Caravan - Social Mobility

Motivation

What is Caravan?

Caravan is a web-based platform that makes it easy for community-based organization managers to share underutilized vehicles.

Its purpose is to ensure that lower-income urban residents can have access, education, employment, healthcare and nutritious food.

MOTIVATION

Transportation scarcity is a multi-billion dollars problem in cities across the U.S., causing missed medical appointments, unemployment, and social isolation. Luckily, community development organizations have been working on this problem for decades.

However, they have inefficient solutions of either - 

• Owning vehicles that require gas, insurance, and maintenance costs or

• Renting a vehicle for $150 an hour with 1-day minimum to provide a trip
   

Research

To gain a deeper understanding of our problem, limited access to mobility, our team conducted 50+ interviews with low-income community residents, community development organization managers, city governments, impact investors, and philanthropists.

I coordinated the interviews by developing the interview protocols, arranging appointments, and participating as an interviewee or a note-taker. Then, I led the team in affinity analysis and created personas to represent our users.

Affinity & Analysis

• Trips: organizations have daily trips from and to their centers and weekly/monthly pre-planned trips. The minimum cost is $10/person per trip
   

• Current Solutions: organizations provide transportation to its members through $400+ van rental per day, illegal driving, or going without.
   

• Constraints: organizations often face with limited economic and social resources and social distrust

User PersonaS & Comparison

We began with multiple user personas and then developed the primary and secondary personas for customer segment prioritization.

The use case for the primary user persona was:

• A non-profit manager either with the underutilized vehicles or without
   

• Struggles with the financial burden of car maintenance, gas, and insurance
   

• Feel the pressure to guarantee enough work hours to the drivers because they use the vehicles only for a few hours in a day
   

• Wish there is more affordable and reliable transportation option
   

• Rather than spending the average of 8 hours, figuring out the rides and routes, wants to spend those hours taking care of their members and fulfilling missions

Design Process

Ecosystem map & Sketches

Based on the personas, we were able to identify goals, needs, limitations, and workflow of our primary users that were reflected on the use cases. Then, we sketched our ideas for potential solutions, such as text message service, online forum, charter van rental, social media group, and others.

Wireframes & Prototypes

We intentionally balanced our pace throughout the iterative design process because of our unique customers: non-profit managers and residents in low-income communities who have a higher level of social distrust towards outsiders because of their experience of political corruption and racial discrimination. Therefore, we created the prototypes to insert in our presentation to the community and quickly get the feedback.
 

Impact

People have shown great faith in Caravan!

Since April, Caravan has placed 2nd in Ford Go Detroit Challenge.

Taken a customer discovery course with Jean Redfield at Next Energy, participated in TechArb Student Accelerator Program, and in FREC City Accelerator run by CivicX and the Ford Motor Company Fund.

Additionally, we have partnerships with Matrix Human Services, and Focus: HOPE to operate pilot projects.

Review & Learn

As we were preparing for the pilot program, we learned the regulations of the budget expenses of non-profit organizations. We pivoted our idea to serve the employers in suburbs who can hire talents from downtowns but we were confronted with the limited car-sharing insurance policy. Because of these administrative and legal challenges, the co-founders decided to shut down Caravan in October 2017. However, we continue to stay involved with the communities by attending local startup and community development meetings.