OBJECTIVES

Live Here Love Here wanted to design and develop a mobile app that would allow them to display clean-up events, adopt a spots, small grants awards, eco-schools, park, beaches and more in a way that allowed users to effectively view, interact and add to the information housed in the app. Over many years Live Here Love Here had collated a lot of information about places in Northern Ireland and had no way of effectively sharing it with the general public and affiliates. They wanted the app to become the primary portal for the public and partner organisations to find out their most up to date information.

Two of the most important sections in the app were events and adopt a spot. Live Here Love Here thought these elements would help increase engagement from affiliate partners and the general public if they could register their clean up events and adopt a spots via the app. They wanted an integration with Google Maps that would allow Live Here Love Here to display all of their events, with markers that could be selected to show event information. They also wanted to give users the ability to go onto the app and register their events that would include event details, any relevant logos, images and supporting information.

Live Here Love Here also had a requirement for this information to be sent back to the bespoke Laravel CMS for them to either approve or deny the content for displaying in the app. Once approved this content would then automatically be pushed out to the app and synced back to the Live Here Love Here ArcGIS account. Live Here Love Here also felt it was important that users of the app could see their impact on the environment as a result of organising and taking part in these events. Therefore, when an event has passed users will be asked to submit their results back to Live Here Love Here via the app. Users will be asked to supply things like number of volunteers, amount of litter collected (kgs) and much more. These results are then available to users in the app at a global level with the results being split into personal results and totals by organisation.

Live Here Love Here also have the ability in the CMS to view and export results as a CSV at both at a user and organisation level to save time when reporting back to funders. Live Here Love Here also had a requirement for users to be able to adopt a spot via the app. By adopting a spot, users are vowing to keep that area clean and tidy for a period of two years. Users would need to be able to set the location of their spot as well as being able to draw the area they were going to adopt on the map. This information would then also be sent back to the CMS for approval by Live Here Love Here system administrators were they could edit and approve the area submitted.

Overall Live Here Love Here now have an app for iOS, Android and desktop via a progressive web application (PWA) with the user experience fully tailored to meet the needs of the end user on each platform. We decided to build the Live Here Love Here app using the Ionic framework as primarily the client would only need to build and maintain one code base to service all platforms. Scaffold Digital are also 1 of only 7 in Europe with Trusted Partner status giving us the expertise to deliver a best-in-class solution that would help Live Here Love Here to increase engagement with their service users. Alongside the apps, Live Here Love Here also have a bespoke Laravel CMS that allows them to keep content up to date easily with no technical input. It was very important to Live Here Love Here that we developed a solution that would allow them to maintain app content inhouse so they could verify the validity of the data and also ensure the most up to date data is available to their user base. We have also developed a full integration between the Laravel CMS and ArcGIS to ensure and effective two-way flow of data. This means that Live Here Love Here can edit location information in either platform and both will always be in sync with latest versions.