Donatr

Inspiration

The heartbreaking stories of tragedy over the globe that receive minimal attention on social media or get comparatively less financial aid made our team realize that there is a disconnect between intent and action for donation due to lack of awareness and an easy way to connect to humanitarian NGOs . People are eager to donate but cannot easily find the right NGOs across the globe to donate to. Our team identified the need for a platform that connects a user to a cause they care for, a middle man for donations essentially. We saw the need for a platform that effectively connects users around the world to lists of humanitarian projects in different countries, enabling users to be more involved and aware. Donatr makes donating easier as you are quickly connected to a legitimate charity that’s based anywhere in the world. Donatr not only raises awareness for these humanitarian issues, but also enables the global society to be more unified in helping the less privileged by allowing users to easily view necessary information about humanitarian NGOs and charities in any country in the world and giving them a link to go further to the NGOs site and donate to the cause.

What it does

Donatr connects a potential donor to NGOs and charities around the world with a click of a button. Based on the country selected by the user, Donatr matches the user with a list of legitimate charities or NGOs, along with essential information about each NGO such as their title, the theme of each project ( varies from education to inequality and even up to disaster relief), the link of the project’s donation site, and a summary of what the charity does and its mission. Donatr also aims to tackle the issue of unawareness and Societal ignorance by informing users about current pressing humanitarian issues around the world on our “current issues “ tab, giving them the information they need with an easy click of a button.

Donatr and Humanitarianism

Humanitarianism is the promotion of human welfare and our project does exactly that. Donatr helps to raise awareness and inform users of pressing humanitarian issues all over the world, and also links users to NGOs and charities that are actively working to help the people affected. The charities available on Donatr tackle a wide range of issues, varying from disaster relief to educational funding. We hope to impact the lives of individuals, families and entire communities by helping raise awareness and funds for whatever situation they’re in, regardless of where they are in the world.

Challenges faced

We had challenges with retrieving data from the globalgiving API, writing code that efficiently loops through each array of data for every return so that the user is only presented with necessary information. We also faced issues with styling a user interface that is Topic sensitive but also informative and easily navigable by the user. In addition to this, we had issues using both HTML and JavaScript interchangeably to make the API call function work. Another challenge we faced dealt with with working around each others schedule. In order to make our website we needed to all be on a server at one time which was very challenging at times. On top of this, since most of our team was relatively new to HTML, CSS and JS we had to try our best to learn the language while simultaneously working on our project.

how we built it

We built the web app using an API called global giving. We used jquery call functions to retrieve data on the backend and then used for loops to loop through each array of data and return relevant information about each object in the array. We used html and css and bootstrap to style the front end and making the pages responsive and interactive. We implemented ISO country codes into our html so that the country selected by the user returns a value to the API call function that the API then used to retrieve data. We coded teach tab on the website using responsive css so that data Is displayed well. We also used links to relevant articles on the current issues tab so that the user can navigate to articles about pressing humanitarian topics.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We are proud that we found a good API, Wrote a good API call function and effectively styled our user interface and ultimately developed a valuable product that can change lives around the world . Furthermore we developed this project in so little time, overcame challenges, and worked so effectively with new teammates ( we all just met each other ).

What we learned

Over the past few days our team learned a lot, some key learnings from this hackathon include:

Teamwork: We learned that when tackling such a huge problem in the small timeframe that we were provided it is crucial to optimize every member of the team in order to make the best product possible.

How to incorporate a new API: Our team came into this hackathon with little to no prior knowledge on API’s which made it extremely difficult for us to initially implement our API. Over the last few days however we learned how to not only implement an API but also how to output the information in a user friendly and attractive manner.

Coding in HTML, CSS and JS: Several members of our team started this hackathon with minimal experience in web development with HTML, CSS and JS. Over the past few days we were able to learn a lot about these languages and how to use them in order to make a responsive and user friendly website.

There is always something that will go wrong: One key lesson that everyone in our team learned is that despite how simple a task may seem something can always go wrong. This most notably occurred hours before this project was due when our home page stopped working. This taught our team to always prepare for something to go wrong so when it does we don’t make things even worse.

What's next for Donatr

We hope to make the website easier to use while increasing the amount of valuable info given to users. Donatr plans to add automated user matching and also a messaging function that would enables users to chat with NGO organizers on our website. Future features could be a chrome extension that accompanies the website. This extension would match users to a charity based on an article they’re viewing. We also hope to expand our platform and gain many users of all ages across the globe to join forces in this journey to global unity.

Built With

• bootstrap
• css3
• globalgivingapi
• html5
• javascript
• jquery