Charles Best: Trust, Competition, & Experimentation

Today’s 3 Things comes from Charles Best, the founder and CEO of Donorschoose.org.  DonorsChoose.org is an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need.  DonorsChoose.org is widely recognized for it’s innovative program that empowers citizen philanthropists to make a difference, so we asked Charles to offer three insights for nonprofits using online tools to do more.

Here’s what he had to say:

“Hello, all!  Thanks for the opportunity to chime in.  My 3 things on innovating for success:

1)  Look for opportunities to trust your crowd.
DonorsChoose.org vets every teacher project proposal for completeness and educational integrity.  Since 2002, nearly 140,000 projects have been fully funded through our site.  That’s a lot of proposals to vet! As the volume of teacher project proposals increased, we looked to more efficient ways of managing the process than hiring and managing ever more interns.  Instead, we asked our most dedicated, successful teachers – those who had 15 or more projects funded – to volunteer their expertise.  Our expert teachers volunteer to vet project proposals, and they do so more quickly than even our army of interns.  Since we moved to this crowdsourcing model, the average time between a project submission and it’s complete vetting has gone down from an average of 8 days to 2 days and requires significantly fewer “central office” resources.

By looking at a potential bottleneck and thinking through “microsolutions” we could implement using simple online tools and our awesome teachers, we were able to maintain a core program function even as it ballooned in size and scope.

2) Create affiliation and competition opportunities
We’ve found that giving our supporters opportunities to affiliate and compete with each other leads to more participation. Affiliation and competition don’t have to be complicated. We were interested in finding creative ways for bloggers to bring DonorsChoose.org to their readers.  We created a “bloggers challenge” and reported on which blogs had raised the most money, both as individual blogs and as blog “categories” (i.e. tech blogs, education blogs, mommy blogs, etc.) that each blogger could choose to join.  We raised significant (for us) funds for classroom projects, and learned a few valuable lessons, too.  It turned out that more blog readers isn’t directly related to a given blogger’s ability to raise money, and that one category of blogs performed twice as well as the runner up (tech blogs readers are great, for the record!).

3) Experiment with new models for cause marketing
Groupon.com offered a 2-for-1 side deal for contributions to classroom projects, allowing subscribers to “buy” a $10 contribution and get $20 to spend on the DonorsChoose.org classroom project of their choice.  While in some ways it was a good old fashioned matching gift repackaged, it was innovative in that it encouraged Groupon habituées to build their relationship with both Groupon and DonorsChoose, while also maintaining the core programming and experience for each of us.  New business models mean new ways to make cause marketing work for businesses and non-profits. Some will work better than others, but it’s worth experimenting with.”

Visit DonorsChoose.org to see Charles and his team in action!