⚔️ Charity Quest: Turf Wars ⚔️ Solution to volunteer deserts

Charity Quest™ is a free volunteering app that connects local volunteers to the charities in their communities, 100% free of charge. We're seeking funds on Kickstarter to add Turf Wars®, a gamified expansion pack that addresses the critical problem of volunteer deserts in communities that need the most help.

Charity Quest

Hello Kickstarter, my name is Frank DiCola! I'm a software developer with a big love for gaming, community service, and my country. Let’s talk a little bit about why I built Charity Quest, how it succeeded, how it failed, and why we need your help to make it better.

I fell in love with my college town. When I finished my Master's degree at Stevens Institute of Technology in Software Engineering, I decided to remain in Hoboken, NJ!

I lived with my older brother (also a Stevens grad) and had a few local friends, but most of the Stevens crew had scattered to distant parts of the U.S. as work and life forced them to travel away.

As a result, those post-grad years were lonely, and I felt a real call to serve my community so I could get to know my city better. I could see that we had a small issue with homelessness locally, and was aware of a homeless shelter in our city. But I also wondered - what else was out there?

Without a centralized directory of local charities, most locals were in the dark about how to volunteer. I launched Charity Quest on May 15th of 2020 to serve as a “one stop shopping” mobile app for community service.

Not only does the Charity Quest mobile app show you all the nearby charities looking for volunteers, it also has their volunteer shift info like times, locations, and the number of other volunteers that are already signed up.

How much do I charge for this service? Absolutely nothing. Why is that? Because, as the executive director of a homeless shelter once told me:

"Free fits within our budget!"

Local charities get to use our back-end tools to post their “quests” to the network, view volunteer contact info, and reach out to volunteers. Since 2020 we've grown organically throughout Northeast New Jersey (and a tiny bit into New York City).

The network now has more than 14,000 volunteers serving at 50+ local charities. 

They're serving up thousands of hot meals, bags of groceries, hygiene kits, and baby supplies for single mothers. They are helping tutor kids after school, clean up their neighborhoods, and even move homeless families into their own apartments.

As more charities joined our little network, my problem was solved! I figured out where I could volunteer in my area and connected lots of volunteers and charities to each other. Time to kick up my feet and relax, right?

Not exactly.

As I grew the Charity Quest network to its current size of 50+ local charities and 14,000+ local volunteers, I began to notice a troubling trend.

The areas of greatest need around me (that is to say, areas with the highest poverty) were also the areas with the lowest number of active volunteers.

That’s because volunteering is a bit of a luxury hobby.

If you have time during business hours to pitch in around town, that’s great! But the poorest Americans among us, who are bouncing between two or three different jobs, just can’t afford to spend that kind of time.

This is how a community enters the death spiral known as a volunteer desert.

In a volunteer desert, local charities eventually have to close, because the skeleton crew running the organization can’t operate without a deep bench of local volunteers.

...which decreases the amount of social services (food, education, legal assistance) available in that neighborhood....

...which increases the strain on the remaining organizations in the area. But it doesn’t necessarily increase the volunteer pool, because there weren’t that many to begin with.

The people who do have time to volunteer reach their burnout point incredibly fast. They get overworked and decide they can’t commit anymore. The local charity gets one step closer to closing down.

Like real water in an actual desert, the last few drops evaporate and fade away, never to return.

We need your help to reverse this trend, bring life back to volunteer deserts, and help the poorest communities around us.

We need the Turf Wars expansion to the Charity Quest mobile app.

Ready to make a pledge? Kickstarter will only charge your card if we reach our funding goal, and you have until the end of the campaign to adjust your contribution. Take a look at the Pledge Levels section below and pick the pledge tier that works for you.

Pledge Levels

There are many ways to support our campaign!

Seed Pledge Tier - Follow our campaign and receive exclusive backer updates!

Wood Pledge Tier - Show your support and join the Charity Quest community!

Stone Pledge Tier - You'll receive a unique digital weapon your character can equip as soon as Neighborhood Wars launches. You'll also get to join us in our developer Discord and provide feedback to the development team and view sneak peaks at what we're working on!

Bronze Pledge Tier - Secure a lifetime subscription to Charity Quest, ensuring you'll never miss a second of that sweet Neighborhood Wars action!

Collector Pledge Tier - As a token of your incredible generosity, we will send you a rare collector's coin with the Charity Quest emblem on it. We say coin, but it's more of a medallion because this thing is MASSIVE.

Knight Pledger Tier - Join the wonderful world of game design by helping the Charity Quest team design one of the items players can acquire in Turf Wars. Whether it's a shimmering set of armor, a trusty carpenter's hammer, a deadly dagger, or something incredibly stupid, whatever you design is going in the final game!

Wizard Pledge Tier - Join the wonderful world of game design by helping the Charity Quest team design a Spell that players can use to dramatically turn the tide of Turf Wars. Will you allow players to rain hailstones down on their foes with the devastating "O, Hail No" spell? Perhaps you'll allow them to rebuild their home base with the "Crafty Corgis" spell? Whatever you design is going into the game!

Merchant Pledge Tier -Secure a discounted 2-year sponsorship on the Charity Quest app. Your business will be listed as a Gold Sponsor, inspiring love from all of the grateful volunteers in our network!

Royal Pledge Tier - We will move Heaven and Earth to bring Charity Quest to your part of the country! Your region will start with zero volunteers and zero charities, and eventually blossom into a thriving network for charities and volunteers! You'll receive in-app credit as the benevolent warlord of your town, earning the eternal adoration of volunteers nationwide.

If you select this tier, the CEO of the company will work with you to bring our free volunteer management platform to the town of your choosing. Be prepared to help facilitate this effort (couch surfing, anybody?) in any way you are able!

Wow, that was a lot!

Thank you for pledging to our project! We can't do this without you. Now let's hear from some volunteers and service leaders in Hudson County, NJ who love the app.

Testimonials

Charity Quest is already operating in four counties of New Jersey, and many of the organizations we serve are in volunteer deserts.

We spoke with Carol Deribeprey, the Communication Specialist & Organizer at Dvine Konektion food pantry in West New York, NJ, to get her thoughts on Charity Quest:

Carol is a huge fan! West New York has the demographics of a volunteer desert, and recruiting volunteers has always been a struggle. In this short video, Carol describes how the Charity Quest app has brought the next generation of volunteers into service.

It isn't just staff members that love the app! Volunteers appreciate that fact that it's now easy and fast to sign up to volunteer locally.

Sakura Helm is a local college student:

David Ford has been a resident for years, but his shy demeanor kept him from volunteering. Our mobile app gave him the confidence to step into a world of volunteering.

Mark Bloomberg lives in a town that doesn't have any charities, so he really appreciated our map-based approach:

We're aiming to raise $10,000 to build the Turf Wars expansion pack. But what happens if we raise more than that? Let's take a look at some of the Stretch Goals we have planned for this campaign:

Stretch Goals

We're thrilled that we get to work on this project. But we want to be up front and remind everyone that some of our more ambitious ideas will require more funding than our initial goal.

Now that we have reached our initial funding goal, we have revealed our first Stretch Goal: Summoning Stones!

Keep sharing the campaign, so we can reveal them all!

From this point on we will solely be discussing the Turf Wars expansion pack!

Project Timeline

April 2025 - October 2025

Design and Development

November 2025 - March 2026

Closed Beta Testing

March 2026 - May 2026

Open Beta

June 2026 - October 2026

Hudson County Launch

October 2026 - December 2026

Feedback from Hudson County, Design Refinement

January 2027 - October 2027

Design and Development of Nationally Scalable Game

October 2027 - December 2027

Launch in all active regions 

Turf Wars

Charity Quest™: Turf Wars® is an expansion pack that builds upon our free volunteering app. We're creating a neighborhood-based "meta-game" for volunteer events and charitable donations that will act as a motivation engine to address the critical issue of volunteer deserts in areas of great need.

Turf Wars will add a territory system that pits your town against neighboring towns in a volunteer contest to save your city and leave your enemies in shambles!

We will add a special button in our app that lets volunteers toggle between the normal map view, and the Turf Wars view. Before your very eyes, your peaceful community will morph into a fantasy medieval battlefield!

Turf Wars is simple: you want to destroy the enemy's Tower, while keeping your Tower intact until the end of the Battle. A single Turf War will last for a predetermined amount of time, typically two weeks.

During the Battle Phase, volunteers can complete any of the following actions:

• Volunteer at / donate to a charity in their home neighborhood, which will add Health to the Tower in that neighborhood
• Volunteer at / donate to a charity in another neighborhood, which will remove Health from the Tower in that neighborhood

After they successfully volunteer (e.g. are marked Present by Staff using our app) or donate through our mobile app, they see an animation of their character either attacking an enemy Tower, or repairing their home Tower.

At the end of the Turf War, any players with a Tower still standing will receive a bundle of Valor Points (VP) during the Repair Phase. Players who attacked an enemy Tower at least once during the Turf War will also get a reward if that Tower was eventually destroyed.

If your Tower got destroyed, you will get a minuscule consolation prize of Valor Points.

Players can then spend their Valor Points on Weapons, Armor, Spells, and cosmetic items for their avatar! Destroyed Towers have time to heal during the Repair Phase, and then a new Declaration Phase begins, which starts the loop over again.

Then it's on to the next Turf War!

How will you play? Will you stay on defense and volunteer locally to keep your Tower from getting destroyed?

Will you blaze a trail forward into neighboring towns, volunteering at new charities, meeting new people, and dealing massive damage to their Tower in the process?

You can do both, actually! The choice is totally up to you.

The technology for making this happen is already in place!

We have data on whether volunteers have completed a service event (a quest) because the staff at each charity takes attendance through our app. That data contains information on where the charity is physically located.

When we put all that together, it gives us a "battle log" that might read something like:

If you read the battle log above, you'll notice a few interesting things. As mentioned above, Turf Wars is a motivation engine to encourage people in our volunteer network to alter their habits in two key ways.

We want to discourage no-show volunteers, while rewarding volunteers who serve at charities with few helpers. Notice that Frank foolishly damaged his own Tower by failing to show up to a volunteer shift he signed up for.

He also completely annihilated the Jersey City tower by volunteering outside of his home territory and landed a "critical strike" by volunteering for a quest that had less than 2 other volunteers signed up.

Look out for a future update here on Kickstarter all about the Motivation Engine behind Turf Wars, and how it will help solve the critical problem of volunteer deserts.

Weapons

So... the Turf War is over! You have bravely volunteered many times in your local community, and also in some nearby towns. You have vanquished your foes, and you now have some Valor Points to spend before the next Turf War.

Let's buy weapons!

Weapons are items your character can hold in their hand to help them deal more damage, or heal more health, when volunteering.

Attack is a modifier applied to your volunteerism abroad (attacking a Tower).

Support is a modifier applied to your volunteerism at home (healing your Tower).

Some Weapons, like the Wooden Stick above, are really intended for going on offense and they don't help you much on defense. Many are multi-purpose (like the Wooden Hammer), and some are purely for support, such as the Tattered Flag.

Once you purchase a Weapon, it's yours forever and can be equipped at any time!

Weapons can't ever break or be destroyed once you have them. They give volunteers a sense of permanent progression as they dig deeper into their own communities and serve the poor with greater love.

If you have a fun idea for a Weapon, remember that you can help us design one if you back this project at the Knight Pledge level!

Now let's take a look at some other actions players can take besides volunteering that affect the outcome of the Turf War...

Spells

What medieval fantasy game is complete without magical Spells? The Turf Wars expansion will add the ability for players to turn the tides of battle with well-timed fiery attacks, last minute heals, and dazzling defenses.

Players can cast any Spell in their Inventory to tip the scales of the current Turf War. Many Spells will heal your Tower, and others will deal damage to an enemy Tower. 

Look out for more details on Spells in a future update, right here on Kickstarter!

We had a lot of fun designing these, and we want you to join in the fun! Remember that everyone who backs our campaign at the Wizard Pledge gets to design their own Spell.

What will you create?

Summons

Dealing damage by casting a Spell is pretty cool, but wouldn't it be even better to send troops to battle to do your work for you? That's where Summons come in!

Summoned units make your neighborhood's battlefield crackle with life. During an active Turf War, you might see a fierce Red Dragon flying toward your Tower while a battalion of your Noble Knights gallop toward your foes.

Summons are special kinds of Spells that add monsters to the map. The summoner chooses a target (e.g. "Attack the Castle of Bayonne!") and the monster will then begin traveling to their target in real time.

Defenders in the region will need to decide between attacking invading units, or healing their Tower.

Look out for more details on Summons in a future update, right here on Kickstarter!

Motivators

Charity Quest: Turf Wars is all about building on the neighborhood volunteering app we created and adding a key layer of gamification to motivate the kind of behavior we want to see in the world.

We plan to offer daily and weekly missions that will reward players with bonus Valor Points if they volunteer at charities who are in dire need of help. We're also planning a Bounty Board that highlights these opportunities the moment a player logs in, to encourage more people to choose those shifts.

Groups already exist in Charity Quest as "Guilds", so we're planning to offer a special bonus to any volunteers who complete a quest with a fellow guild-mate. Volunteering with your guild-mates will result in a Guild Strike!

Look out for a future update here on Kickstarter all about the Motivation Engine behind Turf Wars, and how it will help solve the critical problem of volunteer deserts.

Territories

Charity Quest: Turf Wars will be constantly evolving as more charities across the country adopt our free volunteer management platform. Right now there are only ten Territories, but one day there will be hundreds, perhaps over a thousand!

A Territory is any patch of land (a city, or a part of a county) where there is at least one charity in our network. It is represented by a banner and a title that is either the name of the city, or a fun creative name that blends many little towns together.

Players must declare for a single Territory before a Turf War begins, and they will be fighting for that Territory for the entire duration of the battle.

Here's the flag of Hoboken, the first town added to Charity Quest:

Currently, the majority of the Territories players can declare for are in northeastern New Jersey and Greater New York, but more Territories will be added as more charities join. 

For balance purposes, areas like Hoboken that are densely packed with charities stand alone as their own Territories. That's because Hoboken has 7 different charities all in one square mile!

On the flip side, small towns can be merged together into one combined Territory if they have very few charities, such as the Port Imperial Alliance. Here's a look at some of the other Territories in Hudson County, New Jersey:

Why bother handcrafting these Territories? Because our goal is to make sure that the results of the Turf War are based on player behavior, instead of being pre-determined by factors outside of the players' control.

What if there are no charities in your town using Charity Quest yet? Are you still allowed to compete in Turf Wars?

Absolutely.

Players without a Territory to call home can declare for The Outlanders, a roving band of marauders who have no home base, and can only attack.

At this point, a huge majority of the United States is considered The Outlands, a vast uncharted wilderness that must be explored! The Outlanders faction ensures that no one is ever left out of Turf Wars, even if the charities in their area have yet to adopt our platform.

Speaking of which...

Players who live in the Outlands can add their town as a Territory by persuading at least one local charity in their area to use our free volunteer management tool.

Once that charity joins the network, civilization will gloriously arrive at this formerly barren hellscape! As a thank you, the player who founded the Territory will permanently gain the title of Lord or Lady of the Keep, visible to all other players.

They will help us design the banner for this new Territory, and their name will always be listed as the Founder of the Territory.

In a future update here on Kickstarter, we'll break down the process of how we design Territories, what goes into making each of their banners, and how the map will evolve as our non-profit network grows.

Our Team

Charity Quest would not be the thriving network it is today without the help of many freelancers, volunteers, advisors, and supporters. I want to extend my gratitude to everyone who has labored over the years to help me with this wildly ambitious idea.

I also wanted to include this section so you can see that I'm not creating Turf Wars totally alone without any help. Without further ado, here's our awesome Charity Quest team!

Team members are shown below along with icons to indicate their favorite type of volunteer service!

We want to extend a special thank you to the advisors who have consulted with us during this process.

Bruce Blondina has been a wellspring of knowledge and support since we bumped into each other by chance at a nonprofit event in Hoboken. Our mutual love of our alma mater (Stevens) and volunteering brought us together. Bruce believes in the Charity Quest project, and has 27+ years of nonprofit management under his belt. 

Jacob Spizziri provided technical consulting to usher Charity Quest out of the prototype era and into a framework that could scale nationwide. The app owes him a great debt, and his taciturn coaching has made me a better software developer.

Rocco Vaccone is a software engineer at Xonar Technology, and went to my alma mater. He was instrumental in growing the team to include more student volunteers from Stevens Institute of Technology, and also helped with the Charity Quest website!

Sam Jacobs created our Kickstarter video pro-bono because he believes in the Charity Quest project and has seen the power of its volunteer recruitment ability firsthand. We can't thank him enough, and highly recommend his video services to all who live near Southern New Jersey!

Charity Quest is a mobile app with a companion website for admin features. Our dedicated software developers help maintain the website, the mobile app, the backend service, and handle custom data queries for larger charities.

Yishu (Ben) Song joins us remotely for the West Coast and boasts a wealth of experience in Vue 3 development. He has been instrumental in cleaning up legacy code and implementing new features!

Phillip Anerine has done an excellent job working on the admin features of the website that most users never see. These tools are used by our charity partners, and are the true strength of the network. After all, if charities don't find the system useful, why would they continue posting quests for volunteers to easily sign up for?

Josh Blecherman originally joined to help us with fundraising, but found his niche in the data engineering department given his extensive work experience in that field. He is helping us clean up legacy data from the early days of the Charity Quest protoype!

We've had a lot of help with this Kickstarter from our incredible Fundraising and Marketing team!

Roma Razdan, Laina Haymes, and Sarah Solano have led the way during our Kickstarter campaign by reaching out to the press, influencers, local politicians, and businesses.

Nate Jensen is a Stevens student who has helped us film early drafts of the Kickstarter video, as well as stakeholder interviews with staff & volunteers.

Aasis Jaura is a Stevens student who created our updated logo along with its super cool animation. Then he created mockup animations with original illustrations of the attack / defense sequences that make up the bulk of the Turf Wars gameplay loop.

Laura O'Brien helps to spearhead our outreach to new partners, content creators, and corporations.

Rebecca Bang is a Stevens student who creates social media graphics, and edits our Instagram Reels.

We're blessed to work with not one, but two wonderful teams of seniors who attend my alma mater, Stevens Institute of Technology. These student teams were assigned to Charity Quest as part of their capstone projects for their final year of school.

Our Computer Science team is adding donation capabilities to our volunteering app, and our Business & Technology team has been helping with this Kickstarter + conducting market research for us.

Though we will have to say goodbye to these bright smiling faces in June, we look forward to continuing this partnership by engaging two new teams in the Fall of 2025! 

We will seek students from the Game Design program to provide additional help with the Turf Wars expansion pack, while the new Business students will conduct outreach to charities across the Tri-State area. (NY, NJ, CT)

Thank you for reading our entire Kickstarter story! If you made it this far, you probably think Charity Quest is awesome. You can be a valued member of our team by pledging money toward our campaign, sharing it with your friends, and introducing us to additional charities that are interested in our free platform.

Please pledge to our campaign, and share it with your network today!