Homeless shelters are experiencing a shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) as well as necessities such as food and hygiene products and are in dire need of donation 855F s as more and more people living on the streets look to them for resources during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bridge4Good is a website dedicated to connecting homeless shelters with the resources they need during COVID-19. Donations are collected through online purchases through our website, so donors are not risking exposure to COVID-19 when donating.
Shelters can register with our website and post detailing the exact items and quantities they need so users know exactly where their money goes.
Our platform also helps support local small businesses during these trying times. Local businesses can add web addresses to the shelters' posts indicating where the necessary products are sold online so that donors can purchase items remotely. Bridge4Good will help small businesses generate income during these trying times.
We used Marvel to mock up our front-end design, scikit-learn for machine learning algorithms, and Flask to deploy the back-end functionality. Using logistic regression, a machine learning algorithm, we took into account a donor’s location and donation amount in order to match donors to their best-fit shelter. We are not integrating any personally identifiable information, only the first three digits of each donor's zipcode and the amount of money they wish to donate.
Homeless shelters are able to better reach community members through our website, and local businesses are able to generate revenue during these trying times.
We will be using subscriptions and transaction fees for the growth and development of Bridge4Good.
Going forward we plan on further using machine learning to match shelters with a target group of donors based on demographic information along with an analysis of donors’ past activity to predict future donation patterns.
We also plan on expanding the platform to iOS and Android users and advertise the platform via search engines such as Google and through Instagram, Facebook, and other social media sites with platforms dedicated to social good such as @goodnews_movement and @tanksgoodnews.