DonationMatch

From the landfill to the hands of the community

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Inspiration

Millions of people want to donate clothing, food, hygiene products, and other goods, but in many cases, they have no idea where their donations will bring the most good. Furthermore, many nonprofits waste time sifting through donations that may not be needed in their local areas. We set out to make donating as easy as possible by enabling users to find the organizations that need what they want to give. By bringing technology to bear on this challenge, we sought to create a world where community support is simple, quick, and accessible to everyone.

What it does

We created DonationMatch, an innovative application that connects donors with local nonprofits that are most in need of specific donations.

Users can enter their location and desired donation category/categories or write a description of what they intend to donate; then, AI extracts categories from the description and finds the local charities that need them the most.

Each suggested organization displays:

• Score/compatibility

• Information about the organization

• Categories of donation the organization accepts

• Explanations generated by AI about why the organization is suitable for the donation

• Directions/distance

• Web links

How we built it

We built DonationMatch using

React + Vite

TypeScript

Tailwind CSS

Framer Motion

OpenStreetMap + Overpass API to find local organizations

Gemini AI to extract donation categories from user descriptions and suggest organizations

Firebase to store demo data for organizations and scale the project in the future

This tech stack lets us combine the power of AI donation matching with a real-world mapping system to create an intuitive and revolutionary donation experience.

Challenges we ran into

One of the main challenges we faced was ensuring the data about organizations was reliable. While mapping systems can provide addresses and other general information about organizations, they typically do not include data about what sorts of donations those organizations accept.

To address this issue, we used publicly available organizational data in conjunction with AI to recommend organizations based on user donations.

Another challenge we encountered was billing for Google Maps; some APIs required billing even on a relatively small scale. We addressed this issue by transitioning to OpenStreetMap, which let us utilize real-world location data without incurring any costs.

Finally, implementing a search system that utilized both AI and location information and could provide relevant results in a reasonable timeframe was also quite challenging.

Accomplishments we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of ourselves for being able to create such a convenient, intuitive donation experience in a short time.

Furthermore, we take pride in having created a system that can successfully extract information about intended donations from natural language queries, process that information with AI, and ultimately display relevant results to users.

We are also proud of having managed to use real-world location data to find organizations and develop a convenient, intuitive front end for our application. Finally, we are confident that our application has the potential to help thousands of people in need and thus chose this direction for our project.

What we learned

We learned that developing software for social good often involves understanding the needs of both sides of the equation. For instance, while it may be helpful for donors to find exactly what local organizations need, it is equally important to consider what information those organizations need about their donors.

Finally, we learned how mapping APIs, AI systems for donation suggestion, and modern web development technologies could be combined to create an intuitive and powerful donation system.

What's next for DonationMatch

We envision a future in which our application can be used daily by thousands of people. Features we hope to implement in the future include

organization accounts with verified information and live donation wishlists,

volunteer opportunity discovery,

shipping features,

QR code scanning for completed donations,

school and corporate donation drives,

and dashboards to track community impact.

We hope to work with companies and local organizations in the future to further develop this product and scale it across the country.

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