ActuallyFeed

Overview

ActuallyFeed is a full-stack donation platform I built for an international humanitarian organization. The platform streamlines the donation process with seamless Stripe integration and provides donors with transparent impact visualization through an interactive geospatial map showing where their contributions make a difference.

Problem

The organization was struggling with donation friction—their existing process was slow, had high abandonment rates, and donors had no visibility into where their money was going. The lack of transparency and cumbersome checkout experience was limiting their fundraising potential and donor engagement.

Constraints

• Need to handle international payments securely and reliably
• Real-time transaction confirmation for immediate donor feedback
• Visual impact tracking that works across regions and device types
• Integration with existing organizational workflows

Solution

I designed and built a streamlined donation platform with Stripe webhooks for real-time payment confirmation. The key innovation was an interactive geospatial tracking map that visualizes donation impact across different regions—donors can see exactly where their contributions are making a difference. This combination of smooth UX and transparent impact reporting quadrupled donation volume.

Architecture & Stack

Key Engineering Decisions

• Stripe webhooks for reliable, real-time payment confirmation
• Optimistic UI updates during payment processing for better UX
• Geospatial data visualization for transparent impact reporting
• Progressive enhancement for cross-device compatibility
• Streamlined checkout flow reducing steps from 5 to 2

Challenges & Tradeoffs

The primary challenge was ensuring webhook reliability for payment confirmations—lost webhooks mean lost donations. I implemented idempotent webhook handlers with retry logic and a reconciliation system that catches any missed events. For the impact map, I balanced detail granularity against performance, implementing progressive loading that shows aggregate data first then loads regional details on demand.

Results

What This Demonstrates

• Payment integration with production-grade webhook handling
• Geospatial data visualization and interactive mapping
• UX optimization with measurable conversion improvements
• Working with non-profit stakeholders to deliver real impact