The Nexus Project by WCOC - Nexus Connection

This website helps nonprofits and for-profits to connect; businesses can quickly learn about nonprofits and connect to them through a forum, while nonprofits can easily communicate their needs.

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Inspiration

We were passionate about the idea of being able to create long-lasting and impactful relationships between local nonprofits and for-profits. We came up with a creative and effective solution that would connect these organizations through a website that could match nonprofits and for-profits together and create a line of communication. The website structure is inspired by dating applications because of the efficient way they allow people to meet to easily create a line of communication through one swipe.

What it does

This website allows businesses to discover non-profits that align with their passions and values. After finding nonprofits that interest them, the business will be allowed to join the forum designated to that non-profit where nonprofits can communicate their needs and businesses can communicate back stating if they can fulfill their requests.

How we built it

We created this website from scratch using a MERN stack (sans MongoDB due to time constraints) with Typescript. Backend development involved creating a structure of API routes, functions, and data structures for storing for-profits, non-profits, and forum logs. It was accomplished through Express and Node.js. Front-end development was done through a React app, using libraries such as Material-UI and react-router-dom.

This project was written with Typescript, React, Material-UI, NodeJS, Express, and GitHub.

Challenges we ran into

This project had a significant amount of technical coding involved. Due to time constraints, we were unable to fully implement some features we had envisioned, such as storing our database on MongoDB and a matching algorithm. A good amount of time was spent debugging and researching different packages, functions, and implementations that would best suit our needs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were given an issue (how to connect for-profits and nonprofits?) and we brainstormed, planned, and coded our way into the product we present here. We’re pretty proud of this.

What we learned

Our team is composed of a diverse background of skills. Some of us learned about full stack development and the variety of packages, languages, and platforms that come with this programming. Some of us learned GitHub collaboration and how to pitch an engaging proposal. All of us learned what we can accomplish in 48 hours with a little (lot) of caffeine.

What's next for The Nexus Project by WCOC - Nexus Connection

We would like to create a matching algorithm that will refine user preferences by taking into account any filters the user chooses (i.e. nonprofits within a 10 mile radius, nonprofits in the “Research and Education” category) and the types of non-profits the user swipes left or right on. Our goal is to build an algorithm that will most efficiently align nonprofits with businesses’ values, passions, and missions.

We would like to polish up the GUI aesthetically and functionally. Next steps include allowing non-profits to edit their own profile and forum posts, and allowing businesses to select preferred non-profit categories.

We hope to connect the WCOC membership database with our user and non-profit database. This will allow non-profit WCOC members to automatically have a profile in the Nexus Connection, and allow for-profit WCOC members to gain access to this application. To help with security, we would like to create a login screen, where members of the chamber can login to access this networking program.

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