Linked To Demo

https://devpost.com/software/charity-change

Inspiration

Weeks of wildfires left Australia with $100 billion in damages. This included 25 million acres burned and 1 billion animals fearing for their lives. Inspired by helping out similar sustainability efforts, we decided to come with a solution that encouraged more people to donate to charities. In the USA alone, the population is approximately 300 million people, where 60% of them donate. Therefore, approximately 200 million donate. Additionally, The Nature Conservancy states that it costs approximately $1-3 to plant a tree. As a result, if 200 million people donate just $1 per day, within the span of a year, 70% of Australia's Wildfire damages will have been met.

What it does

Charity Change allows users to donate their spare everyday change from purchase to charities of their choice. You simply connect your credit card, choose a charity, and donate.

How we built it

We used Java as our back-end language with Spring and plain html/css/javascript on the front-end. The website is hosted on an AWS ec2-instance and storing information to a SQL database.

Challenges we ran into

The goal of the project was to set up a donation service. However, we were not able to complete the bank functionality, where the user's bank records are listed on the website, giving the user the option to donate their pocket change. This requires using some kind of API or software we do not currently have access to, so we decided to make this application as realistic as possible, knowing full well we will resolve this issue in the near future.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our user interface, since we realize that in order to increase donations, users should not be struggling to navigate the website. We spent extra time making the buttons, colors, and text boxes look aesthetically pleasing for the user.

What we learned

We learned how to deploy a web application using the AWS EC2 server.

What's next for Charity Change

So far, we have created a website for users to find a certain charity and donate their pocket change. We have added functionality so the user can add his or her credit card, but we haven't yet worked on transferring the funds from one account into the desired charity. Our next steps are to link increase security and authorization, connect with many banks to attract more users, and add more charitable organizations.