Giving Place

Giving Place got together to create a web application that would make the process of donations easier and store all information about charity operations in one place.

They needed experienced middle+ and senior developers to take over the development process and participate in crucial architectural decisions. They decided to partner with Brightgrove. One of the members of the Giving Place team has already worked with us on another project and was pleased with the quality of our work, the terms of our work and our reputation.

In February 2021, we started working together on this project.

The Giving Place team came to us with their concept and project requirements. We tested the requirements and got a clear understanding which experts we will need. We found 1 Product Manager, 1 Front-end Developer and 1 Back-end Developer from our internal pool of specialists. Then we interviewed 13 specialists to find a strong Fullstack Software Engineer with experience in Angular. Cautious about our client’s time, we carefully screened the candidates ourselves and brought to their attention only those who fit perfectly.

After building a dedicated team, we started developing an MVP. Like every startup, the Giving Place project wanted to deliver the “minimum valuable product” as soon as possible. Usually, it takes from 1 to 1.5 years to create a working application, but we managed to launch it in record time, in 6 months.

To achieve that, our experts used platforms with already built infrastructure and frameworks. The front-end and the back-end run on Heroku cloud platform: this way we can maintain the whole delivery process without hiring a DevOps Engineer.

This front-end side is written in Angular. This framework and its components library allow developers to focus on the main purpose instead of coding the basic components from scratch and fixing bugs. Our team also uses TypeScript for both front-end and back-end. This way we can avoid many basic mistakes, and test covering helps to find more difficult errors and gaps in the system.

As a result, using cloud platforms and well-known frameworks we skipped a lot of steps of preparing our own “platform” before starting the development of the project. That is why we have reached our goals without falling behind our schedule.

Now the application is in beta testing, and our test users are regularly contributing by giving detailed feedback and reporting bugs.

Our web application has a module architecture. The added functionality now includes:

• Secure registration and login system for individual donors, businesses that donate to charity, and large foundations.

• History of all previous donations with all records and bank statements.

• Access to the database of all official charity organizations provided by a third-party service integrated into our system.

• Instruments for planning and setting objectives visualized via simple UI elements.

In May 2022, we added the first licensed user. Next step — integration with the payment system, automation of user applications, creation of several subscription plans, taking part in a big philanthropic expo in the USA in June, expanding our team to polish the interface.

Every day we have daily meetings with the Giving Place team to discuss further steps and make joint decisions. Our developers always have a say in technical and logical choices, presenting well-thought-out arguments. Each week, the experts from the Giving Place side meet up with investors to demonstrate our project’s developments.

Our roadmap is planned for not just months but years into the future, for 2023—2024.