Koordi – Volunteer Coordination Made Simple

André helps out at the Bernd-Best-Turnier, a wheelchair rugby tournament in Cologne, and sees every year how much time goes into organizing it. Our research confirmed that this goes well beyond one club. Around 30 million people in Germany volunteer, most of them alongside work and family. Coordination happens in WhatsApp groups, spreadsheets and on paper, and responsibilities stay unclear. Many volunteers are over 50, so the solution has to work without any technical experience.

Our guiding question: How can an app take organizational work off volunteers' hands without adding new complexity?

Platforms like Letsact and Vostel match people with volunteer opportunities, and shift-planning tools cover individual steps. What's missing is an app that holds an event together from the first planning step to event day.

The key insight from our user journey maps: organizers and helpers need very different things at different moments. Our first sitemap treated every feature as equal, which made it confusing. We scrapped it and built the structure around role and event, so everyone sees only what they need right now.

We deliberately limited the scope. Koordi is designed for events with up to 100 helpers, such as club events and tournaments, not festivals. Large-scale events are covered by specialized tools like OnePlan.

Koordi runs in the browser and on mobile and supports an event in three phases.

Plan. Organizers set up an event in four steps. Based on the event type, Koordi suggests matching tasks and channels, so nobody starts from a blank page.

Prepare. Helpers join via a link and pick their name from a prepared list. From then on, they see only their tasks, the event details and the channels with the right contact people.

Run. The central design decision: During the event, Koordi takes features away instead of adding them. Inspired by Spotify CarPlay, Event Mode hides everything related to planning and shows a site map instead, where helpers can see where their contact people are right now.

The brand is designed above all to build trust, including with people who rarely try new apps. It combines a logo of two connected figures, the rounded typeface Gilroy and a clear palette of blue, orange and green.

Koordi is a clickable prototype and hasn't been tested with users yet. The biggest open question is whether the concept holds up at real events, and whether clubs are willing to change their established routines for it. That's what we would test first. We see the next big lever in reducing paperwork: Contracts and receipts for volunteer allowances should be generated automatically and signed directly in the app.