Donors Choose You...Really!

Oprah has given it her seal of approval.  The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal agree on it.  The company I work for even likes to work through it to support public education and they want to work with our teachers to support them.

DonorsChoose.org is a website company set up to connect donors and public school teachers.  It allows people who want to donate as little as $1 or as much as they want to public school teachers who need materials in their classroom.

Here's how it works: teachers create an account on donorschoose.org.  They then "go shopping" in the e-school mall, which is comprised of vendors selected by DonorsChoose.  After filling up their cart with items they need for their classroom, the teacher goes through "checkout".  Rather than taking out their own debit/credit card, the teacher then goes through a process where they write the who, what, and why their classroom needs these items.  The project gets submitted and DonorsChoose.org reviews it and posts it to their site. 

Once it is posted to the donorschoose.org site, anybody (from anywhere in the world) that looks at the site and has the ability to give money can then give any amount of money to the project.  They can either fully fund the project or partially fund it.  The more compelling the project is, the more the draw is for people browsing the site to give money to it.  Some projects have the possibility of matched funds before the project is even posted.  If, for example, you would like an HP Laptop, HP automatically matches all funds through DonorsChoose.  Let's say the laptop costs $800, when it hits the project site, it will automatically go up on the site as a project that only needs $400 to be fully funded.  Horace Mann is another organization that has given generously to some schools and matches all project donations by 50%.

Whitney has a slight advantage over other schools, Whitney is listed as a "high poverty" school.  This is a designation that comes from a national education site and not something we can fiddle with.  This title is part of the draw for many donors.  Speaking from personal experience, I admit that I discriminate when I donate and I try to choose only High Poverty schools.  My hope is that if enough high poverty schools needs are met then we can work on moderate and minimal poverty school needs.

The entire process can be a bit daunting.  I have been through it a few times and I would be more than happy to help anybody that would like to set up a project.  This is an incredible way to get "free money" from people who know your story and some of these people do not know your story they just found the project to be so fantastic that they had to make sure it comes to life.

Talk to your teachers and have them read this blog.  Then have them check out the site and if that isn't working still, have them give me a call and I would love to come in and give some help.

Whitney Parent
-Nikki Rutledge
nikki.rutledge@hp.com
(208)387-1959