Capital University graduate Madison Mikhail Bush has developed an app called Point, which allows users to find and sign up for volunteer opportunities as easily as scheduling an Uber ride or ordering items from Amazon.

After graduating from Ohio State University in 2017, Stephanie Page planned to get more involved in her adopted home of Columbus, but navigating the working world and keeping up with friends and family made it difficult.

Then, in September, the northeast Ohio native overheard some strangers talking about an app called Point that connected people with local volunteer opportunities. She downloaded it and spent the next few weeks browsing the various events at which Point users could help out.

One day she pulled up the Point app and learned that Faith Mission, a Downtown homeless shelter, needed help serving dinner that evening.

“I thought, ‘I have a free night. I’m going to go volunteer,’” said the 23-year-old, who had already created a profile on the app.

She simply clicked “Go” and went.

Volunteering with the Columbus-based and central Ohio-focused Point app is as simple as scheduling an Uber or ordering items from Amazon — at least that’s what founder Madison Mikhail Bush sought to do when she dreamed up the free mobile tool.

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Though only 26, Mikhail Bush — along with a slew of freelancing coders, who often worked for little or no money — has spent the past six years developing, testing and updating a system that not only allows central Ohioans to do good with ease but also helps local nonprofits recruit and track their volunteers.

When she first started pitching the concept of an app to charitable organizations, she discovered that they needed a better system to manage their volunteers almost as much as the actual manpower.

“They’d tell me, ‘We love this idea, but we have these other glaring issues,’” said Mikhail Bush, who lives Downtown. “They were putting data on Excel or having volunteers fill out paperwork.”

Point created cloud-based management software with which the app communicates, allowing organizations to store and analyze volunteer data. Point, a nonprofit, does not charge organizations to list events on the app but charges a subscription for them to receive live statistics, group management tools and other features.

While a few other volunteer apps exist in other cities, this is the first to target Columbus, Mikhail Bush said.

Launched in April 2018, the app has amassed more than 2,000 users, who can scroll through volunteer opportunities of roughly 70 participating charities. These include large organizations such as Habitat for Humanity-MidOhio and smaller, local charities such as Sam’s Fans and the Furniture Bank of Central Ohio.

Difficulty with volunteer recruitment and management is “pretty much universal” no matter an organization’s size, said Emily Savors, director of grant management for the Columbus Foundation, which gave Point a $45,000 grant last year to assure Mikhail Bush could launch a successful product — and keep it in Columbus.

“Nonprofits are fortunate if they even have a volunteer manager,” Savors said. “This is hugely important — having this data and knowing that they have this help on an ongoing basis.”

Last year, Point also raised more than $107,000 in private funding and won the top prize of $37,000 from Sea Change, a social enterprise startup accelerator, at a pitch event.

It’s a far cry from 2015, when Mikhail Bush said she desperately asked her Twitter followers for $5,000 to help with her startup. The 2014 Capital University graduate, who studied biology, had just blown the $20,000 she and others had worked so hard to raise over the previous 18 months.

“I didn’t know much, and I trusted the wrong people and lost a lot of money,” said Mikhail Bush, who lamented her own lack of computer programming skills. “I was devastated ... and not even close to having a product.”

But the young entrepreneur, who calls herself “a traveling vacuum salesman who stands up on chairs talking about Point,” was determined to see through this vision of putting volunteering front and center in people’s minds — and on their phones.

“You can order food at

11 p.m. from your dorm room or book vacations from your phone in different countries,” she said. “I wanted people to be able to pick up their phones on a Saturday afternoon and be able to find somewhere to volunteer.”

She enlisted a programming friend of her husband’s to create a minimally viable product. Then her desperate plea into the Twitterverse paid off: It connected her with a senior engineer at the social-media company, who was so impressed with her mission — and hustle — that he helped finish the first full version of Point.

Many test versions later, she’s finally seeing results and connecting those who want to help with those who most need it.

Megan Modene, volunteer manager at Special Olympics Ohio, used Point to help staff the organization’s state tournaments in the fall, and its dashboard has provided more organization to their volunteer system.

“We use a large number of volunteers for our state events,” Modene said. “We need to recruit from a lot of different places and this allows the volunteers to check in and have them all in one place.”

Before, she’d use emails, phone calls and spreadsheets to keep track of volunteers.

Since downloading the tool last fall, Lydia Tadros, 26, of Dublin, has volunteered with Habit for Humanity a handful of times. It’s an organization she had been interested in working with for a while, but she felt intimidated, she said. Seeing a Habitat event on Point made it more approachable, she explained.

“I feel like personally this year I want to encourage myself to volunteer more — to make it a habit,” Tadros said. “Point has helped me achieve this goal. There are clearer opportunities that I can sign up for.”

That’s the point of Point, Mikhail Bush said.

She and her team of a half-dozen contract workers, which now includes Page as the community outreach manager, plan to roll out Point in other cities in the future.

“We want to eliminate the barriers to doing good,” Mikhail Bush said. “Charities who want to do good but spend so much time with data entry or managing volunteers, we want to get them out from their desks and help them fulfill their mission.”

award@dispatch.com

@AllisonAWard