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.

USA TODAY launches online community, "Kindness: New Ways We Give and Volunteer"

We could joke and call it Philanthropy-Light. Or Giving-Digest. But our nation's top-selling newspaper has launched its newest online community, and its theme is charity, good causes, giving, and giving back.

No small audience: the print and online editions of USA TODAY reach more than 5 million a day. Here's how they're positioning the online community:

Kindness is your daily source of inspiration and guide to making a difference in fresh and exciting ways, no matter where you are. Each day, this site will unearth unique stories of giving with exclusive interviews, fresh takes on news stories, plenty of tips, and links to interesting resources. But we're also building a community, and we look forward to hearing from you.

The community can be found here. You can see a lot there, but of course, you have to register and all that to participate in commenting, connecting, blogging, posting in (or creating) forums ... the usual social networking stuff. But it's all under the USA TODAY brand. No doubt there will be an on-going promotion of it. Who knows? Maybe it will become a generalized philanthropy portal for those who are interested, attracting donors and organizations alike.

(USA TODAY also published its third annual philanthropy section in the newspaper, entitled "Sharing in the USA.")

Labor Day: As summer winds down ... turn your computer off

Labor Day Weekend.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the bridge between San Francisco and Oakland is closed in what's becoming a nearly-annual occurrence. A huge chunk of the bridge is being cut out and a new section is being slid in, creating a detour that will allow the completion of a more seismic-safe span. The closure is forcing the region to pause from the usual frenzy. I say, good!

What's this holiday all about, anyway? It arose from congressional reaction to Grover Cleveland's shut-down of a labor strike in the 1890s. The powers-that-be granted an annual "worker's holiday."

The picture above left shows a workers' Labor Day parade down San Francisco's Market Street in 1934. Ordinary working men and women have long struggled for an 8-hour workday, better pay, the right to unionize, health care benefits, and such.

When I was growing up, the first day of school was always the Tuesday after Labor Day. These days, back-to-school has crept earlier for a variety of reasons.

Now, Labor Day weekend is just an occasion that marks the unofficial end of summer. Labor Day has devolved into a marketing platform for mattress sales and used car clearances.

So how much progress have the workers really made?

Today, many people just count themselves lucky to have a job. Today, jobs frequently become task masters far beyond eight hours, increasingly demanding greater shares of people's attention. And the driver behind it all (in my opinion) isn't some sinister push-pull between labor and capitalists so much as the spread of 24/7 technology and raised expectations for instantaneous response. Remember the days before the curse of email?

Can we slow any of this down? No. It's impossible to roll back to "the good old days." But we CAN occassionally turn it off.

Are you doing anything fun to the celebrate Labor Day? How about declaring Monday to be an email-free day? Turn off your computer. Don't check Facebook. Don't issue any tweets on Twitter. Focus on real-time, person-to-person interaction. Spend some time with friends and family having fun. Or do whatever it is you do to recharge your batteries.

Because, more than anything else, Labor Day now represents the last chance to catch your breath before sprinting through fall, the holidays and the end of the year.

Do yourself a favor: recharge and refresh. Turn off your computer. Just for a day.