Soar Services
2025
Designing "no wrong door" into a nonprofit's website
A same-day case competition solution for SOAR Community Services, a nonprofit offering Employment, Housing, Justice, and Addictions & mental health support helping clients discover every service they're eligible for, not just the one they walked in looking for.
Overview
A same-day case competition for a real nonprofit
SOAR Community Services is a not-for-profit that has supported the Brantford, Brant, and Haldimand communities for over 55 years, offering help across four service lines: Employment, Housing, Justice, and Addictions & Mental Health. Some of the people they support need help across several of these areas at once โ but SOAR's own systems weren't built to make that obvious.
This was Wilfrid Laurier's 2025 Co-op Case Hack: a one-day competition where students had 8am to 3pm to research, design, and pitch a solution to a live brief from SOAR's Director of Services. Our team of five chose the "No Wrong Door" challenge โ designing a digital experience where no matter which door a client walks through, they're guided to everything else they're eligible for.
The Impact
We placed at the competition with a proposed account-based system built on Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365, giving clients a single profile that surfaces every service they qualify for, and giving SOAR staff real-time visibility when a client is already engaged with another department.
Problem
You only know about the door you walked through
The brief asked us to step into the shoes of a persona trying to access SOAR's services knowing about only one of their four program areas, and to find out where the digital experience would let them down.
SOAR's joint case management tool doesn't alert other departments when a client accesses a service coordination between departments still relies on a staff member or client manually flagging it. Combined with a website that's dense with information and hard to navigate, this meant clients could easily miss services they were fully eligible for.
A mobile or native app wasn't financially feasible โ any solution had to work as a web experience. SOAR was already mid-rebrand, so further rebranding was off the table. And because some programs are open-access while others require a referral from a specific source, any system recommending services had to respect which doors are actually open to which clients.
Constraints we had to design around
No cross-department alerts
No cross-department alerts
Manually-prompted case coordination
Dense, hard-to-scan
web pages
Research
Walking a mile in James's shoes
55+ years
SOAR has served the Brantford, Brant, and Haldimand community
SOAR gave us four personas to choose from. We chose James Tiwonge โ a recently immigrated refugee balancing a new country's systems, a language barrier, and a ticking clock on his family's housing subsidy.
What we found walking through it
James came to SOAR knowing about housing support, the most widely advertised service, but had no clear way of discovering the employment services available to him and his wife. Without translation support or familiarity with Ontario's systems, SOAR's multi-page service descriptions were genuinely difficult for him to parse, and a language barrier made phone-based alternatives just as intimidating.
Ideation
One account, every door open
With only a few hours to move from research to a pitch-ready solution, we focused on one core idea: give every client a single account that quietly does the cross-referencing SOAR's staff currently have to do by hand.
We proposed building it on Microsoft Azure with Dynamics 365, reasoning through five criteria that mattered most for a nonprofit with tight margins and sensitive client data:
Data security (ISO/IEC 27001, RBAC)
Real-time translation
Why these four
A structured onboarding experience, starting with a personalized welcome package, turns a single transaction into the start of a relationship. A milestone-based recognition program (a 6-month anniversary, a holiday, a large gift) keeps that relationship alive without turning generosity into a transaction. A multi-platform campaign built on real, relatable stories was designed to reach the 50% of donors who give when they feel personally connected to a cause. And a redesigned donation flow removes the friction we saw firsthand during usability testing.
Designs
What James would actually see
The centrepiece of our pitch was a mockup of the client-facing account dashboard โ showing exactly how James's file would look once housing, employment, and his wife's account were all connected in one place.
Outcome
Good design under a deadline still has to be honest
about trade-offs
