USAHello

USA­Hel­lo ini­tial­ly came to use a few years back need­ing a web­site and a light rebrand­ing. That ini­tial site was a big upgrade, and lead to sev­er­al new oppor­tu­ni­ties and grants. With their mis­sion to help refugees com­ing to the Unit­ed States thrive in a new cir­cum­stances, the orga­ni­za­tion soon want­ed to begin expand­ing their ser­vices. Think­ing about new ways to help using tech­nol­o­gy, the USA­Hel­lo team, in part­ner­ship with the Unit­ed Nations Human Rights Coun­cil, hatched a plan to build a loca­tion-based app to help refugees and their fam­i­lies find crit­i­cal resources tai­lored to them. 

While exist­ing loca­tion-based tools like Google Maps, Yelp, and Foursquare are use­ful to the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion, they’re most­ly use­less to new­com­ers who many not speak Eng­lish and need spe­cif­ic ser­vices, like legal help, health­care, or even an eth­nic gro­cery store. To address this gap, we built Find­Hel­lo. An app the com­bines the use­ful­ness of pop­u­lar map tools with fea­tures and func­tion­al­i­ty spe­cif­ic to the refugee community. 

Devel­op­ment was a colos­sal effort, tak­ing the bet­ter part of a year to com­plete. Lever­age the Google Maps API, we built a cus­tom Djan­go dash­board to allow USA­Hel­lo and their vol­un­teers to add, edit, and flag resources, as well as man­age user sub­mis­sions from the app itself. 

To bet­ter dif­fer­en­ti­ate and brand the app, we also cre­at­ed some bespoke icons and art­work to set the app apart and give the entire prod­uct a pro­fes­sion­al, approach­able feel. 

Short­ly after launch­ing, the app gar­nered the atten­tion of pol­i­cy mak­ers and the gen­er­al pub­lic alike. It even gar­nered some local news atten­tion, which for us is a per­son­al milestone.