These positions will report directly to DonorsChoose.org’s CTO and will play a central role in an agile organization that is serious about technology.
The right candidates are top-notch contributors with a proven track record of success, who will be comfortable in DonorsChoose.org’s start-up atmosphere and ready to play a key technical role on a small, dedicated team. Our team is smart, committed, and passionate, and the work environment is informal, fast-paced, and fun.
Thanks for helping us grow our team so we can serve even more classrooms!
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Posted by Risa on
Monday,
February 28, 2011 at 5:45pm
DonorsChoose.org strives to make a difference for teachers and students in high need public schools. To identify the classrooms that most need our help, we assign each school a “poverty level” based on data from an external provider. This data – displayed on every project – can help donors decide where to direct their contributions. It also helps us measure our impact. So we know it’s important to get it right!
Last week, we completed a large-scale update of the school data on our site. As part of this process we found a more comprehensive way to identify high poverty schools, which were previously under-represented due to missing or inaccurate data.
We hope this improvement will enable us to support even more students in our nation’s highest need schools.
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Posted by Frankie on
Wednesday,
April 1, 2009 at 11:30am
This past month, we’ve been working hard to understand who our donors are and why they come to our site. To do this, we sent out two surveys.
The first survey allowed us to hear the voices of our donors through five open-ended questions. The answers helped us understand how we should approach a second, quantitative survey.
The second survey consisted of about twenty multiple choice questions. This survey just ended and we are excited to share some preliminary results!
1,900 donors responded
About three quarters are women
Our donors run the gamut in terms of age… the even distribution took us by surprise
6 out of 10 have an immediate friend or family member who is a public school teacher
Over half are extremely likely to recommend DonorsChoose.org to a friend, giving us a 10 out of 10 promoter score
Of those unlikely to recommend us, the most common source of frustration was getting a donation returned as account credits because the project did not reach full funding
37% prefer to give to classrooms in the community where they live
Thank you notes from the students are the most popular form of classroom feedback
16% of our donors are interested in automatic, recurring donations to classroom projects in their interest area
Thanks to all who took the survey – you’ve made a real difference! We’ll continue analyzing the data to learn how we can improve the DonorsChoose.org experience.
The plug-in will enable WordPress to automatically accompany each blog post with relevant recommendations for classroom projects. It will do this by first analyzing the content of a blog post to extract the key topics, then using our JSON API to pull in projects related to those same topics.
Such a cool application of our API! We’re looking forward to testing this cool plug-in right here on our blog.
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Posted by Boris on
Thursday,
July 17, 2008 at 3:00pm
We recently revamped the search pages on our site, in an effort to provide a more intuitive user experience. This post aims to walk you through these cool new changes.
Start at the homepage and click “Choose a Project” near the top. You’ll see that we now show all the projects by default. We have also modified how each project appears in the results – Location (e.g. city, state) information is provided as well as the dollar amount needed to complete the project. Clicking the filters in the “Narrow Results By” section allows you to refine your search until you find the projects you’re interested in.
You can filter by cost category (e.g. $200-$399), by subject, by grade level, and more. You can even drill down all the way to a particular school in the “location” section! Note also the keyword search, which you can combine with other filters to find the projects you like.
As you refine your search observe the “bread crumb” (think Hansel and Gretel) near the top which shows you the history of your search activity. Maybe it looks something like this: > All Projects > Technology > $400-$999 > Grades 9-12 (High School). Note that each crumb is clickable, allowing you to backtrack out of your search! (That’s not the only way, however, to remove your search filters! Next to each selected filter you’ll also find a link allowing you to remove that specific filter.)
A couple links at the top of the search results page allow you to sort results by the poverty level of the schools, the cost remaining to complete the project, or the number of days left before the project expires.
Scroll down and in the bottom right you’ll see a small “projects per page” drop-down which lets you choose how many projects to show per results page – 10, 25, or 50.
We hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful, and that the updated faceted search pages help you more easily find the projects of your choice.
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Posted by Oliver on
Sunday,
April 6, 2008 at 5:46pm
Using our “website widget” is probably the best option if you want to list classroom projects on your website, but you’re not a web developer comfortable using our classroom projects API.
Follow these simple steps to add classroom projects to your website!
1. Start at DonorsChoose.org advanced search and specify what type of projects you want to appear on your site:
* Execute your advanced search and on the bottom of the search results, choose the “Website widget” option from the “Add to your website or feed reader” menu.
* You will be transferred over to the SpringWidgets website.
2. Customize your classroom projects “widget” on the SpringWidgets website:
* Under “Step 1 Customize This Widget” take these (recommended, but not required) steps to prepare your widget:
** “Set widget embed size:” to 340 x 390
** Set “Border Color” to white (#FFFFFF). which is on the 2nd row of the palette, 3rd column from the right
** Paste this URL into the “Link to image” box: http://www.donorschoose.org/images/logo_trans.gif
* Under “Step 2 Get The Widget Code!” get the HTML code snippet of the widget you’ve created by following the instructions to “Copy the code–Click below & press Ctrl+C”
** To save or test your widget, paste the HTML code snippet into a text editor (such as Notepad), save the file with a “.html” extension, and then open the file in your web browser.
3. Add the classroom projects widget to your website by pasting the HTML code snippet into the code behind your website.
Our thanks to SpringWidgets for making this possible!
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Posted by Oliver on
Monday,
March 10, 2008 at 4:56am
This past Wednesday, Charles and I presented DonorsChoose.org to a receptive and engaged audience at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA. It was a lot of fun and we’re appreciative of our friends at Google for hosting our visit!
If you want to skip right to a specific portion of the talk, here is a time-stamped table of contents:
* Overview and introductory remarks [00:22]
* Demos of website functionality [04:55]
- making a donation
- zooming in on classroom project details
- choosing a project
- impact statistics [11:25]
- thank-you packet
* How it works behind-the-scenes [15:25]
* “Business model” and marketing programs [21:00]
- Blogger Challenge and other Challenge applications
- gift certificates [31:55]
- project notification and syndication feeds
* Technology topics [37:05]
- handling big spikes in traffic
- support received from the tech community
* Closing remarks [41:50]
* Q&A [43:45]
Enjoy!
Oliver
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We also have been getting requests to enable feeds of public school classroom projects to appear on other people’s public websites. The teachers using DonorsChoose.org are fortunate to have such enthusiastic supporters, people willing to help us spread the word about the thousands of great classroom projects in need of funding.
We’re excited to announce that for these generous DonorsChoose.org “evangelists,” we have built a project feed API!
Our hope is that savvy web developers will use this simple JSON API to show classroom project listings on their websites. For example, a school or school district could show all their teachers’ classroom projects on their public website. Or a company could publish listings of classroom projects in their community on their corporate giving intranet.
In addition, the API could enable web developers to build novel “widgets” showing project listings matching criteria of their choosing or “mash-ups” that combine project listings with other web resources. For example, a Facebook widget could list classroom projects of personal interest to that Facebook user. Or classroom projects could be mashed-up with Google Maps to provide a map-based project browsing interface.
If you’re not a techie yourself, you can help our teachers by telling your favorite web developer to try adding some project listings to their website!
Oliver
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