Most organizations do not need another app. They need an answer to a specific, recurring problem: people who had a few drinks at a company event, a formal, or a late team dinner need a safe way home, and calling a stranger from a rideshare app is not always the right fit. Before building anything, write down the exact moments this needs to solve. A weekly happy hour. A monthly all-hands. Game days. Formals. The clearer the use case, the easier everything after this gets.
The core idea behind a designated driver network is that the driver is not a stranger. They are a coworker, a teammate, a classmate, someone who already has a reason to be accountable to the group. Start by asking for volunteers inside the organization rather than opening the network to outsiders. A member who is not drinking that night, a student who lives nearby, a coworker who wants the extra income: these are the people who make the network feel safe rather than transactional.
Decide upfront how drivers are compensated (a flat stipend per ride, a per mile rate, or free ride credit toward their own trips), what hours the network covers, and what happens if a driver or rider does not show up. Write it down and share it with everyone before the first ride happens, not after the first problem. Ambiguity is what kills these programs in month two.
A private network only works if everyone can trust it. That means real time tracking so someone always knows where a ride is, and a two way rating system so both riders and drivers have a reason to show up on time and treat each other well. Without this, a designated driver network is just a group chat, and group chats do not scale past a dozen people.
The job is getting the people you care about from point A to point B, and the app should stay out of the way of that.Tyler Ramanata, Founder of Chariot
Do not try to launch org wide on day one. Pick a single team, department, or floor and run the network for a month. Learn what times get the most requests, how many drivers you actually need on a given night, and where the friction is. Then use that data to expand to the next group. A designated driver network that works for twenty people is a much better foundation than one that technically covers two thousand but nobody trusts yet.
This is exactly what Chariot is built to handle: matching riders with verified drivers from inside their own organization, tracking every ride in real time, and keeping the whole network accountable through ratings, so you do not have to build any of this from scratch. If your team, school, or company is ready to get people home safely without opening the door to strangers, Chariot is available now on iOS.