Primary Drive

A charity search engine and knowledge base, informing donors, helping smaller charities.

The project

Primary Drive were approached to build a search engine for charities. As well as providing a means for donors to find charities, it was also to provide insights into the quality and effectiveness of charities. Information about the financial state of charities would be provided by the charity commission, and the charities themselves would provide further information using a content management system which was also part of the brief. Users would be able to identify and donate to charities that were both efficient and effective without wasting hours of their time combing the web for information about relevant charities. Behind the search engine would site a back-end system that would manage the donations and fund dispersal.

Solutions

Chester Sinclaire had a very clear vision for alive and giving, and he worked closely with our design team to turn his vision first into a logo and colour treatment, and then into a complete brand. While the brand design stage of development was underway, our developers and began a technical design process for the user interface and the underlying database. Chester was keen to keep it simple both for the person interested in finding a charity, and the charities themselves, using the system to manage their donations and the content on their AliveAndGiving pages. So a great deal of work went into creating simple, intuitive interfaces.

A simple content management system was vital as Chester Sinclaire intended AliveAndGiving to be an even playing field, allowing small charities and large charities to compete alongside each other with equal prominence. Such a system would ultimately benefit those charities that were performing well (according to the data provided by the Charity Commission), and willing to spend some time using the content management system to fill their Alive and Giving page with compelling content. This could be an overview of their charitable works, or more recent information about current programs or priorities. That would be left up to the charity.

A significant impediment to using the Charity commission data was the quality of the data itself. In order to use this data for the website it would first have to be imported into Microsoft SQL, the database that would sit beneath the website doing all the heavy processing. However, entered and managed entirely by hand, the Charity commission data did not submit easily to algorithmic processing. The database was too large for us or Chester's team to pre-process manually and besides the database is updated regularly, which would mean that manual processing would have to occur just as regularly. This presented an interesting challenge to our developers, who nonetheless created robust yet flexible algorithms to clean the data and prepare it for inclusion in the Alive and Giving search process.

Our systems administrators also had their work cut out, as they had to integrate the AliveAndGiving payment processes (used for donations) with an antiquated bespoke payment system used by the charity that was processing and dispersing the funds. However this kind of third party integration is a specialisation of Primary Drive, and the challenge it presented made it all the more compelling. So a solution was found, one that accounted for the potential weaknesses in the third-party system.

Results

Alive and Giving was launched on time, at a fund raising party thrown at University College London, attended by numerous Charities, donors, and members of the Primary Drive staff. The website was very well received and money was raised for charities. On the basis of the quality of the website, feedback from charities that had been using the system, and the business plan and credibility of AliveAndGiving's CEO Chester Sinclaire, AliveAndGiving were able to secure further funding to allow them to continue developing this important social enterprise.

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