Inspiration
For our HackBCAIII submission we wanted to create an application to change the world. To achieve this, we built a website and backend designed to quickly pair people with charities they would likely be interested in volunteering with or donating to. Because ease of access is a major determining factor in whether or not a person will complete a given action, we thought that by facilitating the process of connecting volunteers, donations, and charities in one clean web-based application we would create an environment in which generosity is a more natural tendency.
What it does
Samaritan matches users with charities and organizations by giving them an easy way to donate extra time and items as well as money to charities on a geolocation- and need-based system.
How we built it
We used HTML, CSS, MySQL, PHP, PHPMyAdmin, Twilio, and leveraged the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastucture to host our charity database.
Challenges we ran into
Getting a database set up and connected to the website was by far the hardest part. This problem was exasperated by the fact that nobody on our team had any experience with PHP.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are collectively very proud of creating a donor-charity connection service and successfully linking it to the website.
What we learned
We learned important development skills such as PHP integration and database management.
What's next for Samarita
We hope to further integrate Twilio into our backend, allowing charities to communicate directly with potential Good Samaritans (donors/volunteers) via text message and voice call. Additionally, we hope to eventually acquire an https secure certificate, allowing us to safely route visitors of the site to the websites of the connected organizations.
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