Cares, Not Shares

Our Chrome extension connects news stories in social media user's feeds with relevant charities who focus on them.

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Inspiration

I read a post by a friend who said she was saddened at the events in Aleppo but had no idea what to do about it. Another friend posted a link to 10 Syrian refugee groups. I thought, why should someone have to do this intermediate step? Why isn't there a Chrome extension that does this automatically?

What it does

CaresNotShares takes social media activism from liking and posting to donations and fundraising by automatically connecting items on your newsfeed with relevant charities that work on these problems in the real world. Even if you can't donate your abilities or time, you can still put your money towards the causes you care about. That's the real purpose of this extension.

How we built it

We first created a mockup of the original extension. We then researched the best way to lay out the extension. At first we had it sit under the relevant news stories, but instead we decided to have it sit in the button as a pop-up extension, and have JavaScript just scrape the keywords.

Challenges we ran into

We unfortunately could not access any charity database/rating APIs, as they are all either private or only open to enterprises (large fee). In addition, my skill level was too low for us to do the work I had planned. We were able to create a good Chrome extension with the help of the Materialize framework, but there wasn't any way in the time available for us to feasibly search a user's page for relevant keywords (we had the JavaScript to search the page for certain phrases, but where could we pull the keywords from?) Despite valiant progress on this front, the time frame for developing something like this takes a much longer time. In the end, I added charities into the extension in order to show the power of the cards we had put in there. At least it's aesthetically pleasing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to create a Chrome extension for the first time and learn about all the necessary components. I was also proud of the fact that our extension actually looked pretty. I chose nice pictures as well.

What we learned

A great deal. We learned how to use both GitHub and Git for the first time, the terminal, JavaScript, TypeScript, and improved our CSS and HTML skills. We also learned more about databases, APIs and the perils of web development.

What's next for CharityExtension

I really want to continue with this project because I think given enough time we would be able to make a working extension out of it. I will continue with this as I continue my coding journey (my New Year's resolution is to become a full-stack developer by the end of the year.)

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