Corporate Social Responsibility In-Kind Database

Database Homepage
Sample of donation category tab

Inspiration

Our team observed that like many other Non-Profit organizations, the Haven Project relies on donations and grants to access the resources needed to serve their mission. Our team wanted to find a way to help Haven access a more diversified set of resources.

How we built it

During research, we learned about Corporate Social Responsibility and In-Kind donations. We saw great potential for connecting these resources with the Haven Project. Through Corporate Social Responsibility programs, many large corporations give various types of donations to local nonprofits other than money. We learned that these are called “in-kind donations”. Our team decided we wanted to find a way to make it easy for the Haven Project to access the many in-kind donations that are available.

Our team worked on gathering information about over 40 companies that participate in Corporate Social Responsibility programs. We created a database that listed the company names, the type of donations they make, descriptions of the donations, and all necessary steps to apply for and receive the donation. We filtered the donations by type so that the Haven Project can easily select which category of available donations they would like to view. The categories include clothing, meals & vouchers, auction donations, local grants, toiletries, and job resources.

We implemented our database into a website using Wix website builder. All information from the database is accessible on the website.

What it does

The clothing category includes resources for clothing donations, and the toiletries category includes resources for toiletry donations. Auction donations lists companies that will donate high-demand items that can be auctioned by the non-profit for fundraising, and the meals & vouchers include resources for meal vouchers, food donations, and restaurant gift cards. Local grants lists companies that give small grants to nonprofits through the company’s local branches, and job resources lists available resources to assist in building workforce skills or finding apprenticeship opportunities. We believe these categories will help the Haven Project access a plethora of resources to serve their clients.

Challenges we ran into

The largest challenge our team faced occurred when one of our team members exited the group fairly late into the event. This member had the most coding experience, and left us with a complicated and unfinished website. Our team had to ideate a way to build an effective web interface with limited coding skills and limited time.

We started the website from scratch, deserting the previous interface we had spent many hours working on. We quickly found creative ways to work with a website builder, and implemented fast research to learn how to transfer our database into the website builder.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All of our determination and willingness to persevere has led us to our finished product. We have created a user-friendly and effective web interface that the Haven Project can use to access all of the resources we spent time researching.

What we learned

Through determination, effective team-work, and creative problem solving, daunting challenges can be overcome.

What's next for Corporate Social Responsibility In-Kind Database

Our team intends for this database to continue to be updated and expanded as further research is conducted. In the future, our team envisions a function that would allow donors to visit the database and register their own resource offerings to the database.