PhilOpt

We lower the barrier for supporting charitable projects and make it more personal. We match your genuine interests, talents and skill with specific needs of certified organisations around the world.

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Inspiration

Helping others in need is an importabt, yet not an easy task, well, where shall one start? How can one discover projects she / he is passionate about? Often people would like to contribute, but find it hard, because of the effort thats needs to be put into researching about projects. We provide a simple solution for you and help you to help others.

What it does

We deliver a public tool for you to discover highly relevant and certified charitable projects you personally, or as a whole company feel passionate about and can support with your specific talents, skills and resources.

How we built it

We built our responsive Web Application using the very capable JavaScript Framework React. In combination with our Database Backend System from Firebase, our platform is built with modern-day technology, which allows us to have full modular control over the content of our plattform. In particular certified users (e.g help organazations) can submit their relevant projects to our database. Aditionally we included our own Domain (philopt.org) to ensure our project will persist, so that it has an impact even after the initial Hackatum.

Challenges we ran into

We clearly ran into different challenges, some of which were caused by the 36 hour hackatum time frame. Building any technology needs a lot of debugging. Also having a time frame that narrow, puts very hard decisions the to table - One will have to simplify the project to its most important core functionalities, even there is plenty of the "cool" ideas you have in mind. Regarding the planing of our project structure we faced the challenge to find the simplest way for a user to help others.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to develop a platform that can have a real world impact, changing the way people even perceive charity. Our tool supports charitable projects on a whole new data-driven, digitalized and modern level.

What we learned

We learned that keeping things simple is a great and important strategy for making progress in projects, especially those projects that are narrowly timed. Furthermore we learned that it does not always have to be complicated or super time consuming to make the world a better place - It just takes one Weekend to create the foundations.

What's next for PhilOpt

There are several further steps for us to take. Technologywise we will implement a full user system, including different user classes for certified organisations, Companies and Peronal Users. Therefore we will contact certified organisations, so they can upload their current projects to our database and make them easy accessible for our users. We will also reach out to companies, which we want to help to create their very own and unique portfolio of charitable projects their employees are passionate about. So companies that work with our platform give their employees the priviledge to decide which charitable projects to support. Additionally we are of course open to support personal users. There are a lot of other ideas to follow, like creating a heat map indicating where on the world urgent problems are located or further enhancing our recommandations.

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