determined, but the expectation of using their individual knowledge to positively impact a social organization and, indirectly, the lives of its target audience motivated the participants.

From the first meetings, the volunteers were already working well together, and conversations with the NGO proceeded smoothly. All our meetings took place via Teams, while WhatsApp was an essential tool for more routine questions and real-time feedback.

After understanding Recomeçar’s challenge, and taking into account the short duration of the Potencialize program and the volunteers’ limited availability, we focused on a lean solution that would have a major impact on the organization’s results.

The development process began with a diagnosis of the organization’s internal and external scenarios, highlighting the main challenge it faced: managing and storing data on the people it served. According to the institution’s management team, the system then in use had three major problems: it did not allow management data to be extracted, some information disappeared, and the platform’s instability made it difficult to access the data when needed. The institution used this system through a partner organization, especially because it was offered free of charge—an important advantage, since the institute does not have the financial resources to invest in its management structure.

Lacking management controls, one member of the internal team who was familiar with Microsoft Excel organized a tracking spreadsheet to be completed alongside the system. Using the spreadsheet increased data security, but it also placed additional strain on the team by adding more steps to the internal processes for completing it and by decentralizing some information.

The solution proposed by the team therefore needed to ensure, at very low cost, the three fundamental pillars of Information Security: Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. The main solutions were identified and classified according to their need for customization and development, their price, and the three pillars mentioned above. Ultimately, a combination of the company Google’s free tools, known as G Suite, was selected. It includes Google Sites, Google Data Studio, Google Forms, Google Sheets, Google Drive, and Google Apps Script.

Each application selected addressed a need of the institute’s management team. Google Sites would provide a simple interface that would centralize the internal team’s interaction with the data while integrating the other solutions. Google Data Studio is a data visualization tool that enables the creation of dashboards and charts for use in managing the NGO, as well as greater transparency with partners and the acquisition of new resources. Google Forms and Google Apps Script were used to enter registration details and information about the people served and the services offered. The data collected was organized in Google Sheets and stored in Google Drive.

The first version of the product was presented to the Instituto Recomeçar team at the end of the Potencialize program and is currently in the testing phase to ensure that it meets the team’s needs. It is worth noting that even after the project ended, the volunteers made themselves available to continue assisting with customizing the tools and training the team. Ultimately, the legacy left for Instituto Recomeçar will be an easy-to-use, fast management system capable of meeting the NGO’s needs, carefully designed to remain useful for a long time and to enable Recomeçar to continue changing the lives of so many people.