Great Stewardship from DonorsChoose

I just got an "impact report" today from a school teacher in Oakland.

Back in April, I went to DonorsChoose.org, an online charity that makes it easy for anyone to help students in need. Here's how it works:

1. Public school teachers from every corner of America post classroom project requests. The requests range from pencils for a poetry writing unit, to violins for a school recital, to microscope slides for a biology class.

2. You go to their site and browse project requests. The project is described by the teacher, but also shows detailed cost breakdown of exactly how the money will be spent. (I chose to help a reading intervention teacher in Oakland, California, who wanted to help fourth and fifth grade students get up to grade level at their Title I school. By reading parts of the books aloud, she found, the students are eager to actually read the books for themselves. Her students needed eight books in U.S. history content:

• Longest Journey: The Story of the Donner Party
• Cowboy Marc
• Gold Fever!: Tales from the California Gold Rush
• The Dirty Thirties
• From Slave to Cowboy: The Nat Love Story
• Birmingham 1963
• Cherokee Rose: The Trail of Tears
• The Story of Jamestown

The cost of this proposal was $161, which included a very reasonable fulfillment fee to DonorsChoose.)

3. Find the project that makes your eye twinkle and evokes a good feeling in your heart; give any amount. You can browse and search by city/state, grade level, subject area, teacher type, cost and/or by keyword. You can screen for projects that are close to their goal, located in an economically challenged area, have matching gift offers and by resource type such as books vs. technology vs. supplies vs. field trips or guest speakers.

(I gave an very modest sum, as I was out of work at the time. Within a day, I received a personalized thank you email from the teacher -- not an auto-generated thank you but one that referenced the remarks that accompanied my gift. Impressive!)

4. Once a project reaches its funding goal, DonorsChoose orders and delivers the materials to the school. (In my case, the teacher posted the project on February 28. It took seven donors, acting together, to reach the goal within a few weeks.)

5. Then, you get photos of your project taking place, a thank-you letter from the teacher, and a cost report showing how each dollar was spent.

If you give over $100, you'll also receive hand-written thank-you letters from the students -- a nice touch, for sure. But what's even better from my point of view is that you can give as little as $1 and get the same level of choice, transparency, and feedback that is traditionally reserved for someone who gives far more. They call it citizen philanthropy.

(Quite frankly, I'd forgotten that I'd even made that small gift back in April. But today, when I received the progress report, I was re-engaged all over again. I read the post-project thank you from the teacher. I saw the pictures of fourth and fifth grade kids reading the books I helped to buy. I reviewed the Live Update sequential stream of interactions, including notes from other donors sharing why they chose this project, with the teacher's personal thank you sent to each person contemporaneously. I felt a little sense of community around these like-minded people, strangers to each other who chipped in to make a little difference.)

Did the feedback make me feel good? Yes. Did the thank you reinforce that I'd made a good decision in making the gift? Absolutely. Was I prompted to go looking for another project to support? Of course I did.

The DonorsChoose business model is an exceptionally well-designed example of how technology can be used by a charity to actually personalize the giving process. I gave a modest gift. But I know more about the recipient, have had more interaction with her, and received a report to reinforce my choice ... far higher quality and quantity interaction than I've gotten from faceless organizations to whom I've made far larger gifts without so much as a thank you. Kudos to them.

By the way, if you're a teacher who has a project that needs to be funded, you can go here.

Nonprofit Dating

I've frequently drawn the parallel between romantic courtship and the process of "romancing" a prospective donor. Something draws the two parties together (their eyes meet across a crowded room?). After some time, once you know this person is "the one" for you, the object is to pop the question at the right time. Presumably not the same evening you first encounter them ("hey baby, wanna get married?!") ... the premature ask. But also not after dating and going steady for years and years and years ... the "cultivate, cultivate, cultivate, cultivate, cultivate" phenomen.

Five or six weeks ago, I came across this video which pokes some fun at how some of us choose to speak when first approaching a prospect, the language set that sounds so stilted. Today, I ran across it again, and decided I just had to share it. So, if a nonprofit were a guy and the donor a girl, it might go something like this ... click and enjoy.

By the way, this was done using a free, do-it-yourself movie creation service called xtranormal. "If you can type, you can make movies," they say. You choose the setting, the characters, and then type in dialogue. Voila -- an animated movie that you can then blog, share on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, or whatever. I immediately registered for a free account, but I didn't start playing around with it. Knowing me, I'd have gotten sucked into the tool for hours. But it seems like a great idea for animating a message inexpensively. It will be interesting to see how it is used by community benefit organizations.

Started in marketing - drifted toward engagement

Someone posed a question to me: What do you know now that you wish you'd known then?

(In truth, I bristled at this. I like to be the one posing the questions!)

But it boils down to this. At the start of my career, I was involved in a one-to-many gig. It was public relations, outreach, marketing. Whatever you call what I did back then, it was all about getting the word out to as many people as possible. Not a bad thing; just presumptuous. It presumes the mass audience gives a damn about what I'm talking about. These days we'd refer to this approach as "push marketing."

Over the years, I discovered a more effective way. Not one-to-many. No. One-to-one or one-to-few is ever-so-much-more effective in the end, especially when the "one" or "few" you relate to are known to care about the cause I'm representing.

Instead of me telling you my story, and me hoping you will do what I want you to do, I get to know you. Relate to you. Become involved with you. Call it what you want. I personally like the term engagement, mainly because I like the dating-to-marriage metaphor that it evokes.

When someone is engaged to you (with you), your beloved doesn't walk into the room and hand you a four-color brochure listing his good qualities. He doesn't force feed you his list of projects he's implementing. He doesn't spend his time droning on and on about his great past accomplishments. While you know quite a bit about his past, it's not because he told you his life-story right off the top, or in one sitting.

No. You got engaged to (engaged with) the other person because you came to figure out that you care about the same stuff. You care about each other: he about you, and you about him. If I were to eavesdrop, I'd hear you sharing with each other your hopes and dreams, and joint plans for the future. Together, you would craft the terms of your relationship, your promises to each other, your intentions for spending a long time together, supporting each other, for better or worse. That's much more along the lines of how we should be "engaged" with a donor. Shifting this mindset entirely changes the conversation.

So, what I know now that I wish I knew then is: It's all about the relationship, a two-way relationship. If the relationship is founded on me always getting you to do what I want you to do, then it's headed for, uh, well, a messy divorce.

But if I engage you as one who cares passionately about a shared cause, you will do whatever you can. It's really that simple.