Planet Fundraiser was a mobile app, developed right here in Alabama, designed to make supporting local charities as easy as snapping a photo.

Local businesses were the rock star for this app and made the giving effort possible. Customers shop like they normally do, take a picture of their receipt, and scan it into the Planet Fundraiser app. Once the receipt is scanned, a customer is then prompted to select a charity to donate a portion of their purchase to. The concept was often described in the marketing as “Shop, Snap, Give!”.

Local news station CBS42 covered the app concept nicely. You can also see a walk-through of the app via the video player below:

Only businesses participating on the Planet Fundraiser platform were eligible for the charity give-back. The idea here was to drive consumer behavior and push them towards shopping at businesses that made the decision to support charity efforts in their operating budgets over other businesses that didn’t.

My Role On The Team

As the Lead Mobile Developer for Planet Fundraiser, I managed the mobile engineering team, working closely with designers and developers, as well as shipping code of my own, to build the application from the ground up. The app was developed using the Titanium framework, which allowed cross-platform development from a single unified JavaScript codebase.

My experience with Titanium development on the Planet Fundraiser project would eventually lead to a more significant roll inside the Titanium development ecosystem. I took on a leadership role as chairman of the TiDev Foundation, the 501c3 non-profit organization responsible for maintaining the Titanium framework today. You can learn more about that by clicking here.

Do you need help building a mobile app from the ground up? I can help! Having shipped a number of apps for iOS and Android over the years, I’m intimately familiar with the challenges that come from building one from scratch to scale. Drop me an email and let’s chat. Happy to help bring your app vision to life!