More than forty people, including developers, designers, and students, participated last weekend at the Turin Techfugees Italy challenge: finding innovative solutions to help NGOs fundraise for Refugee projects.
The winners: an instagram for charity and the virtual assistant through Facebook that guides you in donations, two projects with a special focus on leveraging social networks to increase donations in emergency situations improving on the donation SMS, with a better experience for the donor.
The partners of the event – INTERSOS, Paypal, Motorola Solutions, the startups Helperbit and OJOO and the organisation of Migrants Saluzzo, saturday morning discussed the main problems and some of the challenges they face. The teams were then formed and the participants grouped to tackle specific issues. The two selected winners were:
Rebot; Donations made easy – The system that allows you to recruit donors through a Facebook “bot”, works like a virtual assistant who can start personal conversations with users, allowing them to choose the cause to which they would like to donate and gives access in just a few clicks to making a donation. During an emergency the “bot” will engage the community of donors to ask for donations directly.
Waste Your Soul – is the charitygram that converts happiness into social energy. The system follows the social network Instagram, where users post pictures and videos, with one difference: this publication of a post will automatically trigger a payment. In fact, each published content corresponds to a donation that supports a single cause to which the whole community participates and sharing of posts will incentivate an even higher participation on donations.
The prizes – The winning teams have access to prizes provided by TechfugessTorino premium sponsors Paypal Italy and Motorola Solutions that have agreed to offer the prizes winners the support of their internal development teams to push forward on the realisation of the project into actual products.
- Motorola Solutions offered the winner team a trip to Berlin (flight and hotel) for two people with the opportunity to spend time at their Facility & Innovation Center.
- PayPal will also host the winning team in their offices, helping them to acquire knowledge in the field of payments and financial technology to build upon the project by integrating their products such as PayPalMe. Moreover, all members of the winning team receives a branded Paypal backpack.
- Always with the aim of giving continuity to the hackathon projects, the TOP-IX Consortium gifted a free membership for an entire year to their Development Program.