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Shelley Taylor calls herself a Silicon Valley veteran. Veteran, she tells me, "means old."
Raised in Palo Alto, Taylor has an extensive tech background. She isn't an engineer, but she wrote the "bible of user interface" back in 1995 at the dawn of website creation, inventing a lot of the language still used to this day to describe websites and ecommerce. She's launched a bevy of startups and advised companies like AOL, Cisco, Microsoft, and Yahoo in their early days.
"My approach to being a technology founder, which I pretty much have always been, is starting with the user experience and then using that to do product design development," she says.
That's exactly what she's doing with her latest project, albeit with a more humanitarian twist. Taylor is behind the Refugee Aid app, or RefAid, which connects refugees with crucial services when and where they need them most. More than 400 of the largest aid organizations in the world—from the Red Cross to Save the Children to Doctors of the World—all use it.
In many cases, they even rely on it.
Through a simple, easy-to-use interface, the free mobile app uses geolocation to show migrants, refugees, and aid workers a map of the closest services for food, shelter, health care, legal help, and more. Aid organizations can communicate with each other—and touch base with the refugees they've helped—through a web-based content management system, as well as update and keep track of the services they offer.
The app began as Taylor's passion project in early 2016. It's an offshoot of her company Trellyz, formerly known as Digital Fan Clubs, which launched four years ago to help people manage their brands and monetize their fans on Facebook. But about 18 months ago, Taylor, who has lived in Europe on and off for the last 25 years, felt compelled to do something a bit different.
"I was impacted by the horrible images, and just felt a sense of frustration. I just thought, 'What can we do?'"
"I was struck, like many other people, by the refugee crisis," she says. "In Europe, it's much more prominent. Where I am in Italy, just looking out over the sea where I am, there are people who have been drowning trying to get to Europe, to safety. And so I was impacted by the horrible images, and just felt a sense of frustration. I just thought, 'What can we do?'"
Since Digital Fan Clubs already created geolocation-based apps with real-time data, Taylor wondered how they could adapt that technology for refugees, who she knew were already using smartphones. So she asked a number of large organizations like the UNHCR and the British Red Cross if an app like RefAid would be helpful. They all had the same answer: "That would be great."
Over the course of just one weekend, Taylor and her team created RefAid using the company's app creation platform technology. It launched in February 2016, first in the UK and Italy—two countries where refugees can have very different needs. In the UK, many refugees have already reached their destination, and are focused more on integrating into a new society. Many refugees in Italy, meanwhile, are just arriving off boats after extremely harrowing, dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean.
Nel Vandevannet, director of Belgian projects at Doctors of the World, and Mark Forsyth, refugee support services coordinator at the British Red Cross, both say RefAid has proven extremely useful for their organizations. Spreading awareness of their services has been difficult, but the app has streamlined the entire process.
"I think the application is perfect for very vulnerable groups of people."
In Belgium, where many refugees are quickly passing through to get to the UK and other parts of Europe, Vandevannet says the app has helped Doctors of the World explain to them their rights. And, in many cases, it helps point them in the direction of life-saving health care. It's not always easy to translate this kind of vital information and convince refugees of what they need, but tapping into their smartphones—which Vandevannet calls "their compasses"—has helped develop more trust between aid workers and refugees.
"I think the application is perfect for very vulnerable groups of people, who, because of bad experiences, repression, violence they had through their traveling ... don't really go to services," she says. "The application is something they can control. If the police would give information, [refugees] would never go. Because they would think that it's controlled by police, you would have to give your identity, and so on."
The app protects refugees' identities by only requiring an email address, not names or other personal information. There's also a double-login function that protects their accounts, in case they ever lose their phones.
According to Forsyth, the British Red Cross has mainly used RefAid as a directory of relevant services across the country. It enables them to search for up-to-date information about services, such as locations and opening times.
"It's not uncommon for refugees and asylum seekers to be moved all around the country," he says. "So it's really useful that RefAid covers the whole country, so we can contact services in other cities and refer people on."
RefAid is now available in 14 countries: Greece, the UK, Ireland, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Malta, Turkey, and the U.S.
They weren't planning to launch the app in the U.S.—at least not so soon. But as one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 27 to create a 90-day travel ban for citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, as well as a 120-day suspension of the U.S. refugee program. (The ban was ultimately blocked by lower courts, a ruling that a federal appeals court upheld just last week.)
"Because I'm an American, I was so upset by the Trump [travel] ban," Taylor says. "I'm an expat living in Europe, and I'm so proud of our American history of welcoming immigrants. I thought about it all weekend, and I thought, 'Well, we just have to do it.'"
She invited her team and a group of friends to her house on the following Monday, and they all got on their phones and called as many organizations with real-time legal services as they could. They wanted to make sure that people who were being detained had access to essential phone numbers. Even though the ACLU and others had set up free legal resources at international airports, many people couldn't even get out of customs to reach them.
"I thought, if we could at least make this available to people so that they can make phone calls, that would be a great start for RefAid in the U.S.," Taylor says.
In just that one day, RefAid went live in 21 U.S. cities, focusing on legal services in areas with big international airports.
RefAid isn't the only app on the market helping refugees and immigrants at various stages in their journeys. But it's especially novel because of the unexpected problems it solves for nonprofits overall: managing their resources.
What Taylor and her team didn't realize is that most of these organizations didn't have centralized databases of the services they were offering. Information on the different categories of aid they provided and what satellite offices offered was all in aid workers' heads, or on pieces of paper filed away in drawers.
"Because it's on my phone, it's available wherever, whenever, even if I'm not in the office."
"The first organization that said they would love to use our system said, 'We'll get back to you when we've collected all of the services.' I asked, 'Well, how many are there?' And they said, 'We don't really know,'" Taylor says.
That same organization, which Taylor didn't name, had 60 offices in the UK. It took them two-and-a-half months to compile everything and give her an Excel spreadsheet with 300 lines of services.
Forsyth says it's been a similar case for the British Red Cross.
"Services are changing all the time, especially these days, so paper and PDF directories are virtually obsolete from the second they are made," he says. "RefAid is updated regularly, and because it's on my phone, it's available wherever, whenever, even if I'm not in the office."
It was a revelation, and Taylor saw a market opportunity. She dropped everything else, changed the name of Digital Fan Clubs to Trellyz, and pivoted toward exclusively helping nonprofits manage their resources.
Now, the company is applying RefAid's technology to a new app called LifeSpots, in which all nonprofits can compile their services by location, helping people find the assistance they need as well as local volunteer opportunities. It's expected to launch within the next month. Trellyz also plans to do the same thing for cities, offering another app for local governments to list and manage the public services they offer.
RefAid is updated every few weeks or couple of months, as more nonprofits use it and provide feedback. Even governments are starting to hop on board — Washington State uses the app to help distribute information about local services available to refugees, as well as the UK's National Health Service and cities across Europe.
Doctors of the World is also working with Trellyz to integrate a "medical passport" into RefAid, allowing refugees to put their own medical histories in the app. It's all secure, staying in the hands of users, and solves the problem of not being able to keep such important paperwork with them as they're traveling.
Ultimately, it all comes down to what Taylor said about focusing on user experience — understanding who's using the app and then developing it to maximize the impact. And with RefAid, that human-centered approach is clear as soon as you register. You immediately get a short, two-sentence email sent to your inbox.
"Thanks for registering for the RefAid app," the email reads. "We all hope that you find some support near you, and that you have a safe journey."
With that attitude and the technology behind it to create real, positive change, RefAid is quickly becoming a must-have addition to any refugee's phone.
WATCH: This is what refugees face when coming to America
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