uplift

Inspiration

“Optimism for a better world” made us look hard at the news. Headlines are often bleak; ignoring them feels irresponsible, but doom-scrolling isn’t helping anyone. We asked: what if reading the news could leave you hopeful and ready to do something? Our idea is simple: transform each problem in an article into a clear path to action. As you read, we surface organizations tackling that exact issue, along with real and actionable ways to help, so the moment you feel concern, you can turn it into progress. News that doesn’t just inform, but equips.

What it does

uplift is a Google Chrome extension that is a small button on the bottom of your screen. It'll only show up when it detects negative news articles. When it does you can click on it and it'll show you a list of organizations that are helping to combat the problems found in the article and ways to interact directly with those organizations. In addition, it'll provide a link to a news article that highlights the work that others are doing to actually solve these issues.

How we built it

First, we extract the article's text, perform sentiment analysis on both the title and body, and stop the process if the article is not sufficiently negative. If it is, we use GPT to generate a targeted search prompt from the article's topic.

We then use that prompt to search the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer dataset (via a custom API request) to generate a list of relevant non-profits. We cut this list down and rank the results by a simple impact proxy using the data that we extract from ProPublica. Finally, we use the Google Custom Search JSON API to grab the homepages and critical data points for the top three non-profits and display them.

Challenges we ran into

There were a lot of problems with google extensions. We never had used them before, and the ui for them felt more challenging to make than a typical website. In addition, many of the API's that we had wanted to use cost exorbitant amounts of money, from CharityNavigator to GuideStar, so we had to resort to ones that had slightly less information but we could actually use for free.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for uplift

We believe that uplift could be better if we could connect a full website to uplift with full accounts so that we could track what users on uplift are actually doing and how they're making an impact, so that we can show them that other people also care about their issues and that we are not in this alone.

Built With

• chrome
• cloud-natural-language-api
• css
• google-custom-search
• html
• javascript
• openai
• propublica