Do you work for a nonprofit organization, or are you considering starting one and want to incorporate some DonorsChoose.org-like aspects?
In response to frequent requests from folks like you, we’ll host an informal webinar on Wednesday, March 30th at 2:00pm ET.
In this 1-hour webinar, Cesar (our COO) and Oliver (our CTO) will spend 15-20 minutes answering questions such as the ones below, followed by a Q&A session:
- How did DonorsChoose.org get started?
- What would we have done differently if we were starting today?
- What are some common pitfalls to avoid when starting an online giving marketplace?
- How do you maximize the efforts of your volunteers?
- How do you decide between investing in technology and doing things manually?
The webinar is open to anyone interested in learning more about how DonorsChoose.org works from a technology and operations perspective. We don’t intend to spend time on traditional non-profit development tactics, focusing instead on the unique technical and operational aspects of our organization.
Please RSVP to join us. (We’ll email you all the details.)
We hope you’ll join us for some engaging discussion!
Is that Cesar the COO and Oliver the CTO who EACH pocket $135,000 of donor money every year? Let me guess, the presentation is about how to divert hundreds of thousands of dollars from poor schoolchildren and make it look like you have very low overhead. Is that about right?
No thanks. Unlike you, I have a conscience.
Comment by LouF — February 26, 2011 at 6:48pm
Thanks for sharing your views with us. I’d like to briefly explain our talent strategy and how that is linked to our compensation philosophy. Our ultimate goal is to channel $100 million per year to high need classrooms across America. In the current fiscal year, we hope to reach $25 million, so there is a significant journey from here to $100 million. To accomplish this, and be able to do it at the lowest cost along with a high service level to teachers and donors, we need a world class organization, supported by strong business systems and processes that improve over time. To make this happen, we require extraordinary people in the organization. Our incredibly lean organization of 50 staff members:
- Runs our outreach efforts to public school teachers across the country
- Ensures our financials are among the most transparent of any nonprofit
- Makes our website secure and easy to use
- Manages partnerships with corporations and foundations
- Works to engage individuals with our cause
- Fulfills nearly 10,000 individual classroom project orders each month
The executives at DC.org are professionals that possess the skills we require to succeed. Several of them left corporate jobs at very significant reductions in compensation to join us on our journey to $100 million. We want them to feel that within the constraints of a not-for-profit, they are being rewarded fairly. This requires us to compensate them appropriately. They, along with the rest of the team at DC.org have put in place and manage an organization where, between 2008 and 2010, contributions for classroom projects increased 107% and salary expense declined 5%, while the amount of total expense spent on Program Services increased from 89.2% to 93.9%. We believe these results demonstrate the value our highly talented and dedicated team delivers. We care deeply about our impact on public school teachers and their students.
Please visit http://www.donorschoose.org/about/impact.html to see more information on the numbers of teachers and students we are serving. If you have any more questions, please visit http://www.donorschoose.org/contact and we’ll get back to you swiftly. Include a phone number and we’ll gladly give you a call to discuss this further if you’d like.
Comment by Andrew — February 28, 2011 at 2:17pm
You don’t NEED a “world class organization” of 50 people to buy crayons with donations. You don’t NEED to pay yourselves six-figure salaries.
“Program Services” is 93.9% because you include your massively-inflated salaries in “Program Services”. That’s nothing to brag about.
Looting donor money away from poor schoolchildren is nothing to be proud of. It’s bad enough that you can rationalize it to yourself, but to “teach” others to do the same is inexcusable.
Comment by LouF — March 1, 2011 at 12:01am
Hi Lou,
As a donor on DonorChoose.org I deeply appreciate their work. This web site did not build itself. There’s no open source platform that does what they do. They had to build it. They need staff to review the requests, to send the materials, and make sure that everything is above the board. The need to pay for servers and tech stuff to handle the massive traffic influx when Colbert or Reddit talks about them.
Yes, I agree that it’s be totally great if every single penny raise went to the teachers and students, but without some administrative overhead, this site wouldn’t exist. I’d rather have some of my donation go to support DonorsChoose than not have the ability to donate to teacher in high need classrooms.
Non-profits have overhead expenses. They have to have staff and they need to pay their staff fairly if they want to run a professional organization. Otherwise their operations would crumble over time.
I respect your viewpoint, but as a donor, respectful disagree.
Comment by Kevin — March 9, 2011 at 11:53am
I have been an educator for many years and I absolutely love what you do and think Lou should probably think twice about bashing an organization that does much more than our own state and federal governments in the States are willing to do for our schools.
I would like to know if you have any plans to set this up in other countries? I am currently visiting Guatemala on a six month RTW trip and during one of my Spanish lessons with a local University student studying to become a Secondary teacher she mentioned that they do not have materials in their local school for this age group. Your organization was first to come to mind and I’m wondering if this might be in the works. The students around Lake Atitlan are excited to learn and the conditions are worse than what we see in the states. An international donor site such as this would be awesome. Thanks again for everything you are doing to change our broken system. Please keep it up!
Comment by Amanda — March 11, 2011 at 10:14pm
Of course “this web site did not build itself” but there are hundreds of thousands of websites on the internet. You don’t need to pay a CEO $160,000 because his organization has a website. In 2011, having a website is really not that big of a deal.
The statement “There’s no open source platform that does what they do. They had to build it” is false. They use Java and the Spring framework. They are both free. Yes, it requires some software development, but nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of dollars they are lining their pockets with.
I pity anybody naive enough to gives to this organization. Far too little of your donations go to the kids and far too much goes to fatcats.
Comment by LouF — March 22, 2011 at 5:21am
Hi Amanda,
Thank you for your comment and we’re happy to hear that we came to mind during your trip to Guatemala! We absolutely realize that there is need in all sectors of education globally but we have only been a national organization for a short time and we are still working to ensure we can be scalable and sustainable serving the public school students and teachers our organization was founded to serve.
We may eventually be able to expand our program (or license our platform) to serve students in need in any type of school system or geographic location; however, at this time we do not have the capacity to expand to all schools.
We’ll address this question more in depth during the webinar so hope to see you there!
Comment by Andrew — March 28, 2011 at 1:51pm
For those commenters complaining about DC staff earning competitive salaries, SERIOUSLY, STFU! Just because the organization has a social mission, doesn’t imply that people should be paid less, or that the organization should spend every cent on their programs. The reality is that the investments that DC has made in their people and infrastructure is what has made them as successful as they are today.
Comment by Marc B — March 29, 2011 at 10:22am