Charity For You

Inspiration

It’s often hard to find a centralized location to navigate trustworthy charities. We were inspired to create an app which could make searching and donating easy for users, and additionally, allow donors to be in network with one another. We wanted users to explore, find, and make donations to charities conveniently, share their favorite organizations with friends, and create communities with people based on similar interests. And thus, Charity for You was born.

What it does

We used the Facebook API to allow users to log in with Facebook and see what charities their friends were interested in and for donors themselves to share with their friends.

Organizations can fill in the relevant information and we would put them into our database after verifying their legitimacy. They are required to put down the url of the donation page on their website, which will later be used as a hyperlink by our main interface.

Donors can select which categories interest them, which is basically a filter for the whole list of charities in the database. After selection, they can view the organizations one by one (“swiping” left or right to indicate their interest.) If they don’t want to donate at this time, they can click on the “</3” and a “Maybe Next Time” message will appear. If they are interested in the organization, they can click on the “<3” and three more options will show up. Firstly, they could be linked directly to the donation page of the organization’s website to either make donations or learn more information. Secondly, they could share their interest in the organization with their friends on Facebook or invite their friends to join them. Last but not least, they could join the community of people interested in the same organization, so that they can connect with like-minded people to maybe achieve something bigger together. It also allows the organizations to reach out.

How I built it

We used the Android Studio IDE, the language Java, the Facebook API and XML.

Challenges I ran into

It was difficult to configure and implement the Facebook API.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Seeing the project come together was a beautiful moment.

What I learned

We learned how to use Android Studio and how to generally create an app. We also have never implemented an API.

What's next for Charity for You

We hope to move forward by expanding our database of organizations. Also, we want to implement the networking better and create a convenient and interesting way for donors to come together to contribute to larger things.