Impact

Inspiration

When people spend money, whether it be personal purchases or donations, it is always beneficial for them to have a way of managing it all. Erica and Patricia have a passion for giving back to their community, so they wanted to focus on framing finances in the domain of social good. When people are donating to organizations, they want to see where their donations are going. Not only is it rewarding to see the direct impact of your giving, but it also might encourage you to give again. By allowing people to choose causes they are passionate about and letting them see how they are making a difference, they can be more confident in their financial contributions.

What it does

Impact allows users to choose causes they are passionate about and select organizations that are fighting for those causes. By linking to the users' bank accounts, users can make a donation and immediately see a data visualization of how the organization plans on using the money. This is shown in a doughnut chart to see the percentage breakdown and to be as transparent to the user as possible. Users also have the option to view data on their overall donations.

How we built it

Impact is a web-application that is built with HTML/CSS and Angular. We utilized the Nessie API from Capital One to receive Customer and Merchant data in order to simulate donations between a User and Organization. Angular Ng2charts were also used to formulate the graphs and analytics.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges that we faced along the way were the use of the Nessie API and the Angular Ng2charts. Because we have limited experience with Angular, we were unsure how to link the API with the rest of the application. However, thanks to the workshops and mentors, we were able to understand how to utilize the API. With analytics, we were unsure whether to use Ng2charts or D3, but we decided on the former because of the type of graphs we wanted to present.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Prior to this project, we had limited experience with Angular and software engineering. One member of the team was an Industrial Engineer who was curious in development, and she was able to learn more about software development and contribute greatly to the team. The other team member expanded her knowledge in more advanced topics such as API and graphs, and the two are confident that they use what they've learned in the future.

What we learned

The team went to two workshops, Intro to Angular and AWS: Free Tier. There, they both learned valuable skills that they were able to apply to their projects. Aside from technical skills, the two were able to learn about project management and communication with each other. The process of software engineering with a team can be complicated, but the two are now comfortable with carrying a product from start to finish.

What's next for Impact

Our next steps with Impact is to provide our Users with more robust analytics on how their money is being spent. We would also like to expand our list of causes as well as reach out to real organizations to get them connected to the platform.