Zip International Programs

My wife started working for a friend, Jaren. He manages foreign students, usual from Japan, coming to our city and staying, usually for a week but sometimes a year. The short term students are here for an American experience, to stay with Americans in their homes and then during the day they travel to have different experiences. The long term students typically are going to school while here, high school or college.

The Problem

Jaren’s main job was to find families that were willing to host 1-3 of the students for the week, or 1 student for the year. The families get paid and the experience with foreigners that is really good for kids to be exposed to other cultures. But, it is hard to find enough families each year. They would keep track of families on spreadsheets, but they made a new sheet each group that would come and no sheet was the same formatting. Different columns and data. Difficult to track and reuse families.

First Quick Fix

My wife was confused and wished it were better. So I stepped in and started by making a better spreadsheet. That helped but still not the best. I got all the data from other spreadsheets and put them into one. One source of data now. Yay! But hard to tell still if families just finished a group or had asked to do it next year, etc.

Real Fix

Any more work from here would require more tech and labor which I couldn’t do for free. We made a plan and contract. I made them a website with a database. I filled the database with all the families we had in the spreadsheet. To do that I made a spreadsheet parser that I could feed the spreadsheet into and it would separate it all out and create entries into the database. Now we could track even more data, not just family name and contact, but family members info to pass to their students. Also the students, we could keep track of their data, and the groups they were in, and the families to groups and dates, etc.

I made the website to search for families based on all kinds of things, where they lived, preferences, etc. I also created a form so anyone could come to the site and create a family entry into the database. Notes are saved per family and statuses for what the family is doing: hosting, busy, contact later, do not contact, etc.

Conclusion

I solved a bunch of other problems as well, but too complicated to get into. Generally just made things faster, efficient, multiple Zip users could log in and have different permissions to do different things.

If you'd like to see more about Zip International Programs, you can visit their site and sign up to be a host family: https://ziphousing.us.