Charity Growth Engine

Inspiration

Most nonprofits have the mission, the impact numbers, and the stories — but no working online donation engine, and no time to build one. Agencies are expensive and slow. We wanted to give the people who help charities grow a way to research and pitch hundreds of them, fast.

What it does

Give it a charity's website (or a whole list) and, for each one, Charity Growth Engine:

• Scores donation-engine readiness (0–6) across six real dimensions — on-site donation, conversion tracking, buildable website, ad fuel, content engine, and owned audience. A low score means a bigger opportunity.
• Writes a readiness analysis with GPT-5.6, grounded in the charity's actual website content.
• Drafts a personalized cold email — specific, credible, and ready to send.

It presents them as a ranked outbound campaign queue (biggest opportunity first) with one-click copy and CSV export, so a two-person team can run researched outreach at scale.

How we built it

Codex (GPT-5.6) wrote essentially the entire codebase — a Python + FastAPI backend (site fetcher, six-signal readiness detector, and the GPT-5.6 generation layer) and a vanilla-JS single-page UI. GPT-5.6 powers every audit's analysis and outreach email through the Responses API. We built it iteratively across Codex sessions, committing a reviewable checkpoint at each step. Human decisions: the readiness rubric, the outbound-first product shape, and reviewing every generated email.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping the generated emails specific and grounded rather than generic, and getting the readiness detection right — especially spotting charities whose "Donate" button bounces off-site and captures no data, which turned out to be the most common and most valuable gap.

What's next

Wire it to a mailer for one-click sending, scale discovery from a handful of charities to thousands, and add an inbound self-serve version charities can run on their own site.

Built with

Python, FastAPI, GPT-5.6 (Responses API), Codex, and vanilla JavaScript.

Built With

• codex
• fastapi
• gpt-5.6
• javascript
• python