Creating a volunteer sign-up form for a food bank with no coding knowledge

My aunt has the task of organizing volunteers at a local food pantry, using a spreadsheet that was filled in by phone. There would be overlapping shifts, people would disappear, and my aunt spent Sunday evenings trying to fix everything by hand. I offered to create a simple solution, not having any experience in programming.

I used Replit's assistant at the start but then switched to Lovable to have a clearer interface. The initial app allowed one to choose a shift and type their name into it, and it was done within an hour. Another hour of coding was spent solving problems I did not think of earlier: What to do when two people try to book the last shift at once? How can my aunt cancel a certain shift without contacting me?

It was the second hour that gave me the most valuable lessons. The prompts that helped most were those describing a situation rather than a feature.

My recommendation is that when you start to develop something for a nonprofit organization, your first step is the maintainer of that tool or project. If my aunt cannot resolve an issue by herself, I have developed another dependency for her.

Have you developed something for a community group or nonprofit organization? What happened when you transferred responsibility and the project started to break down? Another interesting question that came to mind is which tools are best suited for people who would never open a code editor?