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Overview
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Inspiration
“1 Like = $1 Donated to Charity.” Everyone has seen these viral posts on their newsfeeds with pictures of sick children or the aftermath of a natural disaster, and many of us are even guilty of believing that our social media efforts are capable of raising more than awareness. We’d all love to donate to a good cause, but few of us are willing to go out of our way to do so. Now with LikeFund, you don’t have to.
LikeFund makes charity a part of your daily routine by putting charitable opportunities right in your newsfeed and sending the organization a microdonation of just a few cents from your checking account with each “Like”. These microdonations are so small that you won’t have to think twice before donating, but for a viral post with millions likes, they can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars!
In recent years, it’s hard to find anyone who hasn’t seen something go viral on the internet. These instances can range from funny clips of animals to important information regarding the state of the world we live in. We’ve all seen the power of awareness - just knowing of the suffering around the world can change the way a person or a nation makes choices. In many cases, people may want to help but aren’t comfortable enough make a call and donate to charities even if they support a cause. We wanted to make it so that (useful) viral information does more than just make people aware, but also gives them an accessible way of providing tangible aid to people in need.
What it does
Allows Facebook users to actually donate a small amount of money along with liking a post - to give instead of show support to those in need around the world.
How we built it
We built the project as a Google Chrome extension.
Challenges we ran into
Most of the major issues we ran into involved the security constraints of Chrome extensions. We originally wanted to incorporate more technologies into the extension for both processing and data visualization, but we after hours of trying to find workarounds to the constraints we finally decided to scale back. In some cases this introduced the need to rework a large portion of our plans, since we were no longer able to make use of core APIs like the Facebook and Google Maps interfaces.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
What we learned
A lot about web development and practical programming including how to use NoSQL databases such as Firebase, how to utilize a financial API like Captial One’s Nessie, and much more.
What's next for LikeFund
We think that LikeFund is definitely an idea that can take off. The next steps for LikeFund would be to work with Facebook to integrate the extension with their site, rather than scraping information from the HTML and building on top of it. This way, we would be able to show users charities most relevant to them the same way Facebook shows users relevant ads. These native charitable opportunities would be more seemlessly integrated into a user’s Facebook newsfeed.
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