BeneFIT

For every mile you run BeneFIT donates to a charity of your choice. Be good to the world and to yourself.

Comment

Inspiration

As runners, we're always looking for new ways to spark motivation. What better way than giving back to the community? We are all primary members of She's the First and actively raise money for Read>Lead>Achieve, so charity is something near and dear to our hearts. We thought this would be a great way to help encourage others to be philanthropically minded, while also staying healthy.

What it does

BeneFIT is an iOS app that motivates users by donating money to the charity of their choice based on how many miles they run. As users run they can track their location, distance, run time and pace to get the most out of their running experience. Once they rack up enough points, which can be tracked through a progress bar on their profile page, our sponsor will make a donation on their behalf. At any point in time, the users can change their charity choice by looking through our categorized database of non-profit organizations.

How we built it

We built an iOS app utilizing Swift 4, Cocoapods, and XCode 9.2. We utilized Firebase for user authentication and database storage to create a unique profile for each beneFIT donor. We implemented the Orghunter API to provide us with a list of over 2 million different charitable organizations, which are categorized by their philanthropic efforts. To create the run tracking aspects of the app, we used MapKit and CoreLocation to track the user. To create our CharityCheetah, we used Swift to make our very own special mascot.

Challenges we ran into

We attempted to implement an Augmented Reality Camera View into our app, but the API was very difficult to integrate into our app and it ended up costing hours of coding time which ended up in us having to scrap the idea. The database and API also took much longer than anticipated.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of completing our very first hackathon! We had a great time staying up all night together, and we are proud of our finished app.

What we learned

We learned that whatever your estimations are for how long coding is going to take, double it. We also learned that APIs don't always work as well as you think they will.

What's next for BeneFIT

We would like to find a sponsor to agree to donate for the miles people run! We would also love to implement the Augmented Reality Camera View since we needed more time, and would also like to add a music aspect such as connecting to Spotify.

Share this project:

Updates