Inspiration
Compared to other development platforms, chrome and web extensions experience significant web traffic as they are able to intertwine with users’ day to day experiences. As a team, we were interested in finding a way to modulate the everyday usage of web browsers through emphasizing effective altruism. Our solution was to combine common behavior patterns, such as online shopping or ordering food, and incorporate donation and charity-work into them.
What it does
RoundUp is an easy way to shop guilt free by donating with every-purchase. Most purchases leave behind some spare change, and Round Up encourages you to donate that extra change to a non-profit organization.
RoundUp prompts the user to enter a recent purchase amount. If that purchase value is a non-integer value then it calculates how much change is required to “Round Up” to the nearest dollar and spend it towards a charity. Now the only problem is what Charity?” Using an intuitive selection menu users can look through various charities and make a selection based on issues they care about. The selection menu will refer the user to different organization websites’ donation pages.
Although people love to donate and help others, there are often too many organizations to choose from and many do not use donated funds effectively. RoundUp solves this problem by giving users a few charities from each of the main fields of charities. All of these charities are known for prioritizing change rather than profit or marketing.
How we built it
Using html, css, java script, and json, we created a chrome extension. The following chrome extension works by taking an input for an amount that a user has purchased and passing it into a javascript function which calculates the amount of money needed to round up the purchase to the nearest dollar. It uses html and css to take the input from that function and display the content of that calculation to users .
Challenges we ran into
We ran into issues with using an API to refer users to and process payments within our extension. When trying to use the pledge api, we ran into an error with finding a way to find post and get requests working through a Heroku server that would post a python script to pass in values to the api.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are really proud that we learned how to integrate API into our extensions and code. We’re also proud of how we managed data flow and stored data internally. We're also proud of how we designed the form factor in a widget type space.
What we learned
We had never created chrome extensions before so we learned how to code and design one. We also learned a lot about using html and css to design the UI. We also learned how to make calls with ajax
What's next for Round Up
In the future, this project will automatically link to organizations without referring users to the organizations’ website. The extension could also allow users to create group goals and have multiple contributors to a particular cause. It could also be expanded to allow users to add new non-profits that are important to them.
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