Project Overview
Shotline provides free and confidential support to people needing help accessing vaccine appointments due to technological barriers. Upon conclusion of this program, Shotline helped over 200 people with technology barriers access vaccines.
Please note that this is my understanding of events. My teammates have awesome stories to tell and they are not captured here.
Project Sponsors
Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation
Timeframe
Feb 2021 - Jan 2022
Skills
Management, Engineering, Design, Research
Stuff designed, built, launched, and iterated on
This project was complex as heck. In the pages below I detail each major component that I, or my team, worked on.
Website
Website for general public, volunteer portal for training
Partnerships
Meeting with local groups to support their vaccination efforts and healthcare providers to partner with vaccination sites
Project Narrative
Adapted from stakeholder presentation - May 2021
I take walks every evening around my neighborhood. On one particular evening I came across my elderly neighbor who was waiting for her on her porch. The vaccine had just been released for seniors and although my neighbor was qualified to receive the vaccine she had no idea how to actually sign up to get it and so she asked me for help. Her phone was too old to download the app the county was using. She wasn’t sure if she could use her computer without the help of her son, who was quarantining. She couldn’t get the vaccine. The system had failed her. I got out my phone and within ten minutes, I signed her up for her up an appointment at the hospital down the street the next week.
But Marie is far from the only person dealing with this. People without access to the devices or technological knowhow couldn’t get the vaccine. The digital divide is found on racial, economic, age-based lines. The digital divide went right through the people and the communities that were dying at heartbreaking rates. Meaning that the people who needed the vaccine the most couldn’t get it. Yet, the process was easy for me. The process was easy for my friends. I want to help. My friends want to help.
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But wait a second here. Was this actually a problem? We took a second here to verify a need and capture nuances. Here’s our semi-structured interview guide.
How do we connect them? Easy. Connect the people with the tech and skills to the people without. Shotline.
Shotline was a hotline staffed by tech-savvy, trustworthy, and trained volunteers with the single goal of facilitating accessibility to the COVID-19 vaccine, without requiring the use of the internet.
But wait, how are we gonna tell people about our world saving solution?? We reached out to friends and family. Distributed flyers around Oakland and Lake Merritt. We also using social media to reach people who could share our service with their community. (We also put a volunteer interest form to see what would happen.)
After our first call, we realized that the system that we had built was wholly flawed, ineffective, and not scalable. So we adapted. For more information about the first call and iterating the system, check out the phone system subpage.
Volunteers
I’m so grateful to the people who made this happen. Our volunteers rock and don’t get nearly enough credit, so thank y’all so much. We began the process of acquiring volunteers slowly, first bringing on one volunteer to take calls and one to sleuth.
In the meantime, we had to develop a volunteer onboarding system, including training, disclosures, and screening.
For more about onboarding volunteers, please check out the volunteer subpage