Anything For a Friend

In Fall 2012, Rob Hilton, Computer Science associate professor, lead a group of 30 Computer Science students on a project designed to help a local non-profit organization, "Anything For a Friend"(AFAF) with a need that they had.  AFAF helps individuals with life-threatening illnesses by helping and enabling their family and friends in fund-raising and other support activities.  AFAF is an all-volunteer organization and desires that 100% of proceeds from sponsored activities go to the recipient.  One nagging exception to this desire was the cost of using an outside service to process the pre-registration and payments for events such as Dinners, Golf Tournaments and 5K Runs.  The CS4790 class worked together as a team to create an event registration system complete with an administrative section for use by AFAF board members.

The CS4790 course is a capstone project course and usually develops systems for non-profit community organizations.  The students in this class were organized into 5 teams grouped into functional areas.  The teams first met with Becky Anderson, founder of AFAF, on October 30, 2012.  After five weeks of design, prototyping, programming and testing, the system was delivered to Becky and two other board members in class on December 6th.

The system has been used so far to pre-register nearly 800 participants for dinner events for two recipients.  There are a number of dinners, runs and tournaments coming up during spring, summer and fall.  The success of the system has enabled Becky and others in the organization to be able to devote more time and resources directly to the recipients.   The Spring 2013 CS4790 course is currently extending the system to provide for Giving Tree donations.

More about Anything For a Friend can be found at their main website, http://anythingforafriend.com.