Show HN: Civic – Online Hub for Causes
Every year, over 180M Americans contribute to social causes, yet doing so takes a significant amount of time and energy — information on how to get involved or take action often spreads through disconnected pages, newsletters, and word of mouth. Civic plans to solve this by creating a hub for people to find and organize events, connect, and donate to causes around them.
We just launched our MVP in NYC, focusing exclusively on events. I (Matias) started working on Civic while still in college, where I also spent a lot of my time in politics, having worked with ActBlue and a presidential campaign. I also served as a hyper-local elected official in DC, where I represented about 2k constituents to the city. Jessica is a full-stack software engineer and spent 5 years working at Google before joining us. She's fully responsible for our tech and is the reason why we're able to build this at all.
During my time in DC, one of the most interesting things I observed was how the causes that were most likely to get people engaged were the local/neighborhood issues that affected them directly. Yet, because of their local nature, those causes were also the ones least likely to get publicity. That plus the general lack of a true online hub for civic engagement led us to start Civic.
The MVP is rough around the edges and we're definitely looking for ideas and feedback on how we can improve! Some of the features in our dev pipeline include an onboarding process to customize the content seen by each user (causes are very broad); easy and streamlined, no-fee donations to organizations; social "spaces" based on location and interests where users can meet and discuss issues with others; and much more!
For those curious about revenue, we plan to monetize by introducing donations. Right now, over $300B are donated by individuals to non-profits in the United States each year, much of which goes through outdated platforms that charge high fees. We'd target smaller, local organizations that aren't well served by existing platforms, and would follow the same model as GoFundMe and a few other companies, allowing users to add an optional "tip" to Civic after each donation. From our research, this tends to lead to tips of about 6-8% per transaction.
You can check out our MVP here: https://civicapp.co/
We'd really appreciate any and all feedback (especially related to features, new and existing), please let us know what you think! :)
15 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 38.7 ms ] threadIf so I suppose your policy can simply be that you accept causes with goals consistent with those you have already accepted, and prospective submitters can read about those for more clarity.
Apart from that it's a nice idea, I guess.
That being said, we’re hoping to expand our coverage soon, it’s just a matter of having the resources (or user generated content) to cover enough of the activity in any given place. We also figured some of you must be in nyc ;)
1) The map takes up a lot of screen space but that's arguably not what is most important in this context. If you live in NYC, I would expect that getting around isn't going to be the make-or-break factor of whether you're going to an event. Meetup doesn't even have a map, and Yelp has a small overview map; both let the actual listings take up most of the space, because that's what people are looking for (interesting events, not primarily the closest one by 0.5 miles)
2) Allow people to browse not just events but also groups (associated nonprofits), along with a brief description for each and a "learn more" link. Maybe even some brief metadata (# of members, # of events hosted in the last 3 months, maybe even user reviews...)
3) You talked about the onboarding process in the works. Meetup is pretty good at that, allowing you to select multiple interests (tags) and showing you only the relevant stuff.
4) Being able to subscribe to tags and/or groups would be awesome. Most users probably would only care about a few groups, not all the events happening around them
5) Your filters are a bit confusing. What is the difference between Government, Voting, Campaigns, and Demonstrations...? Maybe more useful categories would be things like "Public Meeting", "Protest", "Community Gardens", "Arts & Crafts", "Food Kitchens", etc... like the specific activities people can engage in, as opposed to making people try to guess whether an event is more "Campaigns" or "Voting". I think breaking down "politics" into specific subcategories is something that people in the field (on the hill/work for a politician) might do, but to the general public, being able to (for example) separate thanksgiving help at the soup kitchen vs chalking for a politician is probably more useful.
6) For the search bar, also allow broader searches ("protests") and suggest them in the placeholder and autocomplete. Searching by exact event name is useless because there's no way people would know what nonprofits call their events.
7) Have some measure of popularity or importance, whether it's a heatmap or a count of attendees/group size, etc. I think the biggest job (and the hardest thing to do) for events sites is dealing with the signal to noise ratio, and presenting the most interesting events -- whether by algorithm or human moderation -- as opposed to a long list of tiny events with like 3-4 people attending that most people won't be interested in. The default view of a new user shouldn't be, "here's 200 things happening in your town, good luck choosing one" but rather something like "here are 3 top picks for today, and 2 more later this week... plus browse by category or popularity"
Some other minor stuff: Your images are loading with the wrong aspect ratios. They are being forcibly resized to squares in your popups... it's a small thing but has a big visual impact. Your Share button is way more prominent than your View More. Your addresses aren't clickable.
Overall though, really glad to see this sort of thing springing up. Thanks for building it, and hope it takes off!
1) I agree, we're definitely still trying to figure out the best balance between the map and the list view. That being said, we've found that causes are somewhat unique in that, to a lot of people, geography matters more when it comes to civic engagement than it does for other types of events. With that in mind, we're looking to add ways for users to customize their experience as much as possible, i.e. by being able to toggle between a list view and the map, adjust the width of the sidebar, etc.
2) Completely agree.
3) Meetup has a great onboarding process.
4) Fully agree!
5) That's a good point, there are definitely ways to make the filters more intuitive. Appreciate the feedback!
6) Absolutely, the search bar is incredibly basic right now but we figured we'd still get it out there. In the coming weeks, we'll add the ability to search by causes, event types (ie 'protests'), key words, and more.
7) That's a good idea! Definitely agree that a core challenge with an events platform is making it easy for each user to see the most relevant/interesting content, as opposed to showing them everything.
Cheers!
One quick follow-up for #1, I wonder if a political boundaries layer would be helpful? Like districts for state/federal House, or local government divisions. When I lived in Chicago, being able to filter by ward would've been great. It's only gonna get more confusing as gerrymandering increases :)
Best of luck with the project, and thanks again for taking this on!
1) I agree the map takes up a lot screen space. Maybe do something like Yelp, where there are alternative views for map of events vs. events list.
2) In addition to allowing browsing specific events and groups.
5) Definitely agree with the current filters being confusing. Maybe a tagging system with a curated set of tags instead or in parallel to the categories might be better, to allow multiple tags per event. I also think having a very granular filtering system with a lot more filter options for things like number of attendees, number of shares, etc. could be important to users.
7) Agreed that making a recommendation system that's able to indicate popularity/importance/significance is a big, hard problem, but that it also could be a very attractive feature to users. Possibly you could have registered organizations "vote" to support other organization's events as one factor - it would help with spam and noise filtering.
Also, it would be good to have a policy statement about how you will handle controversy about events and organizations.
I really like the overall concept, and wish you luck!
Here's a brain-dump of feedback items (both UX and feature requests):
- I'd like to search by various data fields (event name, location / zip code, date)
- When updating the results list, I'd like to see the map auto-snap to all the events (currently, when I select "this weekend", there'll be more events in the list than visible by default in the map)
- The "Show more" tooltip is a bit redundant with the stuff in the sidebar, and its alignment is a bit off
- The form to create a new event is 11 steps long - without an indicator, I might lose my patience and give up... perhaps there's a way to batch a couple questions in a single screen, or display a step indicator
- If the "Show more" tooltip is displayed, and I switch to a different event type, the tooltip should be hidden
- I appreciate the ability to subscribe to an email list, but I'd also like to set up a profile / event preferences / email & push notifications
- I'd like to be able to tag myself & others at events
- I'd like to be able to follow up on past events to see the outcomes, guests, etc...
- I'd like to see if there are any business and/or local gov't sponsorships for events
- I'd like a calendar integration for any events I "follow" or "plan to attend"
The feature ideas are all great and I couldn't agree more with the UX points you made -- I'm hoping we'll be able to fix most of them in the coming weeks. Thanks again :)