The First Charity Platform in the Middle-East
- P2H develops a National Donations Platform—a first-of-its-kind technological solution supporting centuries-long Muslim traditions.
- Industry: Government, semi-government, for-profit, and nonprofit organizations
Project
Charity, one of the five pillars of Islam, known as zakat, substantially increases during the month of Ramadan. The holy month ends with one of the biggest Muslim holidays called “Eid al-Fitr”. For Muslims around the globe, this holiday is a period of sacrifice, deep reflection, and joyful family gatherings.
The centuries-long traditions could have been greatly affected in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It put hard limits for family gatherings, personal interactions, and almsgiving. Social and cultural life spheres were all surrounded by a negative aura.
We joined forces with our client, to develop a platform that digitized donations. The idea was to allow people to fulfill their charitable missions without severe health risk of COVID-19. Moreover, with the platform we developed, people could designate donations for specific causes, such as for COVID-19 patients who desperately needed support.
Had started 3 weeks before Ramadan, P2H developed a simple solution completely satisfying the need of the moment with great success.
After that the project was extended to build a full-scale platform. So far it collects donations of many kinds, including those directed to healthcare, education, orphans, community services, and more.
The platform has become extremely popular in its category (charity and lifestyle). It serves as an excellent example of a software solution that’s both useful and appealing. The app’s popularity speaks for itself.
332
Current opportunities
6,978,043
Beneficiaries of the Donations
8,261,304
transactions
Results
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The platform successfully transformed the means by which local people make donations. For the first time religious donations could be done online.
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The service is accessible through apps on web, mobile devices and interactive screens located in public spaces.
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Over just the first few days the product passed the stress test as people donated more than $250,000 in US dollars. Despite the high user load, all donations were processed promptly and without errors.
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For the past two years, total donations have comprised more than $43 million in US dollars.
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More than 6.5 million users have donated through the platform, and more than 2.5 million are active monthly donors.
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The donation process is secure and transparent and monitored by the Ministry preventing fraud and helping connect donors with the needy.
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The platform is extremely scalable and reliable. Scalability keeps being a top development priority as the app must automatically scale up during high-load periods to accommodate an ever-increasing number of users.
Solution
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The platform is designed to resemble a shopping platform’s look and feel. Users can track secure payments by accessing the statistics page, where charts and progress bars depict activity.
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Multiple types of donations to meet the different needs of various groups of people.The users can donate to one or more causes or make automatic weekly, monthly, or yearly donations to a cause via subscriptions.
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Other religious donation options like operating mobile chapels, taking care of mosques, providing translations and books of interpretation, organizing courses, etc.
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Multiple payment options.
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User roles: Admin in charge of the entire system management; Donor, a registered user who can make donations; Charity Organization, a registered user with rights to launch charity projects.
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Tools for managing content, users, charity projects, and other platform items.
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Third-party integrations with email and SMS delivery services, payment gateways, etc.
Challenges we faced
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User experience
We had to find out what motivates people to make donations and the mechanisms users typically use to make them. For instance, we had to learn how much a family is obliged to donate during the holidays, how it’s calculated, and which categories of citizens are considered the most vulnerable and need unfailing aid. To this end, we performed extremely quick yet extensive cultural and business analysis of users and zakat.
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1st tight deadline
Another challenge was that the requirements for the project were a bit underspecified but had to be rapidly implemented (two-week period) in an MVP. We provided basic payment functionality for several predefined donation opportunities, one of which was donating to people affected by COVID-19.
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2nd tight deadline
The full-fledged platform was timed to Eid Al-Adha, another important Muslim holiday. I was just 2 months away.
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Functionality increase
The variety of causes eligible for donations increased considerably in the 2nd version. Now they include aiding people with disabilities, renovating homes for families living in poverty, helping prisoners released during Ramadan, and many others.
Tech stack and processes
Future plans
We’ve been enhancing and supporting the platform for two years, and its popularity continues to grow. By the end of 2022, we plan to add new features to the web platform and the Android and iOS mobile applications. Namely, we plan to add new categories of donation projects, provide an option to launch charity auctions, and supplement user roles with a Foundation type of users (they will have access to the specific private projects only). We continue to extend the list of third-party integrations and update the code base using cutting-edge technology.
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