Overview

Mother Armenia is a new non-profit organization that I co-founded with a close friend of mine, Yervand Matevosian, in March of 2023. We decided to start mother Armenia for two reasons:

• Armenians globally have no reliable, consistent, or trustworthy way to donate to Armenia.

• Recurring donations add up over time, and the concept of lifetime value can be used to have a huge impact on Armenia.

Tech and Website Development

I programmed Mother Armenia’s website and backend infrastructure completely from scratch! The project totals over 14,000 lines of code, and the architecture layout is shown here:

Tech Stack

• NextJS 13 for front end + back end API, pages/api directory setup.

• NextAuth for user authentication and email login

• Hosted on Vercel (who doesn’t love vercel?)

• Contentful for CMS that manages projects, project updates, donation amounts, team profiles, etc.

• moa-lib (custom) backend that manages user accounts, project balance, monthly amounts for projects, etc

• Stripe for checkout. Native Stripe Elements integration for fully PCI compliant checkout. No full billing address required, and non-native solution I wrote for custom-amount recurring payments that stripe otherwise doesn’t support natively.

• Hubspot for CRM. Hubspot syncs with stripe, but also accepts new contacts through the website’s contact form.

Features I’m Proud Of

Although seemingly simple, there’s a lot of things that I’m proud of on this website that took more thought than anticipated:

• The Dashboard The Mother Armenia dashboard features important metrics like monthly amount, lifetime totals donated to Mother Armenia, and a detailed cent-by-cent breakdown of which projects your donation is allocated to.



The dashboard also comes complete with modals that allow you to change, cancel, or restart your donation at any time:

• The Tip Bar With lots of inspiration from GoFundMe, I was able to successfully replicate a native tip bar that allows the donor to drag and allocate a portion of their donation to Mother Armenia to allow us to operate as a service. Importantly, it works incredibly well on all devices as it’s just a native input element:

• The Header Color inversion and pop-in/pop-out logic requires some weird hooks that relies on page height, last scroll position, and scroll direction.

• Checkout Page Very fluid and dynamic, pulls amounts from Contentful CMS. The round-up amount was also not as simple as it seems, as there’s two cases where either have to calculate the final amount from the user’s inputted amount or if the “cover our fees” box is checked, calculate the fees from that new price point.

• Projects Page Projects each have their own overview, updates, and details page. Details page specifically shows lots of important info, like project finances, items we plan to purcahse, receipts, and images of the project being done.

• Overall Smoothness and UX Using TailwindCSS as a styling lib has really helped me keep things consistent and smooth, especially in the world of facilitating animations and transitions.

Projected Impact On Armenia

Our ultimate revenue goal is $100,000 dollars a month in donations for Armenia. To do this is actually sort of simple: you need 20,000 donors donating on average $5 per month.

With this amount of money, we can fund some extremely large initiatives in the country and put money where the country needs it most. To name some of these areas of support:

• Lack of tech in education.

• Soldier healthcare and survival equipment.

• Network and road infrastructure.