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Highland Hackney: a charity rally site and field app

The Laravel site and field app behind a charity rally we took part in, with a Telegram bot, live JustGiving totals and a route map. It raised £3,282 with Gift Aid.

Client
Highland Hackney
Year
2026
Services
Laravel development
The Highland Hackney home page, with a 3D model of a yellow and black London taxi on a dark background

The problem

This one is our own. In September 2026 Steve and two friends drove a 2010 London taxi about 950 miles from Chesterfield to Whitby, by way of the Lakes and the Scottish Highlands, on the Bangers & Cash Rally. Every penny raised went to Ashgate Hospice.

We wanted a site that people could follow along on and donate through, and a way to keep it up to date from the cab without anyone sitting at a laptop.

What we built

The public site is a Laravel application with Livewire and a Filament admin panel. It shows the route and a live map of where we’d been, a journey log of photos and posts from the road, and a taximeter that counts up the money raised. The totals come from the JustGiving API and are refreshed every few minutes.

The journey map on the Highland Hackney site, with a yellow line tracing the route from Chesterfield through the Lakes and the Highlands
The journey map, with the route we drove in yellow.

The route came from the rally’s own Google map, which the site reads and turns into stops and challenges. On the road we used a small phone-first tool behind a magic-link login: tick off a stop, add photo or video evidence for a challenge, and publish it. Ticking a box there updated the map, the route card and the journey log together, so there was only ever one system to keep right.

We also set up a Telegram bot, so a photo with a caption became a post on the site, and a social post generator that made Instagram images from the real figures on the site.

What’s happened since

The page raised £2,758 from 77 donations, £3,282 with Gift Aid, against a target of £2,500. We raised the target to £3,000 as we got close. We were also given the Spirit of Bangers & Cash award, and the site’s uptime monitoring logged only two short blips in the five days, of two and three minutes.

Who else was involved

There was no agency on this one. Steve built it, with two friends who drove and took the photos, and it’s live at highlandhackney.com.

Our Laravel development page explains how we build applications like this for clients.