The competition was hosted by the U.S. Census Bureau, who provided data. The prompt was to help non-profits in planning future fundraising endeavors. Heather wrote a Shiny App overnight that allowed the user to upload their historic data on fundraising efforts, join this data with the PDB (Planning Database, which contains data from the Census and the American Community Survey), maps donation levels to tracts, model success of previous donation campaigns, forecast success in future campaigns in different locations, and finally optimize different fundraising strategies based on budgetary constraints.

http://www.aapor.org/Conference-Events/Annual-Meeting/ResearchHack-3-0.aspx