Outreach Stars

As an amateur astronomer with over 30 years of experience, I have dedicated countless hours to coordinating outreach events with various astronomy clubs. While these events are rewarding, they often go unappreciated, and the tireless volunteers behind them remain largely unrecognized. This inspired me to create Outreach Stars—a professional tool designed to streamline the organization of astronomy outreach events. Outreach Stars serves four primary functions. First, it provides a centralized management interface for scheduling and organizing events. Facilitators can easily create events with all essential details, including date, time, location, and volunteer requirements. The system automatically generates an event page that includes a map, a volunteer registration form for collecting contact information and equipment lists, and a well-structured system for tracking volunteer hours. Once an event is completed, volunteer hours are reflected in a statistics page. Second, Outreach Stars acts as an information hub for both volunteers and the public. It features a public events page that is continuously updated, providing relevant information—even cancellations due to weather. Visitors can express interest in events, helping facilitators gauge attendance and adjust volunteer numbers accordingly. Additionally, the dashboard provides club members and the public with a wealth of information, such as current weather conditions, five-day forecasts, aurora forecasts, moon phases, and space news, which enhances the event details as the date approaches. The third function is tracking volunteer hours, an essential aspect for clubs to recognize dedicated members. Gone are the days of paper tracking and spreadsheets; the statistics dashboard automatically tallies events held, cancellations, completed hours, and highlights the most active volunteers, making end-of-year recognition straightforward. Finally, Outreach Stars offers organizational controls that allow clubs to tailor the system to their needs. Clubs can customize visuals like hero images and color schemes, toggle features such as volunteer limit enforcement, public event listings, and security settings for user registrations. Facilitators also have complete authority over member account settings, including the ability to disable or approve accounts manually when necessary. My own club, the Cincinnati Astronomical Society, has utilized the system for over a year with fantastic feedback, attracting interest from several other clubs wanting to adopt it. I anticipate a surge in demand when I present Outreach Stars at ALCON, the annual convention of the Astronomical League. Working with Floot has been a game-changer for me. Initially, I built the app using a competing platform, but it quickly became error-prone and cost-inefficient, requiring me to reverse significant work and experience inflation in hosting costs. In contrast, Floot has proven to be fast, efficient, and reliable. Tasks that previously took me months to accomplish are now completed in less than a week, and the end product not only looks professional but functions seamlessly. The ease of building comprehensive features without intricate coding details has made this development journey much more enjoyable.