Inspiration
According to Reader's Digest, items donated to stores often do not get sold -- only 10 percent of items donated to an actual store get sold. Students and many people can benefit from being able to obtain free items that are donated through the site.
At the same time, students can feel self-conscious, embarrassed, and even ashamed to ask for help. 80% of colleges surveyed struggled with “overcoming the stigma some students associate with accepting help for their ... needs.” (https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-19-95) Needs can range from books to interview clothing to laptops, and more.
Colleges and universities want to help their students, but they also may not have the inventory or staff time dedicated to facilitate this.
That's why our project helps people donate items directly to those in need so that they may find items they are looking for. The website automatically generates a tax receipt when an items is donated to someone in need and keeps a well-organized database of items that are donated which many 501c3 organizations have trouble doing due to the high volume of items donated, whilst also listing those organizations (including hours of operation, location, and allowed donation items) to allow easy search with matched criteria
What it does
Our website allows users to sign in and pick from 3 main sections (Active Listings, Categories, Add Donation) that provide users with information and options to get involved with donations of any type of item. We also have a watchlist that allows users to add items to a Watchlist so that they can check back to the location for which the items was donated to. We also have a form that allows users to search for 501c3 organizations based on zip code. After inputting their zip code, the table below will show the name, address and telephone number for all 501c3 organizations in the zip code.
You can create a user account to be a recipient or donor in our deployed site. You can also login as nonprofit admin to see what an example nonprofit (like a university career center) would see: username: nonprofitadmin password: nonprofitadmin
How we built it
Using Github to collaborate, we used a combination of Python and HTML/CSS and created our website through Django and Google CloudSQL Postgres.
For our database of 501c3 organizations, we initially web scraped info from an existing website with NYC donation site information using BeautifulSoup4. We then found that this data was available in a CSV file from government data, so we built the search form to implement the search through zip code.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into a few challenges along the way. It was difficult to scrape data from the donation website that listed donation sites because the database was hidden through a JavaScript code and ultimately found that the referenced site we were trying to scrape was publicly available.
We also ran into a few challenges for the database of users on the backend from trying to get Google Cloud to work to learning how to use Heroku in the last few minutes.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of collaborating together since none of us knew each other beforehand and how everything came together! In building this project, we all stepped out of our comfort zones and tried something new. We didn't have experience with web scraping and were new to working with data to be displayed on a website as well as allowing users to sign in/out. More specifically, we’re proud of the potential that allows donations to be matched with people who need it most.
What we learned
Despite eventually not needing to scrape data, we learned a lot about web scraping and how security of the website was built through JavaScript that made it so difficult to scrape the website because the HTML didn't type each location through. With both backend and frontend features of a website, it was interesting to learn how those aspects are used to create a user centric website.
What's next for Give Directly
We want to create an API with Shippo so the donor can send packages directly rather than having donatees figure it out which site an item was donated to. In addition, we want our website to auto-generate tax receipts from charity and have a database for record-keeping so that items donated can be verified.
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