Refugee Angel

Support and help refugees by becoming a volunteer or making a financial and/or in-kind donation.

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Inspiration

The current migrant refugee crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. A caravan of over 1,500 migrants walked over 4,000 kilometers from Central America to Tijuana, Mexico to request asylum from the U.S. government. The majority of the refugees are women, children, unaccompanied minors, and a few men fleeing political turmoil, death, and violence from their home countries. About 500 of them made it to Tijuana where, as the writing of this post, they are presenting their asylum cases to the U.S. government and awaiting approval. Through personal contacts and his non-profit organization, team member Justino Mora has been working with the refugee caravan organizers, multi-national NGOs, celebrities, and influencers to collect donations and provide legal assistance to the refugees. We have collected about $22,000 dollars in donations since the launch of the online fundraising campaign. However, this is not enough.

What it does

A Facebook chatbot that makes it easy for people to make a monetary and/or in-kind donation to the NGOs directly assisting migrant refugees at the U.S-Mexico border. We have integrated Stripe into our chatbot to process monetary donations. The Facebook chatbot also allows organizers to create and broadcast a "Donation Drop-off site" in order to collect essential items such as food and medicine from other community members. When a Donation Drop-off site is created, it is then broadcasted to subscribers living in that zip code. These items would then be transported to the U.S.-Mexico border by the Donation Drop-off Site organizers. The chatbot also encourages users to become volunteers and makes it easy to contact NGOs that are in desperate need of extra hands to assist alleviate the crisis.

How I built it

We used Chatfuel to create the Refugee Angel Facebook chatbot. It is currently integrated on the UndocuMedia Facebook page which has over 258,000 followers and reaches about 2 million people every week. On the backend we used Node.js and MongoDB to store user-generated information. Lastly, we integrated Stripe to process donations.

Challenges I ran into

It was difficult to narrow down on the kind of users that would get geo-targeted messages from our Chatbot.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We were able complete our MVP's main features: 1) Process donations, 2) Allow people to find donation drop-off locations AND host their own collection location, 3) Connect users with NGOs for volunteer opportunities. 4) Lastly, as a bonus feature, we integrated a "Subscribe" button to allow people to subscribe to updates. We accomplished this by collecting basic information about the users directly from their Facebook Messenger public information.

What I learned

We learned how to create better user-friendly and intuitive message flows.

What's next for Refugee Angel

Take our chatbot global and let it be used for other types of crises around the world such as natural disasters and human-caused crises. Our chatbot has can have immediate impacts on current crises-response campaigns and efforts.

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