New way to earn pocket money for students on financial assistance in the future
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Food delivery app BevEat to help Ngee Ann Polytechnic students on financial support.
By Melissa Deborah Low
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“The goal of our project was to help students who are financially needy. We hope that by doing this, students can earn a side income while not needing to make time for their busy schedule...”
Beta-testing for DeliveryForGood takes place in Food Club where testers can choose to order from stalls selling chicken rice, Korean and Indonesian food. Photo Credits: Melissa Deborah Low
Ngee Ann Polytechnic (NP) students on financial support might be able to earn pocket money with BevEat, a food delivery app debuting in 2020.
Delivery is expected to take place within a radius of 500 metres to facilitate social interaction among acquaintances of the same school. The student delivering will earn 80 per cent of the delivery fee, which they can also choose to donate.
Four Final Year Project (FYP) students from the School of Humanities and Social Science took on the project, DeliveryForGood which is a subset of BevEat. Using DeliveryForGood, students can either volunteer to be a deliverer or be a customer.
“The goal of our project was to help students who are financially needy. We hope that by doing this, students can earn a side income while not needing to make time for their busy schedule,” said Mr Muhammad Taufiq Bin Rozman, 20, head of business development of the FYP group.
A joint survey was conducted among 101 financially needy students by NP’s Student & Alumni Service and the FYP group. The survey found that 87.1 per cent were interested in using this app to deliver food.
DeliveryForGood is in its beta-testing stage and is expected to be ready by 2020. Mr Taufiq and his group helped with the communication aspect of DeliveryForGood. They needed volunteers to test run the delivery and ordering process, but getting people to adopt the app was challenging.
“It is not a fully developed app… [The volunteers] didn’t know how to use the app at all so we had to teach them… Because of that, our volunteer rate and pick up rate becomes low,” Mr Taufiq says. This has delayed the development of the project.
The idea of BevEat came about in 2014, when founder Aaron Soon, 40, realised the implications of not using manpower efficiently to process donations for charity organisations.
“Actually we didn’t start out to be a F&B app… it’s just that we wanted to think of how to automate donations and how to create jobs,” Mr Soon says.
Mr Aaron Soon, the brain behind BevEat, is also an associate lecturer at Singapore Polytechnic and Republic Polytechnic. Photo Credits: Melissa Deborah Low
He was inspired to create an app that could replace the donation can and benefit the giver at the same time. Mr Soon believes that students will be more willing to use the app to buy food as a way of helping fellow students on financial aid earn pocket money. As of now, the delivery fee starts at $1 but it could increase with a pop-up campaign in NP. “[If we do] a delivery for $5, then we can easily raise $4 for every trip,” says Mr Soon.
The $4 will go to the selected charity organisations that the deliverer have chosen to donate to.
Kwan Seing Fong, 18, a second-year student under NP’s financial aid said that she “did think about [using the app]” when asked if she would consider becoming a deliverer. But her busy timetable might not allow for it. "My lunchtime is only one hour... I don’t know whether I have the time,” she says.
"There is a demand for such a service, but it’s a small market [in NP],” says Mr Javihn Chan, 49, a Business and Social Enterprise Lecturer in NP. “I would [ask] if there’s any longer term plans to make it more profitable.”
The second trial and refining of DeliveryForGood will start in the second half of 2019 with final-year students from the School of Business and Accountancy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MELISSA DEBORAH LOW
Melissa is a bundle of creative energy commonly heard before she is seen. She believes in the triune power of good conversation, brilliant writing and bold ideas. She also likes anything glittery.