UrbanSpire

To address the safety concerns of our lab usability testing participants, we chose to have classes at the community centers. That way, both the teachers and learners would feel safer with teaching and attending classes. As a result, one of our main partners would be community centers as we use some of their space as locations for classes.

Going off of the idea of meeting in community centers, we would also partner with local schools to use their space.

We also made a significant change to our business model such that anyone can teach/learn. Originally, we designed the application for newcomers to teach a class to locals but we found this idea potentially troublesome as the former group may be too intimidated to teach.

As our mission statement states, we want to help people "bring what you know and love to your community". This results in a two-fold value proposition.

First of all, we want to help people become more culturally enriched. For the newcomer into society, we hope that they will be able to learn a bit of the culture of the local society. On the other hand, we foresee the local learning more about the international culture and gaining more worldly knowledge. In both of these cases, we hope to empower people with greater cultural understanding.

Secondly, we wish to create a more integrated society. With such a large number of individuals relocating to various locations, there are many instances of people feeling uncomfortable, sometimes even alienated from the local community. We wish to alleviate and/or counteract those negative feelings and create an environment where newcomers and locals can interact in a friendly and constructive basis. Similar to how at Stanford where so many young minds from tremendously different backgrounds have been able to form lifelong friendships and learn in a cooperative environment, we have been inspired to mirror this synergistic setting in daily life outside the Stanford bubble, hence our goal of helping others integrate into society.

Our app would flourish based on recommendations from participant to other individuals within the community. The nature of our application relies on the trust that community members have for one another and the co-creation value.

We would use the community centers as a resource for both a source of class space and possible participants. This is based off of the idea that community centers serve as an open, welcoming space within a community.

It will be necessary to have people be "experts" in cultural subjects so that they will bring some new knowledge to the community around them. Moreover, based on the feedback we received in class, we will utilize actual experts/well-known entities within a certain field to teach classes. This will serve as a good jump-start to our user base as it will attract initial interest to our classes and website.

Furthermore, we will need people in the local community who will pass on information of our web application via word-of-mouth. This resource will stem from our application being able to provide a constructive and enjoyable experience for its users, and we hope to utilize this user bases' enthusiasm and good words to continue the cycle of learning and teaching international knowledge to the local community.

Given we are not on the app store, we would need to take further steps in advertising our application. We do have an advantage with being community focused and based which lends itself to many opportunities of advertisement within the local community. As we partner with community centers, we would look to place advertisements there by supplying the centers with digital content that they could display (posters, flyers, etc.). We would work with the community centers to also place advertisements in any local newspapers, publications, or newsletters. This would be a great avenue to reach many people in the community, as the publications are very often guaranteed to be sent out to its community members (depending on the community of course).

We would also heavily rely on word of mouth as a channel to reach people. As more and more people take classes and are satisfied, more people will start finding out about the site as the word spreads. We can also rely on local teachers to spread the word as they will want people to attend their classes.

Another suggestion we received was to get celebrity endorsements. This would really boost the public profile of the app and enhance the apps perception and reputation. Local celebrities would also probably desire to promote or endorse the app as it shows that they care about their communities and would probably boost their public appeal.