Investropy

Investing and Philanthropy; polar opposites? Our website acts as an investment advisor website, where one can practice investing, while also indirectly donating to charities they are passionate about.

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Inspiration

Investropy was born from the idea of wanting students to exercise their passion for activism while also gaining financial literacy.

As students ourselves, we realized that many of our peers have little to no knowledge about the stock market, but often have an extensive knowledge on the causes they are passionate about and will go out of their way to do further research on these topics.

We also realized that many large corporations donate to charities and partake in social activism, often using this as a part of their marketing strategy. Examples of this include the Coca-Cola corporation donating to World Wildlife Fund to help polar bears, the Bell corporation launching the BellLetsTalk campaign, and much more. This practice serves as a bridge between finance and charity work.

By investing in the stocks of these corporations, young adults are able to indirectly donate their money to the charities they care about while also having an opportunity to make this money back as the stock prices rise. A win-win situation!

What it does

Investropy is an informative web application that serves to help young adults make educated decisions on their future stock investments based on the causes they are passionate about.

Previously conducted studies show that 85% of today’s youth consider themselves to be an activist. By engaging in protests and discussions both online and offline, it’s safe to say that this generation has no shortage of people who aren’t afraid to stand up for what they believe in.

However, there are many young adults who want to make a difference in this world but might not have sufficient funds to make donations or the time to volunteer. Investropy works to encourage these young adults to take an alternative way of getting involved.

Now, how does this all work?

Major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, and others all donate a portion of their net earnings towards charitable organizations. By investing in these companies’ stocks, the user is able to indirectly donate to these charities through their investments and participation in the stock market. Therefore, not only is the user putting their money towards a good cause, but they also have the opportunity to make that money back through their stocks and further develop their financial literacy beyond its basics (ie. budgeting, taxes, etc).

How we built it

We first drafted high fidelity wireframes on Adobe XD to plan our web application, allowing us to have a visual guide through this process. We then custom made all graphics and icons through the sketching software Clip Studio Paint. After this, we started building the database with MySQL and then started working with Brackets to create the HTML and CSS files of the website. We then used JavaScript, chart.js, docker, php, and bootstrap.

Challenges we ran into

We had originally wanted to use Alpha Vantage to implement a real time stock API, however, none of us were familiar with this API and were quite short on time, so we decided to build a database containing all the stock information of companies we wish to present, and have specific data be extracted from there using mySQL instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that this application draws data from a database and sorts the information by the current highest stocks after filtering for specific subcategories. Team member Laura is very proud of the fact that she got to exercise her front end development skills because it's not something she tends works on often. Team member Alice is also proud of the fact that she got to work front end.

What we learned

This project was quite a research heavy one- analyzing how the stock market works, researching major corporations that donate to charities, and finding out if these corporations are on the stock market. Through all this research, we were able to gain insight on the many social issues going on in the world today and how major corporations work with charities to resolve these issues. Many team members also worked with different programming languages and libraries for the first time such as PHP, Bootstrap and chart.js, which further allowed us to develop the skills necessary for front end development.

What's next for Investropy

Investropy has a bright future. Because of the fact that our web application is fully developed and hosted on a server that’s located in our team member Alex’s house, we are able to have full control over everything. Users all over the world are able to access our website through the link IP address http://99.243.229.239:4040/ and gain insight on current stock trends and make educated investment purchases through our web application. The next step is advertising our website. Getting the word out there and making our web application known to young adults all over the world. We plan to accomplish this through social media ad and word of mouth marketing as it’s cost effective and is a perfect way to reach our target demographic of young adults. As well, we hope to one day implement an awesome domain name as well as a current stock API, so that our beautiful graphs can update themselves! We are currently looking for active sponsors who are willing to help us fund the advertisement process of Investropy!

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