Be The Change

Inspiration

We wanted a platform that would make volunteering and being involved in nonprofit organizations not only easy, but fun too. Our idea was to have one platform to provide easy and aesthetic access to many different organizations, funds and disaster relief.

What it does

Be The Change has five main features:

Charity list
Disaster relief list
Custom cause
Random generated organization
Post system ####Breakdown of Features Through the charity and disaster lists, users can search by types or have a direct link to create their own if they cannot find what they are looking for. -In custom causes, users can create their own charity or disaster relief fund by providing a name, organization, location, link, type, details, and urgency, in the case of disasters. -On randomly generated organizations, users have a choice between charities and disasters and are randomly given a link to a corresponding event that they could be apart of. This gives users the chance to check out different organizations that they could be interested in and may not necessarily have looked into on their own. -Be The Change allows users to share posts about what they are doing in the community scene; what charities they have worked with, how they have helped their communities and what nonprofits they have supported.

How we built it

We began the project by drawing up an ER diagram for our database and setting it up. We had to be very precise with this as it would be harder to change later. Once our database was set up we were able to begin creating models for the database and implementing more methods. After this we began linking navigation up to get around the web app. Once the back-end was completed we began on the front-end development using .NET Core, HTML and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

Each person on our team began the project with their own strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, some members weaknesses were that they had never worked with any of the software that Be The Change required. Two members of the team had never worked with c#, HTML or CSS, and another member had never worked with front-end. This presented an extreme challenge because not only did we have 37 hours to complete the project, we had 37 hours to learn completely new languages and complete a project. This was very frustrating at first and yielded no progress for the first part of the weekend, but quickly started moving faster.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment is being able to piece together a fully working web application given the limited set of skills that we began with. We have all come out of the experience with many things learned; from programming languages to team working skills and time management.

What we learned

As a team we learned how to organize and develop in a very quick matter of time. Everyone in the group was entirely unfamiliar with at least one technical aspect that we used. We learned how to use front-end tools such as .NET framework, GitHub, C# and databases.

What's next for Be The Change

Next, we hope to add a direct messaging feature so that contributors can communicate with organizations to learn what more they can do, where their donation will be going, etc. We also hope to improve the donation method. Instead of linking to the organizations' donate link, we could have our own way to donate from the site. This site has the potential to help people in need, and we hope to further improve the UI to have a better experience for those who seek to help people.