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PayPal helps 6 Irish charities in annual hackathon

Written by Robert McHugh, on 20th Nov 2018. Posted in General

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PayPal today announced the winners of this year’s Opportunity Hack, its annual charity hackathon held in Ireland.

The event, held at Castleknock Hotel and Country Club in Dublin, brought together PayPal teammates to solve the digital challenges of six Irish charities over a 24-hour period. 
 
Based on the criteria – which included innovation, collaboration, impact, completion and presentation – the Irish Youth Foundation was crowned the overall winner. The organisation, which financially supports projects and develops programmes that make a difference to children and young people facing adversity in their lives, built an online system for grant-making.

The new system allows applicants to apply for grants via web forms and enables the Irish Youth Foundation to maintain, filter and notify applicants. It also allows the team to create reports and prevents them from having to process everything manually.
 
Other charities involved were the Alzheimer Society of Ireland, ALONE, Down Syndrome Ireland, Focus Ireland and Child Vision.
 
Led by Jonathan Davies, EMEA Mid-Market and Small Business Manager at PayPal, teammates from various disciplines were tasked with working with charities to develop solutions for their most pressing digital needs. A judging panel – which consisted of PayPal members including senior directors Anthony Rafferty and Mairead McIlkenny, as well as Emmet Ryan (Technology Editor at the Sunday Business Post), Guy Thompson (General Manager of Castleknock Hotel) and Anthony Cooney (CEO of the Fingal Chamber of Commerce) – had the difficult task of choosing the best projects.
 
Speaking of the win, Head of Grants & Programmes at Irish Youth Foundation, Sabina Cotter said, "Developing a bespoke CSR platform to manage our grants of programmes has been one of our key strategic priorities for the last two years but the two key stumbling blocks were the cost and secondly the time to invest in setting one up. Over two days an incredible team from PayPal created an unbelievable platform for us which will save us administrative time and resources and enable us to use this time to develop more funding opportunities."
 
Director of EMEA Merchant Operations at PayPal, Anthony Rafferty added, "At PayPal, we are passionate about giving back to the wider community and supporting our teammates in their careers. We want to help everyone reap the benefits of technology and that is what the hackathon is all about: it is a fun way to help charities harness digital and mobile funding for deserving causes, while providing PayPal teammates with a sense of achievement and an opportunity to develop their skills."

Source: www.businessworld.ie

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