DonationFinder

A fast and easy way to find nonprofits that need your items for donation

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Inspiration

A lot of people have extra items in their homes and may want to donate them but through personal experience, we realized that something that might inhibit people from donating is the difficulty to find an organization to donate to. Especially, if you only have one or two items to donate or they are relatively uncommon items, it can be a struggle to find a place that takes them in. So, we thought an app that allows donators to locate nonprofit organizations easily would save donors a lot of time and bridge the gap between donators and nonprofits.

What it does

It is a web application that lets donators enter specific items they wish to donate and get results of all the matching organizations that need those items. The results are shown on a map with markers of the locations of the nonprofits as well as a contact details section. The organizations that are displayed on the map are those that register with the app.

How I built it

We used Java and the Java Servlet technology in a Maven project to create the web application. We also used html and css and javascript to build the UI. To get the map, we used the Leaflet and Mapbox APIs.

Challenges I ran into

Since this was the first web application we created, it was a challenge to get started and learn a variety of new skills needed to build the project. Some things like AJAX and Javascript's fetch function were very new and difficult to grasp at first but we were able to figure out any problems by getting help from google and especially Stack Overflow.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We're proud of trying a lot of new things with this project. Each idea that sprung up led to google searches and lots of learning. From creating animations with CSS and Javascript to using Bootstrap to style the pages, we were constantly being challenged and although it was hard at times, it was also really fun and it feels very satisfying to complete a project from beginning to end.

What I learned

We learned a lot from the basics of what a web application is to how to build one using different technologies and APIs. We also grew our knowledge of html and css and and good design techniques.

What's next for DonationFinder

-Search filters with options like within a certain radius or the size of the organization -A way for donors to keep track track of the places they donated to -More secure log-in facility for organizations -Provide email or text options to contact the organizations directly through our web application

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