Given the time constraints, we decided it was unwise to assume we would be able to work with Comfort Delgro to mount our devices on the buses, or obtain access to their API to improve the accuracy of our estimates. As such, we’re back to working on Give For Free, with a slight twist. It’s no longer a platform for giving your stuff away free, but a way to raise funds for a charity of your choice.

The New Give For Free

In the new system, Givers give away their stuff out of the goodness of their heart. If you see an item you want, you just need to donate a certain amount to a charity of the giver’s choosing before collecting the item from the Giver. This doesn’t sound too different from the old system. We just have to throw in a new ‘payment’ feature, and list the charities on the site.

We ended up going for a complete revamp of our site. (We’re super lucky to have an awesome designer Zhuohan to implement the changes on the front-end.)

Making Donations Work

This was a big problem for us. How were we going to get people to donate in a way that we are able to monitor and track?

We considered a few different methods.

1. Have the charity donation pages in an iframe.
2. Collect the money first, then payout to the charities every month
3. Use some payment processer to send money directly to the charities
4. Use an intermediary (GiveAsia) which already works with a list of charities

Iframes are a bad idea

This was quickly dismissed. Using a iFrame would mean that we can’t track the payments unless the charities had some callback for us (which most clearly don’t have that kind of infrastructure). Furthermore, it just doesn’t seem very secure making payments through an iFrame. This could reflect badly on our site (people might think we’re a phishing site).

Managing money is a nightmare

Putting aside concerns that users might not trust us with the money, we also don’t want to have to manage large sums of money. We would need to be completely transparent, which just means a whole lot of paperwork to done.

Send the money to them directly

This is what we’re probably gonna do. We plan to use Paypal’s Adaptive Payments to send money to the charities, which allows us to get a callback when the payment goes through. Furthermore, we’ve found quite a few charities that already have Paypal setup, so all we need would be their registered email address to send payments to them.

Our only concern about this is the fees (3.9% + $0.50) for each transaction seems really expensive.

GiveAsia

If possible, we also want to see if we can work something out with GiveAsia. GiveAsia raises money for charities via campaigns, and has deals with both Stripe and a long list of charities. This means that a larger percentage of money will go to the charities rather than the payment processer.

Next Step

We hope to get the next version live by Monday night, then start getting the school community to start uploading stuff they wanna give away. If unfortunately no charity gets back to us, we’ll probably just push ahead and just send money to them via our site anyways (since all we need is their email address).