CharityAF

The project is a website that connects charities with popular websites willing to donate their web traffic and an overlay template that redirects the user to the charity's website for donations.

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Inspiration

The tough times that the world has faced over the past year has repeatedly made us ask ourselves "what little extra can we do as budding developers to provide for the needed?". The inspiration dwells from intense introspection. The past year had been very tough for us and that was with the luxuries of having a safe home, food supply and all other basic amenities. This situation put our thoughts into the perspective of people who may not get access to the livelihoods they desire. First it was just covid, but that very thought kept expanding and we began to realize how important it is to always look out for someone even in tiny steps. However, that one question kept ringing in our heads. What extra? There were many mainstream apps for tracking covid or allocating beds but what of the afflicted who cannot afford a recovery? We tried to explore ways to bring that out into the light of those who can afford to do a little extra and push them towards providing for the less fortunate. We try one of those ways in this project. We try to sway a "netizen" going on about his social life in his favorite social media platform or shopping website or any other site willing to donate web traffic for charity into giving a moment and hopefully a hand, for the charities enrolled in our site.

What it does

  • The website shows existing charities with a brief description of what it is about.
  • The website has a form that allows for charities to enroll in it.
  • Enrolled charities get their charities advertised to some user browsing a site which has donated its web traffic for the cause.
  • The overlay displays the charity information and a button which redirects the user to the donation page or website of the charity.

How we built it

  • The website's front-end was built using react. We tried to make the design as simple as possible providing a brief description of the site, list of charities and a form to enroll new charities.
  • The back-end is hosted on firebase.
  • The overlay is a JavaScript file which gets injected into the domains that allow to do so.

Challenges we ran into

  • We didn't face many problems coding what we wanted, since we tried to keep it simple and were aware of our requirements.
  • One challenge that we did run into was in the authentication of charities that enroll with us. We don't have any official way of doing so, so we decided to authenticate with methods that include looking up the internet or contacting the charity directly. Over time however, we will look to build a proper system for this procedure.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We are a group of beginner developers so firstly we are proud that we have actually finished the project successfully and comfortably within the given timeline.

What we learned

  • We learned a good lot of how coding up in teams should work.
  • We also learnt to schedule our work properly and meet the deadlines effectively as a group.

What's next for CharityAF

  • The main functionality of the project was met, but with some very complex loopholes. So we aim to start rectifying these and building a proper industry competent website.
  • We also would want to reach out to domain owners willing to share their web traffic and charities willing to enroll with us and see the dynamic play out.
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