Make A Change With Change

Inspiration

A Youtuber named MrBeast recently brought together more than 600 YouTubers to raise $20 million to plant 20 million trees. Although the campaign was just launched on October 25th, over 12 million dollars have already been raised. In an effort to meet consumer concerns about climate change, we dreamt up Make A Change With Change. Climate change is a burgeoning issue that is too big for any one person to tackle. We believe that any small amount of change can make a big difference, especially when that small change is being made by thousands of people.

What it does

Our idea is an application that financial institutions can implement to build a better world. It offers consumers a convenient way to contribute to the fight against climate change. While there are many things that someone can do to lessen their impact on the earth, most people don't know where to start.

Our application essentially provides a way for consumers to donate their change from purchases to vetted environmental charities and organizations. This would be an optional feature for users to enable. Here's a detailed overview:

• A user would add our application as a feature to their financial application and build their profile. This application takes the "change" from purchases made by any accounts the user chooses to link. The change is calculated as follows: change amounts below 50 cents will be rounded to 50 cents and amounts about 50 will be rounded to the full dollar amount.

   If the user makes a purchase totaling $23.37, they will be asked if they'd like to 
   round this purchase up to $23.50. The change that would be donated to their 
   chosen charities for this purchase would be 13 cents.  
  

• To build their profile, the user would first go over the list of available environmental charities and choose which ones they are interested in. Next, they will be asked if they'd like to have this as an automatic feature for all purchases or if they'd like to manually approve purchases to round up.

• Any transactions that the round-up is approved for will be tracked on the app. The monthly accumulation will be displayed with the transactions listed underneath. At the end of each month, users will be able to choose what percentage of their donation will go to which charity.

• All past transaction history will be saved in the app as monthly records.

How we built it

The team's two developers, Allen and Srikar, weighed the merits of creating a web application vs a mobile application and ultimately decided on a mobile app to show how the feature could be built into existing applications. By following video tutorials to teach themselves Swift, they made an interactive demo of the finished project.

Challenges we ran into

We actually had trouble deciding which challenge to focus our efforts on. There were many that appealed to us but ultimately, we narrowed it down to the Capitol One challenge and Code For Good challenge. Although we wanted to develop a full-fledged application, we decided a demo was more feasible given the time constraints and learning curve involved.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Learning a new language and being able to make a working demo!
• Working as a team to create a successful project while utilizing our own individual skills
• Having fun even through the challenges we faced!

What we learned

• Swift is not something you learn in two days (but Allen and Srikar did awesome regardless)
• Sleep and food are very important for hackathons
• Mentors are very helpful in giving advice (shoutout to Manjunath!)

What's next for Make Change With Change

Hopefully, this will get developed into an actual application. We're all in the process of learning more and more as our degrees progress so check back in May 2020!

Built With

• swift