AllyUp

⬆️ Explore Hacks Hackathon Project by "calee14", "Warder3", and "imatomster"!

Elevated Pitch We are bringing back the intimate feeling of generosity & connecting people with local shelters. Don't know where to donate? Have extra items? Search through endless shelter posts & never stop giving!

More information can be found in our README.md in the docs folder and the following links!

Devpost Description

🤩 Inspiration

When one donates to an organization or charity they don't see where their donation goes towards. With our app, AllyUp, we're seeking to bring transparency and the intimate feeling of generosity back to donating. Users have the ability to choose what to donate as well as provide for the specific needs of their favorite organizations. The immediate impact people make when they click the donation button will put users into a positive feedback loop. Never stop giving!

⚙️ What it does

Our app is a platform for owners of organizations to reach out to donors who are looking to give away their items and make an impact on their society. Owners of shelters and organizations can request items that they need and regular donors can decide to give them those items or buy and have a service ship them to the shelters.

Features (finished by end of Hackathon):

Landing Page for Shelter and Donors
Login & Registration Page
Functioning Frontend Home Page
Backend Database for users and posts through Google Firebase
NavBar with Search bar
Registering donating requests and donations

🔨 How we built it

✏️ Design (Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Paint):
We used Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Paint to design those fantastic logos and icons that are displayed on our app.

Frontend (React, HTML, CSS, JS):
We used React, HTML, CSS and JS to design our front end application where users will enter information that will be populated beautifully across the screen.

🔙 Backend (express.js, node.js, JS, Firebase):
Our backend consisted of api routes that would be connected to our Firebase application for data management and user account authentication.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

Google Firebase was not syncing with our frontend registration and this was one of the most difficult challenges we faced. Our project revolved around users and unique entities who could have posts and donations linked to their accounts, so this roadblock felt like the make-or-break of the project! Nevertheless, we realized that we were not accessing the correct part of the requests, and after some tweaking, AllyUp was back and accessible to anybody who wanted to make an account.

🎉 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud of our attempt to bring back intimate feeling people get when they make an impactful decision. In terms of our technilogical feats, we're also proud of integrating a backend with multiple features that can store and manipluate user data with a complex frontend with many moving objects.

💭 What we learned

We learned to work with Firebase and its intricacies. We familiarized ourselves in reading documentation to attain the knowledge we needed to develop our app and learn better programming practices. A lot of our members also learned to connect our frontend with our backend through the use of libraries, many of which we have never used before. MOST IMPORTANTLY we learned how to work long, tiring hours and still have the time and energy to crunch our final features and film a video.

🔮 What's next for AllyUp

We plan on integrating an in-app payment feature that will directly purchase a product from a trust third-party retail such as Amazon, Chewy, Ebay, Walmat and the other online retail websites. That way users can decide to donate money and still feel like their donation is having that immediate impact on an organization they love. Of course bug fixes are always the next priority. :)