The fun and interactive way to give back to the community.
Big Pineapple is a volunteer project we started to make volunteering simpler and more incentivized. We believe that no product can replace the power of human interaction and volunteering for a truly great cause, but that our job is to enable and encourage others to volunteer and help those who need it the most.
To make logging hours a little more 🎉✨fun!✨🎉we create digital characters in Habitica, and give users coins, power-ups, and monster fighting abilities when they log volunteer hours! To make finding a volunteer opportunity simpler, we’re programmatically filling a Google Calendar with nearby events.
“It was only an hour of my time, I had to get it done for my scholarship. I figured it would help, but I never imaged how much this mattered. Tears rolled down her eyes as she thanked me for my time. I knew I did the right thing”. At work the value of our time can usually be represented in a dollar amount, but in other places it gets trickier to figure out. After hearing my roommate’s story while he persuaded me to help him at a local soup kitchen, I realized this was all too true. In order for my roommate to receive a scholarship from his college, he had to volunteer a number of hours to qualify. So after some searching he found a shift open at a local soup kitchen. Showing up unexpected, he was quickly welcomed in the grateful arms of the kitchen’s manager. She began to tear up as she told him how they were about to shut the kitchen down that night because they didn’t have enough help to serve the meals. His decision to help that night allowed hungry families get a wholesome meal in their bellies. We believe that no product can replace the power of human interaction and volunteering for a truly great cause. We believe our job is to enable and encourage others to volunteer, helping those who need it the most. We plan on doing this through a software allowing volunteers to easily find time slots that fit their changing schedules, through a Google calendar. To incentivize completed hours, we will use Habitica. Habitica is a platform the gamifies daily tasks.