Projects

Each hackathon is a chance to learn something new about a nonprofit. A new problem, a new solution.  While we don't have prize money to incentivize completion of every problem, we track the projects that we still need to solve for humanity here. 

If you are looking to build your portfolio, help your community, work on something challenging, or leverage your skills for social good, join us via GitHub and Slack to help us complete these projects.


These projects come from our years of experience working with nonprofits, we sought to generalize the problems we see in order to impact many nonprofits, so although you'll see a few called out, we intend for these solutions to be used at scale, open-sourced, globally, at a relatively inexpensive price point.

We are moving these projects over to our Hacker Portal on ohack.dev in order to create a more collaborative environment.

Project Status

1. Digitize Paper Forms

GitHub

Status: Post-hackathon: need help


Nonprofits are using paper forms. The cost to digitize these forms to an HTML form in order to integrate it into their existing systems is difficult. Google Forms is great, yes, but it still requires some effort and knowledge without allowing integration with existing software applications. We have been working with ASU on two senior capstones around this problem that we can leverage as a head start.

Requirements

References

Non-Profit Examples

Suzanne OliverNMTSA

2. Simple Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR)

GitHub

Status: Post-hackathon: need help


Some nonprofits have "clients" that require demographics and treatment to be tracked easily. This usually requires some scheduling component as well as a historical record of visits with services provided, then reports follow. There are open-source EHR solutions on the internet, but none are simple enough for nonprofits to use without dedicated training.

Requirements

References

Non-Profit Examples

3. Client Relationship Manager (CRM)

No GitHub exists

Status: Post-hackathon: need help


This is the sister to the Lightweight EHR project above. Instead of tracking health and progress of clients, nonprofits typically do this with Excel or Google Forms and also manually integrate into DonorPerfect and other non-profit platforms. SalesForce is the obvious leading solution here, but still charges nonprofits for use. Platforms like SuiteCRM or SpiceCRM and various open-source platforms are available, but nonprofits don't have IT support right next to them, they need something simple and cost-effective. A big part of this is making different external systems integrate with this CRM (e.g. DonorPerfect + SpiceCRM), but this work will be optional for this summer project.

Requirements

References

Non-Profit Examples

4. Risk Scoring

GitHub

Status: Post-hackathon: need help

Started: 2019 (Team 2 & Team 19)

Additional Work: 2020 Summer Volunteer Internship 


Nonprofits need a way to vet the standing of people, specifically for pets, as they want to be sure they are going to a nice home. Given a social media profile (and potentially their network) that someone has granted access to, analyze the content of their posts to create a risk score to understand if there are any red flags for pet adoption.

Requirements

References

5. Volunteer registration and tracking

GitHub

Status: Post-hackathon: need help


There are a ton of nonprofits that want to allow volunteers to register on their website. Registration and signup is not new, and there is room to standardize how nonprofits collect registrant data. Volunteers and clients have a need to create an account in order to allow the non-profit to offer services or ask for help from them. Once a volunteer is registered, they help the non-profit and their efforts need to be tracked so that the non-profit and the person can understand their contributions, for personal benefit, but also for tax reasons.

Requirements

Instead of trying to build a system to do this, we want to perform market research to recommend a system for all non-profts to use. We think that a platform should already exist, but we are counting on you to weigh all of these requirements and perform a gap analysis to tell us if we should build a system to do this, or if one (or maybe two systems that are well integrated) already exist.

References

6. Intelligent Donation Platform

No GitHub exists

Status: Concept: need help


Donations are a key resource for nonprofits, the more funds that can be raised, the better. We need to dig deep with this one and look for engineering methods to increase recurring donations or volume of donations. This project is very open-ended and will require some research into human behavior as well as prototyping some software that may not exist yet. After spending some time researching what is out there, see if you see a gap and either prototype it, write code, or write out your thoughts.

Some ideas:

Requirements

References

7. Inventory Management System

No GitHub exists

Status: Hackathon: need help

A large set of nonprofits that would benefit from a solution here are food pantries (note the difference between a food bank and a food pantry). There are large food pantries who likely have all of the software they need (including an integration with Link2Feed), but most of the smaller food pantries won't have everything they need, but still need to provide food for their client base. An effective, free, solution here will benefit many food pantries.

The general solution you are solving is: given a certain inventory that could be spread across many different buildings, how can a non-profit know what inventory is available in near-real-time (within 2 minutes of an item being added or removed).

Requirements

References

8. Notification System


Status: Hackathon

For Opportunity Hack 2018, Children's Cancer Network used Constant Contact, but was missing a mechanism to text clients to ask for them to RSVP, gather how many people responded to a given survey, and wanted to have a simple method to reach out. A great solution Easy Message and we would love to see this push into production so that more nonprofits can benefit from it.

Requirements

References

9. Digital Form Optimization

Status: Hackathon

This one is pretty straightforward. We'd like to take an existing winning idea and scale it for other nonprofits to use. Some nonprofits cannot afford tablets or don't want to go through the trouble of emailing/texting forms, they would still rather use a combination of paper and digital forms. This solution hopefully bridges this gap a little more effectively than requiring a human to review paper forms.

Requirements

10. Social Injustice Index

GitHub:  Frontend | Backend

Status: Post-capstone


Technical debt is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now that may only mitigate a portion of the problem instead of using a strategic long-term approach that would take longer and endure the test of time. Larger corporations accumulate technical debt in various ways. Over time, tech debt becomes known through fail points in the system: latency goes up, reliability goes down, or changes and deployments take longer to complete. Companies must address tech debt with a focused group of people to resolve latency. This typically works well, but as time passes, the same issue can surface again.

With social injustice, we see the same pattern. In the case of latency, a mature organization will put measurement and attribution in place to ensure that any skew in latency is quickly discovered and resolved. With social injustice, the solution is more abstract and less concrete. One goal would be to develop and maintain a social injustice index based on data surrounding social issues by leveraging current events from multiple media outlets, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, along with Google Trends. This would allow for some measurement to be performed at the state and national level so that trends and magnitudes across localities could be examined objectively through a data driven lens.


Update: May 2022

We have been working with students as part of ASU's Senior Capstone program over the last two semesters to prototype what a solution might look like.

The team has written the following open-source code:


They have also prepared this short demo video as part of their capstone showcase:

Requirements

References

11. Recommend the best website platform for nonprofits to use

Status: Concept

This project only requires significant research in this space, you'lll need to create (free/trial) accounts, Google your heart out, and document your analysis of the various options available for nonprofits to use. Instead of surgically repairing various websites, we would instead like to recommend a platform that nonprofits can use. We'd then use Opportunity Hack to work with them to move their content to this platform that you recommend.

Requirements

References

12. Virtual fundraisers

Status: Concept

COVID-19 has people staying home and away from groups of people, so avenues like fundraisers are unable to be a stream of income for nonprofits. We need innovative ideas that will get people to donate virtually and online that hopefully also have a viral or gamification element to get people engaged.

Requirements

References

Completed projects

Rebekah Brubaker RealTimeSteam

Analyze trends to recommend areas of STEAM focus

Status: Maintenance

Code: https://github.com/opportunity-hack/popsteam

This was originally put together in our 2019 hackathon and productionalized during the Summer 2020 volunteer internship.

For Opportunity Hack 2019, RealTimeSTEAM was looking for a way to analyze data on the web in order to provide their own staff, along with teachers and parents a better way to introduce STEAM concepts to children. If there was a way to intersect popular culture with science and technology, as these things evolve, it would provide new educational ideas.

Requirements

References

Matthews Crossing Food Bank Data Manager

Code: https://github.com/2018-Arizona-Opportunity-Hack/Team15-Matthews-Crossing-Data-Manager 

Our solution, Matthew's Crossing Data Manager (MCDM), works in conjunction with their main system, Food Bank Manager, in order to ingest the donation and guest data, automatically classify it, and generate meaningful reports that Matthew's Crossing can make use of to directly improve their service.

2018 Opportunity Hack Matthews Crossing.pdf