Micro A-Thon website

The Foundation For Caregivers is looking for an individual or a company that would be willing to contribute (part or fulltime) their time and talent (tax deductable) to a nonprofit project? As explained below I have developed a complete mockup of a unique new online application that a Carnegie Mellon University CS professor friend of mine at has estimated will require 4-6 person weeks to complete. Please submit a $1 Freelance bid if you are interested in helping the Foundation. I will also accept traditional (fee based) bids but you need to understand that: a) contributed work will be favored over paid work (duh!), and b) if I do accept a traditional paid bid, then I will have to go raise the money to complete the work. Depending on the amount needed, this could take some time. The Foundation For Caregivers is a small nonprofit struggling to grow in an economy where few have cash to give to good works. Don’t be fooled by the “Foundation” word. The Foundation For Caregivers is very small and I/we don’t have money, we have heart, knowledge, and a desire to change things. I put the Foundation together about 5 years ago after losing my wife of 25 years to cancer. As caregiver for my wife, I came to understand the critical role the caregivers play and the cost (over $500 billion annually) of our failure to properly: train, use, or support the caregivers. You can read My Story if you are interested. One of the things I learned in establishing the Foundation is just how difficult it is for small nonprofits to obtain funds to fulfill their mission. Our first project addresses this need; specifically we are creating a “shared resource” fundraising engine that we will make available free of charge to any “cause” anywhere on the globe. Free means free, there are no hidden “management” fees. The “Micro A-Thon” system ([login to view URL]) will be a complete turnkey online a-thon system that anyone can use simply by registering. It will be saleable from a 1-person a-thon to a major multinational campaign. There are many good people with good ideas and a desire to help. What they lack is the ability to raise the money they need to make it happen. The Micro A-Thon system is one solution, an attractive fundraiser that they can use risk/cost free to raise at least some of the funds they need. I am not a software guy or a website developer but I have taught myself the bare minimums and actually developed a few sites, [login to view URL] for example. I have a complete (~30 page) requirements document and I have created a complete mockup of the website/system as a way of refining/proving the design. I walked my Carnegie Mellon friend through this and that is what he based his 4-6 week estimate on. I would be happy to spend an hour (a webinar under NDA) to walk you through the program once I receive samples of previous work along with your statement (or bid) indicating that you are seriously interested in contributing your talents to make this happen. Even though this is a $1 volunteer assignment, all deliverables will be considered "work made for hire" under U.S. Copyright law. The Foundation will receive exclusive and complete copyrights to all work purchased. (No GPL, GNU, 3rd party components, etc. unless all copyright ramifications are explained AND AGREED TO in advance). My preference is to have the Micro A-Thon system developed using Ruby on Rails but I am open if you can convince me of a better platform. As far as the website design, the mockup I made has a reasonable layout, at least for the first release, but I am open to changes if you have a better way of presenting the UI. This is primarily a database application with only minor programming work. Most if not all required fields have been identified and all the conditions are annotated on the mockup pages. The copy for each page is already written. Pages for presenting: participants, causes, teams, etc. use a single template, this is the bulk of the website. Registration pages and fields are included in the mockup. The HTML used to create the mockup is garbage I put together to get the look/feel I wanted, it is not useable for the actual site. My CS friend suggested that overall, it looked (programmatically) like dealing with products. The most challenging parts (my estimate) will be properly posting sponsor’s pledge payments as each “cause” will have their own PayPal button so that payments go directly to them and do not pass through the Foundation (remember I said it was free of any management fees) but their donations need to be posted back to the Micro A-Thon system to clear the Pledge. And, email integration so that event administrators can contact participants and users can send email to sponsors to ask them to pay their pledges. These can probably be solved relatively easily, but they are outside of my skill set so they seem tough to me. I am flexible (within reason) on time to complete the work and I certainly understand that paying work will take precedence over your volunteer work. Having said that, we do need a firm commitment and delivery of a solid product. So if you have a heart to help or if you could you use a unique application to showcase your talent then I would love to work with you to change the world. Remember, the Foundation is a 501 (c) 3, so your contribution is fully tax deductable at its retail value. Please contact me if you have questions. I look forward to hearing from you.