Ukrainian IT company EPAM creates new donation platform HelpUA Foundation

HelpUA Foundation, developed to collect donations, offers a new feature — a volunteer's personal office, Rubryka reports.

What is the problem?

The number of volunteer requests is growing daily in Ukraine. Thousands of posts requesting donations and help from charitable foundations and individual volunteers appear on social media daily. However, it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between real fundraising campaigns and fraudulent ones.

What is the solution?

To make the fundraising process transparent and convenient, a team of 30 volunteers — specialists from the Ukrainian office of EPAM created the HelpUA Foundation platform based on the marketplace principle. Developers, testers, business analysts, designers, and system engineers worked on its implementation.

They started work in January of this year. The main goal was to develop a functional platform to facilitate the routine work of volunteers and charitable organizations. On the website, you can publish posts about fundraisers to support the defense forces and provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainians affected by the war. Ads are being verified.

How does it work?

A feature of the platform is a volunteer's personal office. You can see active and closed meetings and the corresponding reporting by clicking on it. The site has two language versions: Ukrainian and English. This allows you to attract users from different parts of the world.

On the platform, users can see the fundraiser of the day. It can be one that is just a little short of the goal or, on the contrary, one that needs more attention due to the slow pace of raising financing.

The developers paid special attention to privacy and personal data security issues. The infrastructure of the site is created in the AWS cloud environment. Encryption and HTTPS certificates are used to protect data. Transparency is a key priority of the IT solution, so every fee is checked and verified.

In the two months since the release of the platform, it has already been possible to close 88 needs for more than 8.5 million hryvnias, of which the largest amounts — more than half a million hryvnias — are for reconnaissance drones and evacuation vehicles for defenders.

All interested public organizations, foundations, and independent volunteers can become users of the platform after verification and creating an account.

As Rubryka reported, on the morning of August 14, UNITED24, Come Back Alive, and monobank started raising 235 million hryvnias for 10,000 kamikaze drones. Over 35 million hryvnias were collected in the first three hours. Only on the first day, almost half of the 235 million hryvnias was collected.