Donate Tags

We should all aim to be engaged citizens who actively participate in the governance of our society. Civic education goes beyond involvement in politics and society; it includes participation in various settings such as classrooms, neighborhoods, groups, and organizations. Through civics education, students gain knowledge and skills to make meaningful contributions to public discussions and processes related to real-world issues. They also learn about important civic practices such as voting, volunteering, serving on juries, and working collaboratively to enhance our communities.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the global volume of food wastage is estimated at 1.6 billion tons of "primary product equivalents." Total food wastage for the edible part of this amounts to 1.3 billion tons. Whereas, on the other hand, millions of needy people sleep empty-stomach each day. Also, the carbon footprint left by global food wastage is estimated at 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere per year. 

Did you know that 20 billion tons of clothes end up in landfills each year? And it is not just clothes, other items such footwear, food, stationery, household goods etc. reach the landfills every day. In contrast, most needy people do not have access to decent clothes, footwear or other necessity items.

One person's trash could be another person's treasure. While millions of tons of used items get added to landfills each day, there are millions of needy people who could otherwise make good use of most discarded items.

The challenge is to enable donors to donate to needy people, directly. Existing donation platforms do not allow peer-to-peer donations.

To encourage more donations, donors should be able to locate needy people/ institutions and donate to them directly more so when it is comes to donating food.

Donate Tags brings donors and needy people/institutions on to a single platform. Donors are enabled to directly donate to needy people around them.

Donate Tags focusses on providing needy, homeless people with necessities such as used clothes, shoes, medicines, and such. It primarily focuses on solving the twin issues of Hunger and Food wastage around the world as it is estimated that millions sleep on an empty stomach each day. On the other hand, millions of tons of food are wasted each year.

Donate Tags is being built to help needy, homeless people. Donations need not be newly purchased products when used items found within our homes can be of great use for people in need. This way, we can easily Reduce, Reuse and Recycle and in the process, greatly assist in the conservation of Mother Earth!!

The solution includes the use of an Android App by Donors and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled tags which are distributed to the needy. The location of the tags is crowdsourced and near real-time locations is provided to donors who can use our Android App to locate needy people and donate items to them. 

Android Tags are coin-sized, inexpensive and can be easily carried around. They work similar to how Apple Tags work. Their cost is the same as buying a pizza for needy person once. However, if one such tag is given to a needy person, more people can donate to that person for over a period of 6 months before the inexpensive battery needs replacement. This way the needy person's necessities are fulfilled for a better part of 6 months and more. Institutions like old age homes, orphanages etc. do not require these tags. The caretakers or owners of these institutions simply need to install our android app to seek/receive donations. 

Through our solution, we intend to enable 'learning' of civic education to our citizens by 'doing' and 'volunteering'. Our future roadmap includes enhancing our solution to include volunteering for civic actions other than donations as such.

Any needy person on the streets or any institution that requires donations of basic items such as food, clothes, stationery, shoes, medicines and such, from time to time, are those whom Donate Tags serves. 

Needy people within a locality can be identified and assigned an inexpensive, Android Tag. The location of the tags is crowdsourced and near, real-time locations are provided to the donors who can use our Android app to locate needy people and donate used items to them.

Institutions like old-age homes, orphanages, educational trusts and such can register on our platform and seek & receive donations from donors around them. 

With Donate Tags, as more number of donors join our system, more and more needy people have a good chance of receiving meals and other necessity items from time to time. This can greatly help the needy people not just to survive but also looks for other means of livelihood. 

Needy people can start thinking about making a living for themselves and get off the streets sooner than longer. No matter how small the donations are, it can help restore the dignity of needy people on the streets.

Our app was launched a few week ago. We chose a few areas within our city to pilot our solution. A few institutions have registered on our mobile app and have stated to receive donations from donors. The registered institutes can put up a request on our mobile app asking for the items they require and the donors within the locality get notified. 

For example, A registered institution on our app, made a request for adult diapers, three ceiling fans and few kilograms of pulses. A donor who happened to have a used ceiling fan, saw this request. The donor got the fan repaired and donated it to the institution, thus fulfilling one of their requirements.

As students, we study in our books about poverty that exists not just within our country but around the world as well. On the streets, sometimes we come across needy people who are in very bad situations wanting to get basic items like food, clothing and shelter. We have seen how poverty has hit some more than others. 

Although we haven't volunteered for any major causes as yet, we whole-heartedly believe that we can make a difference and that everybody deserves a fair and dignified life. 

Initially we thought about helping the needy get food through donations and we started working on the concept of Hunger Tags. Soon, we realized that it was possible to donate more than just food to the needy people and that's when we developed Hunger Tags into Donate Tags. 

Developing the concept of Hunger Tags to Donate Tags over the past several months has been a result of trying to understand what more can be done for the people living on the streets. 

As student founders, we engage with the development team and put across our requirements. The development team takes care of the technical aspects of our solution. From an idea to actually releasing a version on Google Play and now institutions & donors using it, we have seen an entire product life cycle. We are passionate about our work and would like to ensure more and more people use our App and get benefitted.

With Donate Tags, we aim to provide basic necessities to people all over the world. In order for our solution to have a large impact, we need to build larger communities around the world that are willing to donate to the needy. By applying to Solve, we plan on building a large community full of people who are willing to help the needy and reach out to those underprivileged people.

For us to continue working on the app, we would like organizations to give us grants and/or funding. We would like to utilize it to further develop the app and also to spread the word about our app to various donors and institutions around the world.

We would like to gain further understanding of social entrepreneurship and how we could impact at a large scale. 

We strongly believe that people want to donate to needy people around them. It is the "how", "where" and to "whom" factors that prevent more donations from happening. When somebody would like to donate, it is not always easy to find places to donate or needy people to donate to.

We think by using our solution we can change and improve the way people donate. By simplifying the donation process, we believe we can make more and more people think of donating used items to the needy. 

Our solution is like the "Uber" for donations. We aggregate institutions such as home for the ages, orphanages, adoption centers and such and list them for donors to find and donate to them. In the process, donors are able to make good use of used items within their homes by donating to needy institutions which in turn promotes Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

Further, when the number of donors within a community increases, we would like to provide inexpensive, coin-sized, easily carriable Android Tags to identified needy individuals who again can be located and donated to by Donors.

Use of technology in the form of inexpensive Android Tags has made it extremely easier for donors to find needy people in their localities.

Our solution has been launched a few weeks ago, in the second week of April, 2023. Before releasing it to the entire world, we have started to work within our own community first by talking to institutions and getting them registered on to our solution. On the other hand, we have requested our family and friends to download our App and use it for making donations to the registered institutions.

Once we understand how the solution is working and the improvements that need to be made, we shall open it for use within our city, next our state, eventually the country and then the world.

On a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis, we shall measure

1) # of items donated

2) # of items reduced, reused and recycled vs. newly purchased goods (for donation)

3) Reducing carbon footprints

4) # items prevented from going to landfills

5) # people who have been fed (hunger satisfied)

6) # people whose basic needs have been met 

By leveraging the power of community work, we want more and more people to donate to the needy ones around them. Over a period of time, such donations shall enable the needy people to stand on their feet and find employment which in turn can provide them with regular income. By enabling a technology-based solution like Donate Tags, we want to provide the much needed nudge to the needy people.

Needy people are given inexpensive Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags that help donors locate them. This way, it enables donors to donate necessities to needy people. Not just needy people, donors could also opt to donate to institutions such as old age homes, orphanages and such that are registered on our platform.

Android Tags are inexpensive. They work similar to how Apple Tags work. Their cost is the same as buying a pizza for a needy person once. However, if one such tag is given to a needy person, more people can donate to that person for over a period of 6 months before its inexpensive battery needs replacing. This way the needy person's necessities are fulfilled for a better part of 6 months or more. Institutions like old age homes, orphanages etc. do not require these tags. The caretakers or owners of these institutions simply need to install our android app to seek and receive donations. 

Donate tags is an android-based app that uses BLE and Global Positioning System (GPS) to detect tags. All of the data is stored in Google’s cloud base.

The location of the tags is crowdsourced and near real-time locations are provided to donors who can use our Android App to locate needy people and donate items to them.

We are two girl students working part-time of this solution. We work with a diverse development team. Once our solution starts making revenues or we secure grants, we intended to hire diverse groups of like-minded people to come together and drive the change we intend to. 

By keep our operational expenses low (since our solution is a technology-based solution), we would like to provide value to our customers who are needy people and people residing within institutions such as orphanages, old-aged homes and such. 

By enabling donors to make donations and easily discover requirements of needy people around them, Donate Tags is trying to make a difference by encouraging donors to make more donations than they currently make.

While we are not against donors buying new items for donations, we want donors to donate used items (in decent and usable condition) to needy people and help us "Reduce", "Reuse" and "Recycle". Of course, under certain situations where used items cannot be donated, the donors can donate newly purchased ones as well.

By providing this service, needy people on the streets as well as those who reside in institutions are our biggest beneficiaries.  

We would like to offer this as a service to organizations who in turn, as part of their corporate social responsibilities, shall involve their employee volunteers to use and donate via donate tags. We shall provide a dashboard for the organizations to track and reward active employee volunteers who in-turn shall be motivated to volunteer more.

We obviously cannot charge needy people and neither can we charge Institutions because the Institutions may or may not be able to pay. Those Institutions that can afford can pay us a small fee. Ideally, we would not want to charge them as well.

Initially, to continue our work, one revenue making model that we thought of was to work with restaurants and grocery stores to sell their inventory as last-minute deals. For example, a restaurant can give away untouched, leftover food which otherwise would be wasted, at very low prices for anybody interested in purchasing it. We could charge a commission for making a restaurant find a customer. However, it would totally work against our core concept of encouraging donations amongst donors. Restaurants may prefer sale of leftover foods over donating them right away.

Hence, currently we would like to continue our work based on Grants and Donations. And, post the development of dashboard and analytics that can be used by paying organizations, we shall provide Donate Tags in a Software as a Service model wherein organizations shall pay for their employee volunteers to use the app.

Also, we intend to introduce this in schools, wherein the school students below the age of 16 can use the App to know the requirements of institutions around them and post it on their social circles. Students over 16 can participate in driving donation campaigns themselves. This solution can be offered to schools as well for them to teach civic education, not just by theory but by practically carrying it out.

The prize money that we received for winning a National School-level competition has been donated to the development of Donate Tags. We are actively seeking grants and donations for further development of the solution.

The App is currently being used by a handful of institutions and donors. Once the solution is fully tested and ready for corporate use, we shall open it for corporates to provide it as one of the solutions for their employee volunteer programs.