Inspiration
We wanted to find a way to help people donate to causes they care about easily, including but not limited to political causes and charities. It is often difficult to determine how much to donate, and the different platforms each institution offers for donations pose a challenge as well. Although many people want to contribute to charity organizations and take an active stance in supporting political institutions, the difficulty in doing so creates a clear disconnect between the people's good intentions and actual donations. Pearit seeks to bridge this gap by giving its users the ability to consistently donate the organizations they feel strongly about.
What it does
The key to our app is its ability to seamlessly transfer funds from creditor to organization with little to no effort required by the user of the application. This ease of donation creates a large impact with minimal time investment - once the app is set up, it runs completely automatically. Pearit links with your credit card transactions, rounding up each purchase to the nearest dollar. The difference in change is then distributed among institutions chosen by the user in a ratio they would like. As the size of donation is consistent between each purchase - always confined to under a dollar - the user can ensure that they are continually supporting causes they believe in without incurring a sudden large expense. The account holder can then log into the dashboard and quickly understand the history of transactions and donations being made on their behalf.
How I built it
This app was created using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. An HTML page was enhanced through visually appealing additions and a basic framework was adapted to work for multiple accounts and account settings. The graphs were first outlined in Excel, then adapted for a web setting. Our site is user-friendly for both mobile and web users, and a further development could be to create a complete mobile app interface for this software.
Challenges I ran into
Nessie, the Capital One API that would have greatly streamlined the process of integrating our app with the user's bank account, was down, so we were unable to completely replicate the interactions between the bank account and credit card user. However, our front-end development allowed for reasonable demonstration of this process and fleshes out how the application would function in the real world. This was a difficult project for us, however, because we were not familiar with creating more advanced websites using CSS and Javascript. We were able to learn as we went on, relying on guides online.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Despite being newcomers to website design, we managed to create a functional and effective website that is easily adaptable to both web and mobile applications.
What I learned
We learned HTML, CSS, and some Javascript.
What's next for Pearit
We plan to implement greater backend development that would streamline the development of the application as well as extend this service to actual mobile applications from just a mobile site.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.