German municipality develops Funding Scout platform

Funding Scout platform boosts success rate of community project funding

Introduction

Amt Viöl is a small, rural north German municipality which struggled with the “funding jungle” when applying for financing for community projects. Aware that the 11 other small neighbouring municipalities in its region faced a similar challenge, Amt Viöl conceived of a digital solution.

The municipality applied for and was awarded Federal government funding to develop the Funding Scout platform.

The concept was for a digital platform that would host all the information and other resources and means to collaborate that would make it faster and easier for municipal workers to secure funding while increasing their application success rate.

Dr Melanie Boieck, the Funding Scout project coordinator, initiated the process of contacting potential IT outsourcing providers able to develop the platform. She reached out to several, inviting them to bid for the contract.

What we did step-by-step

  • Understood the “what” and “why” of the Funding Scout initiative.
  • Collaborative finalisation of the project’s requirements and specifications between K&C team and Amt Viol.
  • UI/UX design
  • Strategic decision to use Vue.js with the Quasar framework rather than React for the platform’s front end.
  • Agile development process over 5 months.
  • Final delivery and sign-off on time and in-budget

Why K&C?

Based in Munich and ISO certified, K&C first met the requirements of the Federal funding secured for the development of the Funding Scout platform. Having made a great impression during preliminary meetings, we were invited to tender a fixed-price bid for the development of Funding Scout based on the project specifications already established by the team behind the platform.

Having recently established a new office and team in Sulaymaniyah, a university city in Iraqi Kurdistand, we were in a position to make a great value offer that was compatible with the project’s tight budget.

Like its neighbouring villages and hamlets in Schleswig-Holstein and elsewhere across rural Germany, Amt Viöl’s tiny size means it is forced to rely on outside funding for most public amenity projects. The annual municipal budget simply doesn’t stretch to funding new amenities like playgrounds and cycle lanes. Even most municipal roles including the mayor are fulfilled by local volunteers in addition to their day jobs.

Funding Scout – an ambitious digital project in the heart of rural Germany

Dr. Melanie Boieck of Amt Viöl explains this means when the community needs to finance these kinds of projects, they have to enter what is referred to in local government as “the funding jungle”.

There is a myriad of different state, national, EU and other programmes that can be applied to for funding for community projects. But they all vary in the kind and scale of projects they will fund and have different, often complex, restrictions and conditions.

Even the application process isn’t always entirely clear. Dr Boieck laments the fact these programmes can have 20 pages of legal speak amateur, part-time municipal representatives have to get through to try and understand if they are a funding option for a particular project.

Cutting a path through the funding jungle

A digital platform was proposed to help cut a path through the funding jungle Amt Viöl and the ten other small municipalities that make up its county has to regularly navigate.

The proposed online platform would host briefs detailing the key details of different funding programmes, making it much easier for municipal representatives to get a quick overview of which may be worth looking into in more detail. It would also facilitate collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Anyone who had been through the application process for a particular programme would be able to add notes, advice and detailed checklists for others who followed in their footsteps. Municipalities with similar projects that required funding could also collaborate, splitting the groundwork involved in their individual applications or exchanging advice. Or even making joint applications where relevant, such as for a cycle lane linking villages in neighbouring municipalities.

Like any digital platform, the end goal of what was named Funding Scout was to make a complex job simpler, less time consuming and to improve the overall result – more successful funding applications for local amenities projects.

The tech stack

The technology stack used in this project includes but is not limited to:

Front End

Tools

Back End

Vue.js with Quasar framework

Sentry for error reporting

Node.js with Strapi framework and Koa.js

The team

The K&C team that built Funding Scout consisted of

Software developers

1 x Full Stack Developer

2 x Frontend Developer

DevOps

1 x DevOps Engineer

QA

1 x QA Engineer

UI/UX

1 x UI/UX Designer

Key Decisions – Vue.js and monolithic architecture

Our team opted to develop Funding Scout’s front end with Vue.js based on the consideration the platform involved numerous forms. It was decided Vue’s two-way binding of data within the JS state gave it an advantage over React which binds the value and listens for event changes on each input manually.

The usage of Quasar Framework (only available for Vue) helped cut down the amount of code that needed to be written and reduced labour hours.

When asking the initial questions of whether a monolith or microservices architecture would be the best approach, we considered cost-effectiveness and speed to market. In consultation with Amt Viöl, the decision was made to build a monolithic application. But one that was scalable and maintainable in a way that could be easily migrated to microservices at a later date if the platform’s adoption rate justified doing so.

Achievements

Lightning fast performance
First Contentful Paint: 0.8s
Speed Index 1.1s
Largest Contentful Paint: 1.2s
Time to Interactive: 1.3s
Total Blocking time: 0ms

Funding Scout was fully developed, tested and launched within the contracted time frame.

Despite a tight budget for a project of Funding Scout’s nature and requirements, we were able to deliver the platform for the contracted fixed price

A personally rewarding cultural exchange between a project team that included Germans, Iraqi Kurds and Ukrainians successfully collaborating

The Result

A scalable and intuitive digital platform that allows municipal workers to more efficiently access details on the state, federal and European funding opportunities for community projects like playgrounds and cycle lanes. The platform also facilitates knowledge exchange and collaboration.

The combination of features and functionalities is designed to make the funding application process less time consuming for employees and to improve the application success rate, resulting in benefits for local communities.

The K&C team that worked on this project was happy “to be a part of a digital project to enable ideas that improve lives. We also had zero bugs in production“.

What Amt Viol said

“We knew finding a German IT outsourcing provider that met the conditions of the federal grant financing Funding Scout and could do it within the budget awarded would be tough. We are really happy we found K&C and that the team was able to deliver such a high quality product by the deadline we had set for its release.”

“We really had a lot of fun on our video conferencing calls and got to know each other’s cultures and also personally. We look forward to continuing to work with some of the team as they maintain the project and hope to scale Funding Scout in future so it is available to other municipalities at our state and potentially even national level. 


Dr Melania Boieck, Funding Scout project lead – Amt Viöl

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