Hi there!
Nice new community! I think I'm in the perfect place to tell you about my first Tech for Good project, so I'm going for it 😉
I hope that my experience can be of use to some of you, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this project.
Hopefully we can all learn from each other here, and help those we care about!
A couple of months ago, I took a training on gender-based and sexual violences. I learned about the resources available to help victims (emergency numbers, non-profits, etc). It's great because in France, we have a lot of institutions specialized in taking care of victims. But I was surprised to see that they are not centralized anywhere. So inevitably, we get lost between all the websites and we miss crucial information 🤷🏼♀.
I then launched the Perséphone project, joined by a friend who is my tech consultant. Perséphone is an app that centralizes all this information and to do prevention. You can have a look at the app here!
For the moment, it is in French but I will soon add the English option for foreigners in France.
I'm a research engineer in biotechnology 👩🏻🔬, but in my free time I've been learning about no-code tools. I've decided to use Glide to develop the app:
The price is very affordable: it's super interesting for non-profits with very small budgets (and here for us as we are financing the project from our own).
It's a progressive web app, which means that it's a website that can be downloaded as an application: no need to go through Apple or Android.
Everything is connected to a Google Sheets. So, if we decide to give it to non-profits, they won’t need to know how to use Glide: they just have to fill in the information (phone number, description,...) in the spreadsheet and the app will update itself directly. Talking about our database, we already have 600+ contacts and information!
- On my side, the tool is super easy to handle, but you can still inject CSS to rework the design 🤓
For the design, Glide already offers quite a lot of possibilities (quite basic certainly, but with a bit of imagination I assure you that you can do great things). In parallel I use Adobe Illustrator, but also a lot of no-code design tools. I think I'll do a post on that later as I could talk about it for hours 😍.
We've connected audience analysis tools to the website. If the app is used by a lot of people, we'll be able to see where the victims are mostly coming from. If they come from certain regions specifically, it may be because prevention and help devices are lacking there. In relation with the government and associations, we will be able to help improve the situation.
To organize myself in this work, I use a Notion shared with my friend in addition to Airtable.
It's practical and it allows us to push the productivity to its maximum, especially since the project is done during our free time. So I'll let you imagine my joy when I discovered Integromat and Zapier automation tools 🤪
I can't wait to tell you more about this project that is very important to us.
If anyone has any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d be happy to answer them. Thanks for reading!
Top comments (19)
English version below
Salut Julien,
Merci pour la suggestion du canal no code France, je vais aller regarder ça de suite 🙂
Effectivement, nous sommes en train de refaire notre landing page. Je viens de changer le lien dans ce post pour qu’il redirige directement vers l’application (app.mercipersephone.fr).
Merci beaucoup pour tout soutien et tes partages, ça nous touche beaucoup !
English
Thank you for the No code France channel suggestion, I'll go watch it right away 🙂
Effectively, we are redoing our landing page. I just changed the link in this post so that it redirects to the app directly (app.mercipersephone.fr).
Thank you very much for all your support and sharing, it means a lot to us!
Well done Cécile, I'm loving it :)
I also think that's a perfect use of no-code tools, enabling you to start shipping fast, focus on the database and centralising important information.
Keep us updated on your progress, and don't hesitate to ask for help if you need some help with coding 👍 (for example customising your design by injecting some CSS)
Thanks Rayan!
Totally, that's definitely the reason why I chose to use this tool!
Maybe you've heard about Vensy Krishna. She used the Glide to build an app during the Covid to help find drug resources in India. She is not a developer but she did no-code training, and filled the database with the help of volunteers from all over her country. Hundreds thousands of people have used it! You can find more information here if you are interested: yourstory.com/herstory/2021/04/no-...
and here's her app: hydcovidresources.com/
All of this is so inspiring and promising!
Thank you for building this amazing community! :)
Very good project ! ✨👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Thank you Thomas! I just saw the message you sent me privately on the app, it's super nice of you, thanks a lot for the support!
I had a look at your website, it seems that you are doing some great projects too 😀 Keep up the great work!
Thanks you a lot!
Yes ! Happy to see people sharing projects for such causes :)
That's exactly what our community is about <3
Well done Cécile ! The app is really clean and the content very clear !
I learned thing reading it 🎉
I will share it with relevant people around me 😁
I also shared it with friends, it's useful to keep that in your phone just in case. Sometimes I hear about these situations and I don't really know what to do, but now there's this as a reference. It's the same with some emergency health apps haha, I have one by the Red Cross to tell me how to manage someone during an accident and where to get a defibrilator around me. I hope I won't have to use it but I'm keeping it on my phone !
Thank you for the support and for sharing Antoine! That's super nice of you :)
Love to see those kind of project popping up ! Keep up the good work !!
Thank you Arnaud, that's super nice of you :)
I would love for messages to be auto-translated but that's something for the future x)
If you want you can use deepl.com to do translations easy.
People in our community are coming from everywhere which is amazing for international collaboration on social impact, but I also understand that language can be difficult. Only 20% of visitors are from the US, most visitors don't have english as their first language :)
Here's a screenshot of where people are coming from hehe
developmenthackers.com/uploads/art...
Well it's supposed to be real because it's with my analytics tool but I'm sure it's not 100% true haha. Same for me, I use Brave browser + VPN often so I'm not really detected in this I think.
Super useful tool - impressed that you were able to put this together so quick in your free time!