Charitea

Inspiration

Americans donate $400 billion to charity annually. The FTC estimates $10 billion goes to fraudulent organizations who steal from people trying to help. Often, scammers race to create charities after natural disasters and know people want to help immediately. They take advantage of that fact that people cannot verify if a charity is real in the moment they’re being asked to donate. We hope to fill that gap with Charitea.

What it does

Charitea scrapes data from multiple sources including tax documents, google searches, and newspaper searches in order to extract financial and future plans. Then, it presents financial info to the user in a presentable format, along with a trustworthiness score indicating how healthy and transparent the charity is.

How we built it

We used Flask for the backend, along with Google and OpenAI APIs for web searching and LLM processing. We scraped websites using requests. For the frontend, we hand-drew the background and used Next.js for a modern yet elegant design.

Challenges we ran into

We spent a great deal of time coming up with this idea and fleshing it out, leaving little time to implement. Our team took a long time to reach consensus on multiple ideas (no fights, just collaborative discussion).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing everything in time. It really was a race to the last minutes (I'm writing this 10 minutes before the deadline!).

What we learned

The idea is the most important part. I really think our product was amazing despite our limited time, compared to other hackathons I've done where we took <30mins for the idea.

What's next for Charitea

We hope to process payments in-platform, and tell users EXACTLY where their money goes. This is pretty groundbreaking / revolutionary because financial transparency, although revealed through documents, is still one of the biggest issues in donations.