Giving Compass' Take:

•  Frederick Hess, writing for Education Next, interviews Charles Best, the CEO of DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit website that fundraises for classroom projects. 

• What makes this model sustainable and prosperous? Even with many moving parts of online fundraising, projects are getting done, and teachers are satisfied. 

• Read about how education philanthropy needs accountability to survive. 

Charles Best leads DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit website on which teachers can post their specific classroom needs and receive crowdfunding. To date, teachers at more than 80 percent of all the public schools in America have used DonorsChoose.org, and more than 3 million people have contributed. I recently talked with Charles about DonorsChoose.org and the role of philanthropy in education.

RH: Can you explain a bit more about the mechanics of how this all works?

CB: A teacher does not need any experience with grant writing to use DonorsChoose.org. They just need to explain, in plain speak, what resource they want for their students, and how it will help them learn. We vet and authenticate the teacher’s project before posting it to the public site. About 20 percent of project requests are returned to the draft stage with follow-up questions for the teacher. When a project is funded, we do not send cash to the teacher. Instead, we purchase the materials and have them shipped to the classroom—or in the case of a field trip, we pay the bus company, the museum, or some other provider.

RH: Seems like this involves a slew of moving parts. What are the biggest challenges to making this work?

CB: It’s a lot of moving parts! This school year alone, teachers will create over 300,000 classroom project requests, each of which has to be carefully vetted and authenticated. To make that work scalable, we’ve turned to some of our best teacher users. About 200 of them have volunteered to receive extensive training in how to screen project requests, which they now do at incredible scale. More than 200,000 of those projects will be funded. To make fulfillment of those projects scalable, we developed an electronic procurement system in which teachers specify the exact items they need, and DonorsChoose.org staff purchase those items with great efficiency.

Read the full article about donorschoose by Frederick Hess at Education Next