On July 14, 2021, Belgium was hit by heavy floods, and over 20,000 households were affected with billions of euros in damage. A lot of volunteers started offering help immediately on social media, but everything was chaotic and unstructured — and thus often ineffective.
Ilse, a digital marketer, and her colleague had the goal to launch a peer-to-peer marketplace platform to start structuring help offers as soon as possible. She didn't want to spend much time thinking about the design and UX and needed something that was good straight out of the box.
Ilse and her colleague were able to have a platform up and running in three hours, providing forms to quickly enter requests or offer details that people had.
All the submissions were stored in an Airtable database and presented publicly within a directory that could be filtered based on the type of help required or offered (furniture, cleaning services, food, shelter, and so on).
Apart from the need to build the peer-to-peer marketplace, they also had to maintain and adapt it as the database grew and more was being learned.
"With Softr we could very quickly adapt the platform as the number of submissions increased and new factors needed to be taken into account," said Isle. "We had zero experience with crisis management, so we needed a tool that was flexible and that we could quickly adapt to any insights we were gaining throughout the process."
The platform went live on July 15, 2021 and just 4 days later it had 250,000 visitors and 3000 people offering their help through the peer-to-peer marketplace. Ilse and her colleague had around 100 press interviews within two weeks since the launch of the platform, which attracted even more visitors.
Over 15,000€ was donated to a dedicated organization, which was used to build and maintain field kitchens in the affected regions, and 3000+ warm meals were provided to people left without food or kitchens. Ilse and her team also invested in tools, dryers, and hardware for people to help clean and rebuild their homes.
Several months after the disaster occurred, and the most urgent issues addressed, the peer-to-peer marketplace part of the platform has been discontinued. The website now serves as a source of information, providing, among other things, links to useful external resources where people can find more information on the subject.
Last but not least, the platform has helped to gather a lot of valuable information that could potentially be used in the future in the context of crisis management. Ilse and her colleague are already collaborating with other organizations to apply their experience and data to other areas and possibly at a larger scale.
