Consulting Projects

Boston Children's Museum

Boston Children's Museum engages children and families in joyful discovery experiences that instill an appreciation of our world, develop foundational skills, and spark a lifelong love of learning.


Interactive map visualization

We built a web-app to illustrate an interactive exhibition map. Students built a web-app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that holds an interactive map built on top of the existing Museum Map of the three exhibits’ floor plans. Over each exhibition room, the team placed a button such that when the user clicks on a room, a pop-up will appear that contains an image and description for the exhibition. This way, users are able to see what exhibits and activities a room has so they can plan their visits better. These pop-ups were created using the Modal Box method in CSS/JS.

— Katherine Xiong, Madie Wang, Meryl Wang, Cindy Zhang

Spring 2019

Boston Rescue Mission

Boston Rescue Mission's goals are to offer resources that prevent and end homelessness; support the recovery, health, faith, and independence of those who have a history of substance use, incarceration, and homelessness; raise awareness about the root causes of homelessness, addiction, and incarceration; serve our guests and residents and each other with respect, integrity, and grace; continue to learn, grow, and excel in our services, and be good stewards of the resources entrusted to us by our supporters.

Data processing and migration

We migrated and cleaned data to storage in Salesforce. Students developed a Python script using the pandas library to migrate Boston Rescue Mission’s donor data from the current DonorPerfect system to Salesforce. The data contains approximately 57,000 donors, with information ranging from their names and contact information, past donations, and preferred methods of contact. The team cleaned the data to create a mapping of information fields from DonorPerfect to the new information fields in Salesforce.

— Allison Htun, Steven Okada, Alicia Weng

Spring 2019

Green Streets Initiative

Green Streets Initiative encourages people across the world to make healthy and environment-friendly decisions when traveling. On the last Friday of each month, Green Streets holds Walk/Ride Day, in which people switch to an alternate mode of transportation, such as walking, biking, public transportation, or carpooling, that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions and burn more calories. Participants are rewarded through discounts in restaurants and retail. Green Streets also holds an annual Corporate Challenge for companies.

Database and data visualization

We managed a database and created diagrams of the information it held. Students managed a given database by employing additional information into a PostgreSQL database, producing a table of 9 columns that includes the ID, home and work zip codes, carbon change and savings, and primary and secondary modes of transportation of an individual participating in Green Streets Initiative’s Walk/Ride days. They also implemented data visualization by using Python scripts to build a sankey diagram of travel modes and geographic plot of carbon savings by zip code, using CSV files where additional informational or testing data were needed.

— Hanna, Jocelyn, Kathryn, Gary, Shushu

Fall 2018

MS Cure Fund

MS Cure Fund is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to: Increasing awareness and understanding of Multiple Sclerosis and its debilitating symptoms, providing help and information to newly diagnosed patients, conducting educational programs & seminars for patients, along with MS neurologist led forums for support & case discussion, raising much needed funds going directly to the scientists and clinicians researching a cure for MS.

HTML Events Grid Calendar

We implemented a basic grid calendar for the site "events"/"find programs" page. We decided to develop our own grid HTML calendar, which would wait for events to be loaded via liquid before using JavaScript to inject these events and their properties into the HTML between the website’s location request and the list calendar. Difficulties included checking the month of the event to display, the order of appending various HTML elements that would flow with the timing of accessing the liquid variables as well as stay consistent, and guessing the structure of the properties of liquid variables that stored submitted events. We also added some visual elements, like matching the color scheme of the website and event information popovers.

— Alex Tran, Cleverina Cong, Daniela Guillen, Victoria Juan

Spring 2018

Massachusetts Nonprofit Network

Massachusetts Nonprofit Network (MNN) is a statewide non-profit organization that works with various stakeholders in the development sector—nonprofits, donors, community and corporate leaders, and elected officials—to strengthen nonprofits and raise the sector’s voice on critical issues. MNN works with more than 700 nonprofit members from all across Massachusetts. The organization achieves its goals of advocacy, public awareness, and capacity-building through government partnerships, media outreach, networking events etc.

Commonwealth Stats Upgrade

We extended the functionality of the Commonwealth Stats data visualization tools. Our project was to add features and improve one of MNN’s projects, Commonwealth Stats, a data science tool that provides specific demographic data about cities/counties in Massachusetts. It also allows users to compare demographic data across the counties and cities. Initially, the tool provided county-level information on the income, age and education level parameters. We added a city-data functionality which enables the user to look at data by city or country. We also added the employment status, race, ethnicity and language spoken at home fields to the tool.

— Zoe Anderson, Kaveri Nadhamuni, Lior Hirschfeld, Eliza Khokhar

Fall 2017

Jewish Vocational Services

The Jewish Vocational Society is a local non-profit focused on providing education and occupational assistance to the Boston community. They work to providing training for minority groups, refugees, and Boston’s less privileged population in order to help them find and prepare jobs.

Easy-Access Information App

We developed an accessible Android application for JVS's refugee clients. For our project, we worked with JVS to develop an app for their refugee client base. JVS wanted to make information more accessible to the general population, specifically by creating an interface that is simple and easy to utilize. We built an Android app for navigating information such as event calendars, English learning resources, and contact information. We focused on making everything simple to use--both for the app users, and for the JVS employees who will be updating the information presented by the app.

— Collin Potts

Fall 2017

Best Buddies

Best Buddies is an organization dedicated to matching people with intellectual and developmental disabilities with life-long mentors. By providing meaningful relationships, Best Buddies hopes to facilitate more fulfilling lives for both mentors and mentees.

Google Sheets Add-on for Volunteer Matching

We simplified the volunteer match-making process. We created a spreadsheet solution to make matching pairs easier. Firstly, we crafted a form that would make information entry easier. Secondly, we developed an addon for Google maps to visualize physical distance between prospective matches.

— Gabriel Ramirez, Victor Reyes, Emily Cheng

Fall 2017

Green Streets Initiative

Green Streets Initiative encourages people across the world to make healthy and environment-friendly decisions when traveling. On the last Friday of each month, Green Streets holds Walk/Ride Day, in which people switch to an alternate mode of transportation, such as walking, biking, public transportation, or carpooling, that would reduce carbon dioxide emissions and burn more calories. Participants are rewarded through discounts in restaurants and retail. Green Streets also holds an annual Corporate Challenge for companies.

Corporate Challenge Employee Tracker

Help companies understand the impact of Walk/Ride day on their carbon savings. We did so by making an employer interface where each employer can access their employees’ check-in data, as well as overall statistics for each month and each year. Some statistics include percentage of employee participation, total calories burned, total carbon dioxide emitted and saved, modes of transportation and total duration traveled for each mode for both Walk-Ride Day and Normal Days, and graphs of progress over the past year.

— Cynthia Zhou, Janice Lee

Fall 2016