Charitea

We want to enable people to be effective altruists by making it easy to rank charities by their cause, location and efficiency.

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Inspiration

We learned about effective altruism in our Business Ethics class. In the class we discussed how charities can be very opaque and it can be difficult to try and maximise our impact when donating. This lead us to the idea to be able to compare the impact and efficiency of different charities in order to make it easy for people who are looking to make an impact find a charity that suits their preferred causes and financial prowess. A user should be able to sort charities like any web-store by category, financial needs for a charity's goals, location (if the donator wants to physically see the results), and efficiency (quality of life improved, or lives saved per 1000€).

What it does

We are the easiest way to find your perfect Charity. Enter your amount you want to pledge, we search an index of about 1.4 million IRS registered Charities to match you up with the perfect Charity to maximise your desired impact.

How we built it

We built it with React Native for the App and in the Backend we used Fastify for the API, which works as a Proxy between our Open API's. In our API we take a closer look at the masses of data and drill down to the most important and relevant results.

Challenges we ran into

  • We could not find / analyse financial tax records from charities so we had to use more simple data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • It provides a solid proof-of-concept of enabling effective altruism
  • We think we came up with a metric that can be developed further.
  • It works!
  • We pulled through 👍

What we learned

  • How to cope with Big Data on an Open Accessible API
  • Rate limiting on Open API's
  • Analyse Open Accessible Charity Data for Impact Scoring

What's next for Charitea

  • Harvest multiple Open API's for more granular IRS Data
  • Get Access to openly accessible IRS Data for Charities
  • Analyse the impact of Charities more in-depth
  • Heavy Data Warehousing and Caching strategy
  • Add functionality to drill-down to uprising and high-potential Charities
  • And a few beers 🍺 and sleep 😴

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