Enviromoney

Be the change with your spare change

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Inspiration

During Covid-19, public grants to environmental organizations were taken back to prioritize investments in masks and sanitizers. At the same time, the number of online transactions in the private sector has drastically increased. Observing this trend, we were motivated to create a solution that enables people to donate spare change, generated in online transactions, to these environmental organizations.

What it does

The Enviromoney mobile app provides a simple and seamless way for users to donate to sustainable causes. The app takes users’ spare change (by rounding up to the nearest dollar on purchases) and puts it toward the organization of each user’s choice. Whether they are grabbing a snack after school or shopping online, Enviromoney provides a way to support sustainability wherever a user goes. The app also includes social and gamification aspects, such as special badges, to push users to further support causes they care about, engage with our partner sustainable organizations, and have fun doing it. On top of this, Enviromoney motivates its users to maintain participation by having a feed to show the causes their friends to. A notification system periodically updates the user on the real life impact of the donations.

How we built it

We designed the Enviromoney app using Figma to visualize the different UI/UX features that are required to make this app as easy and accessible to use as possible. After finalizing the design on Figma, we used the React Native framework to develop the front-end mobile application. We attempted to use MongoDB to process user authentication and Plaid API to link bank accounts to Enviromoney accounts for easy expenditure tracking.

Challenges we ran into

Implementing a secure User Authentication and the Plaid API proved to be extremely challenging given the short timeframe of the hackathon. Despite our attempts, we were unable to fully integrate the more complex aspects of the backend with the React Native frontend.

We were also challenged by the video making process as we prepared the script, delegated roles, and edited the final video

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having no experience in React Native or Figma before this hackathon, we were pleasantly surprised by the quality of our final application.

Additionally, we are proud that our project has the potential to positively impact society.

What we learned

As first time hackers, we learnt how to collaborate as a team on a project by organizing all the different ideas and incrementally developing the application. We also learnt how to collaboratively work on projects using Github.

Working on this app allowed us to learn how to design layouts using Figma. We had never used React Native to develop a front-end application before, however, by the end of the 24 hours we had managed to put together a cohesive front-end for our application. We had never worked with the Plaid API before and experimenting with it on the back-end taught us about secure authentication with US financial institutions.

What's next for Enviromoney

After we finalize our app from its prototype version, an important next step will be successfully integrating the Plaid API to easily and securely collect users’ financial information. After that, we can move on to include even more features to increase the appeal of the app, and contact sustainable organizations to tie them in with our project.

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