Who are StreetSmart?
StreetSmart tackles homelessness at the grassroots. They are a unique bridge between the community and small, ‘hard to reach’ agencies and projects that assist people experiencing homelessness or at risk. We support critical services and emergency aid as well as projects that promote social inclusion, empowerment and sustainable change for people who are homeless. When money is raised from the public through their fundraising events, 100 per cent of donations are distributed in the form of grants. To date they have raised and distributed over $1,672,214 to 400 grassroots projects.
StreetSmart has two major fundraising initiatives Dinesmart and Cafesmart. The principle is really simple! Dinesmart operates for 6 weeks in the run up for Christmas they partner with restaurants to ask diners to make a small donation to StreetSmart on their bill. Every table is asked to add $2 or more to their bill, not even the price of a coffee or mineral water. It’s a simple idea that adds up to a big impact on the lives of people who are homeless. CafeSmart operates for a single day and brings together cafes and coffee drinkers around the country to help people who are homeless. Participating cafes will generously donate $1.00 per coffee sold to fund local projects.
What did Geoplex do?
Geoplex came together in late October for a meet-up. It was a great opportunity for all of us to discuss what we wanted to do over the next 12 to 18 months. At the meeting I think we all shared a desire to put some of our skills to good use outside of our traditional client environments and we wanted to give a little back in whatever way we could. Matt‘s friend Simon is a long term supporter of StreetSmart and we all agreed that it would be great if we could provide some of our time to them if they needed it.
A coffee with Simon later and we were up and running on a project to provide a mobile version of the StreetSmart website – we didn’t have very much time before the Dinesmart campaign deadline so it was important to be lean and be able to release a site quickly. Luckily Simon has been a great custodian of the StreetSmart data and it only took us a few days to pull something together, a sprint later and we had a working mobile website ready.
StreetSmart Australia had been wanting to make the leap into mobile and location based searching for some time and partnering with Geoplex made it extremely easy to get there. This success was based on partnering with a team that are not only experts in the spatial information and technology field but are also great guys to work with. The Geoplex team understood our needs, making suggestions along the way, providing simple solutions that got the job done.
Simon Bristow, IT Manager, StreetSmart Australia
Streetsmart Mobile
The idea behind putting together the mobile site was simple – we wanted to provide a way to connect people quickly to participating restaurants and cafes. Simon provided the geocoded locations of participating partners and we utilised JQuery mobile to provide a cross platform\cross-browser compatibility – we used the Google Maps API to display the map and HTML5′s geolocation provides the mobile website with the user’s current location. The mobile website connects to the Streetsmart Salesforce database to extract participating restaurants. Restaurant distance is calculated and the map centres on the closest five restaurants to where you are. We finally added a simple and effective way to select a restaurant and make a booking using the Dimmi API.
View the site here on your mobile browser
Find out more about StreetSmart
Dinesmart is running to the 24th of December, if you’re going for a feed over the next couple of weeks – open the mobile site and choose a Dinesmart partner restaurant and help homelessness in your local community.