Donate Tags

Donate Tags enables Donors to adopt needy people and institutions in their localities and lets them donate basic necessities using Android Tags and a Mobile App. 

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 inexpensive. 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. 

Demo Video: https://youtu.be/GscYIoYNMoY  

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.

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. 

We have talked to a few institutions who were more than glad to get onto our platform whenever it was ready. We also talked to our friends and few of their parents as well to check if they would be interested in using our App to make donations. They too have shown keen interest and appreciation of our initiative.

When we presented the original concept (Hunger Tags) to the Smart India Hackathon (All India Entrepreneurial Competition for Schools Students) jury members along with several other startup leaders, they were all appreciative of the initiative and expressed their support.

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.

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. 

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 will be ready for a launch within the next few weeks. Before releasing it to the entire world, we would like to work within our own community first by talking to institutions and getting them registered on our solution. On the other hand, we shall request our family and friends to download our App and use them 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.

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.

Our solution is nearing the process of completion. It shall be launched in the next few weeks. 

Since it is going to be the first year, we expect to serve anywhere between 5,000 to 10,000 needy individuals and needy people within institutions.

As we are school students, while we concentrate on our academics, we constantly need support in developing the solution. We currently are relying on our mentor's team in helping us with developing the solution. 

The cash prize we won from the Smart India Hackathon has been used to further develop our solution. However, we would need more grants/cash prizes which in turn can help immensely in setting up a team that  completely focuses on developing our solution to the next level.

EquiBillion Foundation and Next Skills 360 EdTech Private Limited are supporting us to develop our solution. We suggest our designs to them and their designers/developers build the models as per our suggestions.

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 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, after a while, we shall find other means to fund our work which may include displaying advertisements within Donate Tags and such.