newspark | Devpost

Figma design of the widget (will be ready later this week)
Seamless payment through GlobalGiving (a trusted crowdfunding platform)

About newspark

Problem we are solving & our solution

Wildfires. Coronavirus. Volcano eruptions. Issues like these surround us online. People want to help, but very few actually do. That’s because it is not easy to donate. Finding relevant charities is hard, there are simply too many and we do not know which ones to trust. Nonprofits rely on outdated methods. They get the majority of the funding in cash and cheques. It leads to not enough funding. We experienced it first hand at the nonprofits we work with. Other charities face the same problem.

That's why we are building newspark. We are making online donations easier by building a widget that allows you to donate to charities relevant to online content with one-click. Our long term vision is to work with content publishers and offer them the widget they can embed onto their platforms to serve to their viewers, and at the same time build out a donation management system that will help charities streamline their fundraising efforts. For this hackathon, we created a chrome extension that displays charities relevant to Coronavirus articles on the New York Times.

We are basing our long term vision on countless interviews with charities, donors and content publishers we had over the past few months. Before coding up the platform we spent a significant amount of time during the previous weeks making sure that our design resonates with future donors (viewers of content management websites). At the same time, we are in constant contact with several charities to make sure the donation management system we will build in the following weeks will be tailored to their needs.

Team

We are a team of 4: Divyesha, Alex, Maciej, and Karthik. All of us have significant technical experience. However, what really differentiates us is our common passion for social impact. All of us have been involved with nonprofits for many years, ranging from volunteering and mentoring young kids to serving on the board of advisors of an education charity. We experienced the problem of charities not receiving enough funding first hand, and we want to solve it.

Next steps

Moving forward, we plan to update the front-end of our platform, particularly the design, so that it has a more intuitive user interface (as pictured above). This will be done in a matter of days. We also plan to increase our social impact by matching non-Coronavirus charities with online content and integrating payment onto our platform. Doing so will increase the conversion rates of donations and allow us to include charities that are not even advertised on crowdfunding sites. Our Chrome extension will also work for many different online news sites rather than just the New York Times. Once we have incorporated these changes, we plan to advertise the Chrome extension so we can secure a large user base. More people on our platforms mean more people donating to causes that are helping people throughout the world. As mentioned above, our long term vision is to have our platform embedded in online publishing platforms, and we are currently in talks with newspapers. At this moment, we have the ability to embed our technology on any online platform, such as blogs, newsletters, and newspapers.