The Problem
Bissell Centre’s current system relies on managing ARC card and recipient data through Excel spreadsheets and manual data entry, leading to inefficiencies such as:

Tracking Challenges: There is no unified system to track ARC card issuance, leading to inconsistent or duplicate user records and difficulties identifying individuals who have already received cards.

Data Entry Errors & Time-Consuming Processes: Staff must manually input recipient details into Google Forms for every card issuance, creating an administrative burden. A monthly statistics report must also be filled out and sent to the City of Edmonton.

Scalability Limitations: The current method struggles to handle increasing demand, restricting Bissell Centre’s ability to distribute more passes and potentially expand the program to other agencies.

The Solution
To address these challenges, our team is developing a management platform that simplifies ARC card distribution by improving card management, tracking, and reporting. The goal is to maximize value for Bissell Centre administrative staff, focusing on four key functionalities. The team has wrapped up the design phase and we are now moving into development. Below is a breakdown of our solution with some previews of the designs:

Administrative Staff Authentication
To ensure secure access, we will implement a role-based authentication system that allows staff to register, log in, and manage access securely.

Features:

• Secure login for administrative staff
• Secure login for IT administrators
• New user registration by authorized IT staff

Dashboard for Administrative Staff
Previously, ARC card and recipient data existed in spreadsheets, requiring staff to sift through large volumes of records. The new dashboard will provide a clear overview of ARC card and recipient data with search capability.

Features:

• Real-time status of available, allocated, and expired ARC cards
• Real-time status of ineligible ARC card recipients
• Search for existing recipients by name, alias, or ARC card number

New Recipient & Profile Management
The current spreadsheet system causes duplicate entries and inconsistencies. Digital profiles will allow staff to track recipients, card history, and related details in one place.

Features:

• Register new recipients with name, alias, date of birth, postal code, and additional information
• Flag ineligible recipients to prevent misuse
• Editable recipient profiles for updates

ARC Card Management
The system will include a log of ARC cards belonging to Bissell Centre to help staff track issuance and availability.

Features:

• Monitor issued and available ARC cards in one place
• View details including allocation status, recipient, card number, and notes

Reporting to the City of Edmonton
Bissell Centre must submit two reports: one after each ARC card allocation and one monthly statistics report. This process will be automated to eliminate repetitive manual input.

Features:

• Auto-population of Google Form fields
• One-click report submission
• Notifications confirming completion

What’s Next: Design → Development
With the design phase complete, we are now in the development phase of the Bissell Centre ARC Card Management System. This includes integrating secure authentication, a centralized dashboard, automated reporting, and structured ARC card tracking to replace the current manual process.

Our development team is working in iterative sprints, testing and validating each component to ensure a seamless transition when onboarding Bissell Centre staff.

Technical Overview
The system is being built using React with TypeScript and Next.js, with Tailwind CSS for a modern and responsive interface. Firebase powers the backend using Firestore Database, Cloud Storage, and Firebase Authentication. The platform is deployed on Vercel for frontend hosting, while Firebase ensures a scalable, serverless backend for efficient ARC card management.

Future Considerations

• User testing and staff feedback to refine workflows
• Performance optimization to ensure Firestore queries and Next.js components scale effectively
• This structured approach ensures the system will be scalable, secure, and user-friendly at launch.

Voice of the Client

Destin Deluca, Manager of Administration and Project Management
“Bissell Centre is able to provide 140 bus passes to our community members every month through our relationship with the PATH program. Access to public transit is an essential resource for people journeying out of poverty, so this program has a huge impact on our community. Currently data entry and tracking is a major roadblock to providing access to transit efficiently. Our small two-person team spends hours entering data every month. Thankfully the U of A Blueprint team is saving the day by helping us create an app to more efficiently manage our participant data and the distribution of ARC cards. Working with Blueprint has been a very positive experience for Bissell. I am continually impressed by the club’s professionalism, quick responses, and the quality of the iterations we are getting back. Great work Blueprint.”

Sandra Pablo, General Administration
“I have been an admin contact for the PATH program at Bissell Centre. We distribute 140 bus passes to our community members through eight departments and submit data to the City of Edmonton to load and reload new ARC cards. Collecting accurate data is time-consuming, so we appreciate the U of A Blueprint team for designing an app that could transform our data collection and reporting workflow. They have been accommodating with change requests and thorough in explaining the process. We are grateful to work with them and look forward to using the finished app.”

Meet the Team

Project Lead

Ayush Roy: Hey, my name is Ayush and I’m in my 5th year of Computing Science with a Minor in Mathematics, currently the Project Lead for Bissell Centre. I have been in Blueprint since its inception. I love Blueprint for the various amazing and working projects it already has under its belt. We’ve made our clients happy and delivered on our promises. Looking forward to seeing the new organizations, clubs, or non profits we get to work with this year.

Product Manager

Rachel Wang: Hey there! My name is Rachel, I’m a 4th year Business Technology Management major & Finance minor, currently the Product Manager for Bissell Centre. I really enjoy the collaborative environment at Blueprint and the opportunity to create real solutions for nonprofits. I’m excited to see the positive difference our project will make for Bissell Centre’s hardworking staff!

Product Designers

Imran Amin: Hi there! My name’s Imran, a fourth-year Computer Science undergrad and the VP Design/Product Design Lead for the Bissell Centre Project. What I love about Blueprint is the opportunity to solve real problems for nonprofits alongside an incredibly talented cross-functional team. This year, I’m excited to take on even more complex challenges and streamline internal processes to make them faster and more efficient. Looking forward to another impactful year!

Amal Mirza: Hi! My name is Amal and I’m in my third year studying Business Technology Management and minoring in Marketing! I’m a product designer at Blueprint and was on the Bissell 24–25 design team. I love how at Blueprint I’m able to get lots of mentorship in UX/UI design, have creative freedom in my designs, and am working towards a good cause of creating an app for a non-profit. A fun fact about me is that I like to devote my free time to all types of creative arts, such as clay art and sketching :)

Product Developers

Faiyad Rahman:I’m Faiyad Rahman, a 5th-year Computer Science major and a Project Developer for the Bissell Centre Project with Blueprint. What I enjoy most about Blueprint is how so many students come together to build a product that will have a real impact on our community. Knowing that my contributions are making a meaningful difference is incredibly rewarding. This year, I’m looking forward to collaborating with my team, while learning from and supporting each other.

Jacob Mellick: Hi! My name is Jacob and this is my first year as a Project Developer with Blueprint. I’m in my third year of Software Engineering. I’m excited to work on the Bissell Centre Project, and a lot less excited to resolve merge conflicts.

Richard Wu: Hello, my name is Richard, and I’m a third-year computer science student. I’m also a project developer working with the Bissell Centre Project. One of the things I love about Blueprint is the teamwork and collaboration within our group, as well as the opportunity to support nonprofits through our work.

Yash Jha: Hey, I am Yash, and I am in the 3rd year of my computer science program. I am working as the project developer on the Bissell Centre Project, where I am implementing several UI frames and programming the app’s mechanism. At Blueprint I get to work on projects that I know have a real value in the world. This is within my personal goals which is to apply my skills in ways that benefit the most. It’s been 2 years since I have been a part of the team.

We accomplish this by focusing on:

• Connecting NPOs/NFPs with capable project teams
• Providing project teams with financial support and training
• Enriching student life

Building Bridges between Talent and Clients

The core component of Blueprint is connecting clients with eager students. To accomplish this we have two outreach teams that work hard to build the bridge between the two groups. Our first team reaches out to local organizations and builds up connections and shares our vision with potential clients. Through this process we build up a list of potential projects based on the needs of the organizations we are in contact with. Our next step is to select which upcoming projects we will work on. We carefully select projects based on feasibility, impact, and how well it aligns with our mission/vision statement.

Our second team handles campus recruitment. Teams contain designers, developers, a product manager and project lead, modelled after common industry practices. In addition to this being a proven method of organizing work, this provides students with experience working in a setting which resembles common industry practices. Available project teams are then matched with proposals that have made it past our “analysis period”. Finally, we have a third team that conducts fundraising to ensure project teams have the financial support they need.

Project Lifecycle

Our project lifecycle is an accelerated form of how software contracting companies usually operate.

Once a project has been selected, we initiate an “analysis period”. During this time our internal team of business analysts and designers conduct an investigation and work to create solutions. They conduct interviews with the client, potential users, and other industry experts to better understand the domain of the problem. Afterwards, they refine the client’s initial vision into something that is concrete, feasible, and based on the combined expertise of the client and our design/dev team. At the end, we come to an agreement with our client on a list of “needs/wants” for the project (commonly called a Statement of Work in industry) and a draft design or “prototype”.

The first edition of the specification and designs are then handed off to our project team, followed by development. Upon project completion, we conduct a hand-off. Blueprint doesn’t maintain finished projects — all costs and effort after hand-off is up to the client. Instead clients are given the knowledge and resources they need to host and maintain the projects themselves. Our teams provide training for relevant personnel, documentation for usage and maintenance, and support in launching the project. The project’s original source code is also provided under an open source MIT License. At Blueprint we highly value the open source community — but we also want to enable clients to be able to make proprietary changes in the future.

Student Life

Alongside supporting our clients, we seek to benefit students on campus. All the students who are a part of Blueprint freely give up their time to support our mission. Many students, when they choose clubs to join, are looking for something new to learn or for a community. And while project teams are a great means for members to apply and further build up their skills and find community — we work to offer them more.

Blueprint hosts community events such as games nights and rock climbing for members. Additionally, we have a team that plans workshops on business analysis, design, and management that are open to the entire campus. We also host panels and other events for students to engage with industry professionals, even connecting each project team with an industry mentor. Students are encouraged to constantly be learning and use the connections they build at Blueprint to enrich their student life and professional network.

We are a student lead volunteer organization with the mission “Tech for Social Good” — but what does that actually mean? And how do we accomplish this?

What is “Tech for Social Good”?

Social Good is the act of positively impacting the world around you for the good of others. There is no doubt, that even in our technologically advanced society, that the world is in desperate need of people who will champion those causes. In our present day, only a small fraction of people across the globe have proper access to healthcare, shelter, food, clean water, and education. On top of this, other concerns such as global warming, rising mental health cases, and more, become increasingly pressing by the day. We believe that technology can play a key role in these battles, and in fact, it already does.

Many nonprofit and not-for-profit organizations (NPOs and NFPs) rely on administrative tools, websites, algorithms, and other technologies to be able to maximize their capabilities. However, there are two problems many organizations still face:

1. There yet to exists software for their specific problem
2. Making new technology is expensive

The truth is, software development is time consuming and requires many different uniquely trained individuals. Sadly, not every organization has the funds to be able to hire a development team. This is especially true with smaller NPOs and NFPs, such as local food banks and homeless shelters. At Blueprint we believe these organizations should have access to the technology they require, so that they can provide a greater impact on their communities — regardless of the cost.

How do we make that happen? Well, we build the tech ourselves!

What is Blueprint?

Blueprint is a volunteer organization made up of students that have committed to building software for NPOs and NFPs, free of charge. Our organization exists because we recognize the technological need these other organizations have — and the desire of many students to build tech for others.

In Universities there are a large number of students with skills in Computer Science, UI/UX design, finance, marketing, product management, business analysis, and more, that are eager to work on projects related to Social Good. Additionally, many students are also looking for some experience and ways to grow their own skillset to get a jumpstart on their careers. However, it takes more than just an eager heart and technical skills to be able to provide tech for these organizations. Barriers include necessary funding, outreach/building connections with NPOs, having domain knowledge, and having a team that can bring all the required skills to the table.

This is where Blueprint comes in. By bridging the gap between eager students and NPOs / NFPs, we are able to build up capable project teams, provide them with adequate funding and support, and match them with projects brought to us by different organizations!

Originating at UC Berkeley in 2013, Blueprint has evolved into a multinational organization establishing chapters across North America. Our chapter at the University of Alberta was started in May 2022, and we’re the 4th chapter in Canada.

Want more information… check out this quick read on what we do.

Alzheimer Society of Calgary aims to enable local people impacted by dementia to live life well and build the capacity of the community to support and care for them. Alzheimer Calgary runs a adult day, called Club 36, where people with dementia are engaged in meaningful, success-oriented and mentally stimulating activities. It’s also a valuable opportunity to socialize and make new friends while their caregivers enjoy a break from caregiving responsibilities.

Blueprint is building a mobile app that will improve communications between caregivers and the staff of Club 36. The app will help staff document the program and communicate the arrival and departure of members to caregivers.

DishZero is a student group that provides students and staff with reusable alternatives to traditional disposable takeout containers and mugs.

Blueprint is building a mobile app that will simplify the way students and staff borrow and return reusable containers and mugs from DishZero.

About the organization

International Students’ Association (ISA) is a student group at the University of Alberta with the mission to serve, represent and advocate for the interests of the international students at the University of Alberta.

About the project

Blueprint is building a mobile app for the ICard program that will allow participating vendors to check for eligible students.