Spark-For-Change

Add a spark to your philanthropy and make it go further by partnering with service-oriented corporate citizens

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Spark for Change

Inspiration

During the opening ceremonies, we were surprised to hear about the large amount of philanthropy that the various corporate sponsors participate in. We began to think about how to make these donations more visible to inspire people to follow suit. This led us to the idea of gamifying personal philanthropy, using companies' contributions as rewards.

What it does

Our app, Spark for Change, is targeted for philanthropic-minded individuals who want their donations and service hours to go farther. When users donate money to charities through the app or volunteer at charities (verified through a special SparkQR), they receive an in-game currency, Sparks. Once you accumulate Sparks, you can choose a charity to support. Companies can choose to sponsor many charities. The sponsoring company for that charity at the time will donate a proportionate amount of money on your behalf to the charity, up to a company-set max.

Users can form groups to track their progress as a group. For example, fraternities may wish to compete against each other, and an actual competition mechanism is in the future for the app.

Companies want to use Spark for Change because it allows them to get good PR / exposure as good corporate citizens. Furthermore, when companies have fundraising sprints, they can have coupons or freebies as rewards for the top users who contribute to their goals. In the future, we'd like the company-facing portal to also be able to do donation matching for employees at a better rate (than it is for the general public). A lot of employers already match donations from employees, so we would be centralizing both of these matching mechanisms for convenience.

Spark for Change also has a charity-facing app, which allows the charities to post events and reach charitable people in their area. In addition, there is a SparkQR functionality that allows the charity to scan users' unique QR codes and add their hours, making registration easy and service hours securely verified.

How we built it

We built it with Android Studio and Java.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled with developing an idea that we all believed in as we considered various use cases.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We spent time on the user interface to make it consistent and follow the branding that we created to tell our story. Furthermore, we were able to work as a team, separate the responsibilites, and communicate in order to create a product we are proud of.

What we learned

We gained more experience with list adapters and organizing UI elements with these list adapters.

What's next for Spark For Change

We created the user-facing app for this project, but the company-facing and charity-facing applications still need to be developed and integrated into our app ecosystem.

The competition aspect between and within groups needs to be fleshed out, with explicit sprints defined including goals and target charity.

We would need to get some number of companies and charities manually onboarded in order to have an incentive to use the platform for users.

Finally, in terms of technology, we built the current app on Android as a proof of concept but also plan to port it to iOS, and it would be ideal to also have it integrated in a website.

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