Two Monmouthshire firms have helped launch a new website and campaign platform for Calcutta Mercy, a US-based charity working to feed, educate, and medically assist the poor of Calcutta, India.

Millwood Online is a web application development agency based in Abergavenny specialising in the building of complex feature-rich websites for clients around the world.

It was approached by Monmouth-based Hive Social to partner on the project.

Hive Social specialises in building content-rich websites and digital marketing solutions. It also official specialists for the web publishing platform Squarespace, which was used to build the main website for Calcutta Mercy.

The website consists of around 40 pages explaining what the charity does, the causes they support and how to donate. There’s also a store allowing supporters to purchase a number of products or donate to specific causes such a surgery for a child or a community clinic.

The other part of the project was a custom web application built by Millwood Online to allow supporters to easily create their own campaigns and accept donations against the campaign.

Campaigns can be created around any event, sports, birthdays or fundraiser.

Millwood Online built the application using the Ruby on Rails framework, which is also used by some of the world largest companies such as Twitter and Groupon. The application is then hosted with Heroku, with which Millwood Online are the only official partner in Wales.