January 27, 2009, 2:20 pm
In 2005, DonorsChoose.org won the Amazon.com Nonprofit Innovation Award. It was a tight race, with a lot of noise. We spoke with the founder, Charles Best, about how they did it.
Can you give us some quick insider information and share your tricks on how you managed to beat the bigger beast (a.k.a. Teach For America)?
We tried everything and a good amount of what we tried actually worked. Our engineer pulled two all nighters straight to pull of our “tell-a-friend” convention; not only could people tell their friends about DonorsChoose.org, but we could track who told the most friends and we could give out awards to those people that told the most friends. In terms of the website experience, we retrofitted the homepage to market the Amazon award.
Also, while it’s not very web 2.0, our board members called in all of their friends to make the maximum 1k gifts and the board member inspired gifts really did constitute the majority of our proceeds. Board members spent a lot of time generating a lot of support for us. Our chairman spent every night until about 3 in the morning emailing friends to donate. We had a number of events and just tried really hard to get the word out.
How did you come up with the idea of giving out gift certificates with the winnings?
We wanted to let the people decide which classroom projects to bring to life. It wouldn’t be in the spirit of DonorsChoose.org to have the staff choose in a top down approach. So we realized the way to do that was to give out tens of thousands of DonorsChoose.org giving cards. We realized that these would be the best way to enable the donors to choose. But we realized quickly we’d have to spend a lot of money on postage and mailings just to get the gift certificates into the people’s hands. That realization led us to eBay and Crate and Barrel, two stores who ended up distributing our cards. The eBay/Crate and Barrel choices really weren’t super strategic; some board members had relationships at those two stores, we went with it. We did have some criteria for the stores we chose and these two fit that criteria, but we would say board member relationships were the deciding factor.
What has been the outcome of these gift certificates?
Crate and Barrel initially gave out the cards underwritten by the award, but they were so blown away by the response of their customers that they now buy the cards from DonorChoose.org to distribute regularly. During our initial distribution with them, many of their customers that received gift cards wrote to them saying how they would be lifelong loyal customers thanks to these cards. Initially 100,000 of the customers were given a giving card, but this school year Crate and Barrel will be giving 160,000 of it’s customers a DonorsChoose.org card, mostly out of their advertising budget. Even though they are now buying the cards from DonorsChoose, we needed to have the original underwritten cards as a lead in to get in with Crate & Barrel so they could see how valuable this was to their business.
Do you have any tips for someone wanting to try something similar?
It just comes down to the greater level of engagement and giving that you inspire from your donors when you inspire those donors to have some say in where their money goes. The giving cards just speak to the marketing 101 truth that if you entice people to come to your site with a free proposition, they will get hooked and return as a paying customer.
For organizations, they might want to think about how to find projects that allow constituents to connect in a personal way. Charitable gift certificates are not specific to just DonorsChoose and there are ways to incorporate this idea into other organizations. Just be creative.
Tips for Parents (12)
January 27, 2009, 2:20 pm
In 2005, DonorsChoose.org won the Amazon.com Nonprofit Innovation Award. It was a tight race, with a lot of noise. We spoke with the founder, Charles Best, about how they did it.
Can you give us some quick insider information and share your tricks on how you managed to beat the bigger beast (a.k.a. Teach For America)?
We tried everything and a good amount of what we tried actually worked. Our engineer pulled two all nighters straight to pull of our “tell-a-friend” convention; not only could people tell their friends about DonorsChoose.org, but we could track who told the most friends and we could give out awards to those people that told the most friends. In terms of the website experience, we retrofitted the homepage to market the Amazon award.
Also, while it’s not very web 2.0, our board members called in all of their friends to make the maximum 1k gifts and the board member inspired gifts really did constitute the majority of our proceeds. Board members spent a lot of time generating a lot of support for us. Our chairman spent every night until about 3 in the morning emailing friends to donate. We had a number of events and just tried really hard to get the word out.
How did you come up with the idea of giving out gift certificates with the winnings?
We wanted to let the people decide which classroom projects to bring to life. It wouldn’t be in the spirit of DonorsChoose.org to have the staff choose in a top down approach. So we realized the way to do that was to give out tens of thousands of DonorsChoose.org giving cards. We realized that these would be the best way to enable the donors to choose. But we realized quickly we’d have to spend a lot of money on postage and mailings just to get the gift certificates into the people’s hands. That realization led us to eBay and Crate and Barrel, two stores who ended up distributing our cards. The eBay/Crate and Barrel choices really weren’t super strategic; some board members had relationships at those two stores, we went with it. We did have some criteria for the stores we chose and these two fit that criteria, but we would say board member relationships were the deciding factor.
What has been the outcome of these gift certificates?
Crate and Barrel initially gave out the cards underwritten by the award, but they were so blown away by the response of their customers that they now buy the cards from DonorChoose.org to distribute regularly. During our initial distribution with them, many of their customers that received gift cards wrote to them saying how they would be lifelong loyal customers thanks to these cards. Initially 100,000 of the customers were given a giving card, but this school year Crate and Barrel will be giving 160,000 of it’s customers a DonorsChoose.org card, mostly out of their advertising budget. Even though they are now buying the cards from DonorsChoose, we needed to have the original underwritten cards as a lead in to get in with Crate & Barrel so they could see how valuable this was to their business.
Do you have any tips for someone wanting to try something similar?
It just comes down to the greater level of engagement and giving that you inspire from your donors when you inspire those donors to have some say in where their money goes. The giving cards just speak to the marketing 101 truth that if you entice people to come to your site with a free proposition, they will get hooked and return as a paying customer.
For organizations, they might want to think about how to find projects that allow constituents to connect in a personal way. Charitable gift certificates are not specific to just DonorsChoose and there are ways to incorporate this idea into other organizations. Just be creative.