Hack Week: Web Development Team Offers A Local Nonprofit A Fresh Start

We often describe Rocket Companies^® as being “For More Than Profit^SM.” This mindset – that our team members, clients and communities come first – guides our actions and efforts in everything we do. 

We have a unique opportunity to use our resources and talents to help revitalize the communities where we live, work and play.

Hack Week is a week of innovation that is hosted every quarter and encourages team members to create impactful inventions for Rocket Companies and our community partners.

Technology teams are given full creative freedom to come up with potential ideas, and they have from Monday through Thursday to complete the build phase of their projects. On Friday, teams have the chance to demo their projects and celebrate all the amazing accomplishments from the week.

For the Web Development team, the program came with a chance to work on a total revamp of a local nonprofit’s website, Jackets for Jobs. This nonprofit provides career skills training, employment etiquette and professional clothing to job seekers in Detroit and surrounding communities. 

The Rocket Community Fund^SM and Jackets for Jobs have partnered together on local community initiatives for several years, as team members continue to volunteer for the organization on a regular basis.

In late 2017, Rocket Community Fund reached out to Alison Vaughn, Founder and CEO of Jackets for Jobs, to see how we could further collaborate and support the organization’s volunteer needs and community efforts.

As the two teams brainstormed together, Alison explained that her organization’s website was in desperate need of a redesign. The old site was suffering from out-of-date content, a cluttered user experience and an overall lack of vision.

“Having a clean and presentable website is so crucial for those of us in the nonprofit space,” Alison said. “A website is like the front door to your organization; you want people to feel welcomed when they arrive.”

Kate Hyland, who at the time was a Technology intern, was eager to use her web design and development talents as a way to give back to the Detroit community. When she saw the Jackets for Jobs project, she knew it would be a perfect fit.

With input from Alison and the Jackets for Jobs team, Kate crafted a fresh vision for the website, creating a wireframe prototype that effectively captured the overall direction and goals for the local nonprofit.

After the wireframe was built and the vision for the new site was established, the project switched gears and was handed off to Micah Mangin, a Business Analyst for Rocket Companies whose mission was to help bring the project full circle.

Micah teamed up with Jennifer Thurin, a Senior Product Owner at Rocket Companies, to see if her team would be interested in taking on the project during Hack Week. The project was presented to her team, and they quickly pounced on the opportunity to give back to the Detroit community.

The group approached the task like they do on all of their other assignments – as a team. Together, they developed a workflow that would ensure they were spending quality time on this project and broke down their agenda piece by piece. The entire team knew how to build a terrific user-friendly site that would help Jackets for Jobs drive business forward.

“Thanks to those who got the ball rolling on the project, we already had a beautiful site design and strong vision to work with,” said Eric Saliba, a Senior UX Designer who helped run the project to the finish line. “From there, all we had to do was bring that vision to life, figuring out ways to push traffic toward key areas of the site, such as sponsorships, volunteer opportunities, upcoming events and, most importantly, the donations page.”

The team went to work on building and updating the new site over the course of two Hack Week sprints. Each sprint lasts one full week, where our participating Technology team members donate their full time and attention to their Hack Week initiatives. 

Jason Nolan, Eric Saliba and Tom Ruit were responsible for key areas that led to the completion of the project.  

In addition to providing Jackets for Jobs with a modern and visually appealing website, they also supplied them with the knowledge and tools to make future alterations to the platform, including teaching the team how to properly use WordPress. Now, the team has the ability to make updates to the website as their needs change over time, something they struggled to do previously.

The fresh, new look of the Jackets for Jobs website comes at the perfect time as they prepare for their 20th anniversary celebration in April 2021.