Phil Great

Inspiration

Inspired by those around us to promote positive change throughout society, Zorlvan Enterprises decided to tackle the idea of giving back and supporting others through philanthropy. As given the current circumstances of our society, we should all do our best to support one another.
However, there are so many non-profit organisations/charities to get involved in, making it difficult to find and pick which charities/causes to support without thorough, manual research.
We saw this as an opportunity to create a centralised platform to manage information and donations for non-profits - making it easier for people to get involved. However, beyond monetary change, we seek to build a community of keen philanthropists through volunteering events, providing opportunities for every user to make a difference, regardless of financial status.

Phil Great is an online platform for philanthropy enthusiasts that provides an access point to easily contribute to charities and nonprofits, simplifying the ever growing problem of knowing who to support and how
Both regular users and organisations can make accounts, where organisations create "missions" that have a target goal of funds raised
Users/organisations can donate to these missions, and also share these posts to raise awareness to pressing matters
- Donations can be one time or recurring, giving the user options in how they want to support charities/nonprofits
You can be subscribed to users/organisations, populating your news feed with relevant missions that correspond to your personalised needs
Search and explore functionality: providing users with easy ways to find charities/nonprofits that align with their beliefs
Event pages for non-donation contributions, such as cleanups and fundraising!

Phil Great
Preloaded Accounts:
- {username: 11, password: 11}, (user)
- {username: etanfoo, password: etanfoo}, (user)
- {username: X foundation, password: xfoundation}, (org)

Frontend
- The frontend was built using React with routes to different pages hosted on Heroku, allowing for a remote working website
- We used a template to provide us with a skeleton framework which we built upon
  - Template
Backend
- The backend was built using Django and a Postgresql database hosted on Heroku, allowing for persistent data and multiple users
- It provides custom API routes for the frontend to access via fetches, returning relevant data to be displayed to the user
- These routes are separated into account, post and donate using relative HTTP methods
- We access the database using ORM queries from the Django framework, allowing us to instantly retrieve important information

Overall
- The overall scope of the project made it hard to manage
Frontend
- It took a while for us to get the ideas rolling, and to get used to the frontend template.
- Few of our pages were not working, which we had to debug for a long time with eventual success in the end.
Backend
- As 2 of our 3 backend developers had no/limited experience with Django, it took a considerable amount of time to get accustomed to the framework
  - This led to many bugs and errors with compiling/deploying, specifically with migration discrepancies between development and production environments
- Scheduling recurring payments took a significant amount of time to get working, where considerable research and testing had to be done
  - This also proved difficult to migrate from dev to prod, as the script had to be run in a different way

Our team is proud of how much we achieved and the improvements we made in a short amount of time, particularly that we got a functioning prototype with frontend/backend deployed in the time constraints
The overall process of creating the product, from drafting to implementing went fairly smoothly, without much confusion and conflict between team members
Our final product is missing a few features that we initially wanted to include, as we realised the time constraints of the Hackathon would not allow for such in depth features to be implemented. As a result, we had to simplify our idea and only incorporate core concepts that were deemed essential

Overall
- Organisation is extremely important, it was crucial to have good communication between the frontend and backend as well as internally, as it avoids having to repeat steps and confuse each other with our changing criteria
Frontend
- It was important to get used to the framework you're working with, as it makes it a lot easier to navigate through the code if you are familiar with it. Early preparation would be much needed.
Backend
- Working with Django and its structured layout was very different to ExpressJS, provided good insight into how different frameworks are laid out
- How Django can be deployed to prod and its many features that make a developers life easier

We believe Phil Great has the potential to become a significant platform for Philanthropy enthusiasts. Depending on feedback, we might continue to improve this product :)
Currently, we only mock the donations being paid through a simple integer increment in the backend, in the future, we would like to implement api's such as Stripe/PayPal to actually allow payments to be made