Last week, I wrote about my experience with DonorsChoose and their thank-you packages. I got a very nice comment from Mike Everett-Lane explaining some of the inner workings at DC. Yesterday I got two more emails of thanks which included links to six more worthy projects, which I thought I’d share here.
Dear David,
Thank you so much for making “Through the eyes of a child…” a reality for Ms. Thompson’s classroom. By now, you should have received your thank-you package in the mail. If you have not received it, please email zach[at]donorschoose.org. We welcome any questions or suggestions.
We hope the feedback illustrates the difference you’ve made for Ms. Thompson’s students. In case you’d like to help another classroom, we’ve selected some projects for you that are similar:
Putting on the marketeer hat for a bit, I have to admire the clever customized upsell. Nice work. And remember, you can save everybody some work if you cap your gifts at $99 each. But please make as many gifts as you can.
Back in December, I received an odd corporate gift - a 2GB flash memory card, and a $100 DonorsChoose gift card - from Google. I suppose it isn’t that odd to get a gift of some sort when you (your employer if you want to get technical) spend over $100,000 with a vendor. Anyway, I pocketed the flash card and logged on to DonorsChoose to see what that was all about:
DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to addressing the scarcity and inequitable distribution of learning materials and experiences in our public schools. We believe this inequity is rooted in the following factors:
Shortages of learning materials prevent thorough, engaging instruction;
Top-down distribution of materials stifles our best teachers and discourages them from developing targeted solutions for their students; and
Small, directed contributions have gone un-tapped as a source of funding.
DonorsChoose.org will improve public education by engaging citizens in an online marketplace where teachers describe and individuals can fund specific student projects. We envision a nation where students in every community have the resources they need to learn.
I poked around and found a request for a digital camera from a teacher at the William Ohrenberger Elementary School in West Roxbury, MA. The $100 from Google put the project close to completion, and I chipped in $30 more to finish it off. (Very smart marketing, BTW, reminding users of the amount needed to complete!) One of the interesting things about DonorsChoose is that you have the option of paying or not paying their overhead costs, assessed at 15%. They claim that 90% of donors choose to pay the fee, and I’m proud to be part of that group.
I didn’t think much more about the donation. My work was done. I got some nice thank-you emails from DonorsChoose, and a tax statement after the end of the year. This week, I also got two letter-size envelopes containing some more personalized thank you letters from the teacher, and also a packet of photos and thank you notes from the students themselves.
It’s nice to get some acknowledgment and its nice to see that the children are being taught to acknowledge gifts, and it’s good that I was reminded of the organization and inspired to write this post that might spread the word and get more people doing similar good things.
But I’m still a little uneasy at the effort and expense going into thanking me. I had the option to pay the overhead, I should have had the option also to put all that overhead into running the organization and none into sending me big hand-assembled packages of paper. When I give to public radio, I make sure to check the “I don’t want your stinkin’ tote bag” box. Additionally, I’m note sure how I feel about the schoolkids being reminded that some of their educational equipment comes at the whim of donors and that they should take time out of their day to write these notes. I received four photos (pretty obviously film photos, I guess the digital camera wasn’t operational yet) and four crayon drawings in each of the two packets, and (Google and) I gave about a quarter of the total funds for the project, so there were probably at least six more such packets created at the school and collated at DonorsChoose HQ.
Probably, I’m just having another grumpy day, but I still think charitable gifts should be anonymous and minimally acknowledged - just enough to feel secure that the funds went to good use and to satisfy the tax man.
And one more parting rant: If anybody at Kodak is tuned in (LKB?), these photos and crayon drawings with KODAK prominently featured are priceless. Why does it fall to individual citizens to place your products in elementary schools? These kids will probably never know what film is (was?), don’t you want them growing up associating Kodak with cameras?
I’d been thinking about this for a while, but it came back to the top of the queue recently when I saw the beginning of an advertising blitz for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. Or, as I like to point out, the walk for a cure for breast cancer. But this isn’t one of those annoying grammar posts.
If you want to do something to help cure breast cancer, you can walk or you can support a walker, (for example, pick one of over 200 people raising money to fight breast cancer at firstgiving.com) or you can just send money or you can hold a bake sale, or you can buy pink stuff. I was in a store, I won’t say which one, in the kitchen area, and there was a section where everything was pink. Pink cupcake pans, pink knife sets, pink toasters, you get the idea. Wow, I thought, all these companies are giving money for breast cancer research and helping to publicize the issue! (Of course, it was inconceivable to me that you might want pink kitchenware unless there was a good charitable reason for it!)
Not so fast. Some of the stuff was just pink. No pink ribbon, no Susan G. Komen, no percent of profits for research. Three of these products have a notation that they’re giving to the cause, and three don’t.
OK, that’s not entirely fair, since you can’t see the packaging, but I think it gets to the confusion that comes from stocking all the pink stuff together. *
What, if anything is wrong here, and who, if anyone is at fault? I think this might be the normal and necessary noise of a free market, but I have to at least suspect a few sketchy things might be happening. Perhaps some manufacturers are making pink stuff to cash in on the charitable aura without actually giving to the cause. Perhaps the people stocking the store are just being lazy, or maybe they’re in on some kind of conspiracy.
Even if every piece of pink merchandise in the world actually had a connection to the breast cancer cause, I’m not sure I would approve. The typical deal is something like 3-5% of profits donated. That’s profits, not the price of the item. 5% of a $50 mixer might be $2.50, but 5% of the profits on that sale is going to be a whole lot less, no more than a quarter, I’d wager. Sure, its more than nothing, and might come to a lot over thousands of purchases, but it should hardly make the choice for a rational consumer. Plus, if the pink item costs more than 3-5% more than the comparable non-pink one, the company could be making additional profits above and beyond those donated because of the charity, and that doesn’t seem right.
I’m not a big fan of the small but highly visible gestures, like wearing a ribbon or buying pink stuff. It’s true, these things help raise awareness, but I’m more interested in raising funds. If you’re buying small electric kitchen appliances of any color, you can afford to write a check for more than $2.50 for a cause you believe in. Buying the pink pancake griddle does not check “fight cancer” off your to-do list.
I encourage you to walk the walk any way you can.
* For those who must know, the santokus, the strainer and the mixer are donating to breast cancer research; the pans, pots and steak knives are just pink.
I’m off to Miami this weekend to attend a wedding and maybe sneak in some additional cultural or culinary fun. While I’m in the sunshine state sipping mojitos poolside, some people here in Massachusetts (and elsewhere) will be immersing themselves in the ice cold waters of the Atlantic ocean and local lakes and rivers.
Why?
Because some sadistic genius at the Special Olympics came up with the idea for raising money by holding Passion Plunges in wintry locales around the country. This is truly a brilliant idea. You have to be in some kind of shape to run a marathon, and even a shorter run or longer walk requires some kind of training commitment. Just about anybody can dunk themselves in cold water. Not that it doesn’t take guts and some dedication, but it doesn’t require training or even much of a time commitment. Plus, it’s too cold and icky in winter to do any conventional run or ride fundraisers.
I’m including a fundraising widget (at right) for a team of plungers fielded by Firstgiving.com where I’m doing a consulting project. In addition to taking a gander a Firstgiving’s cool technology, you should click through and consider making a donation to support the Special Olympics and cheer on the plungers. Or search the Firstgiving site for other events you can support, or learn how to set up your own personal fundraising page.
Before I call it a post, I have to spend some time geeking out, since the implementation of this widget in WordPress was not as smooth as I would have liked, and maybe others can learn from my experience.
What you’re supposed to do is grab the code from your Firstgiving fundraising page and paste it into your blog post. But WordPress’ “visual editor” mangles FG’s code (and YouTube’s and no doubt others’) and it doesn’t work. Unless you disable the visual editor by going to Users, selecting the user in question, choosing Edit, and UNticking the box marked “Use the visual editor when writing.” If you do this, things work just fine as long as you don’t mind composing your blog entry in raw HTML.
I hope that this makes it easier for people to use the Firstgiving widget and other kinds of scripts in WP blogs, and also that somebody notices this and either fixes it or tells me that I’ve been doing something wrong. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I missed the obvious solution. Maybe a nice cold dip will clear my head…
It’s winter. There’s no getting around it, denying it, bargaining with it, raging against it - it’s colder than a really cold thing. It’s also the “holiday season” when we get whipped up into a consumerist frenzy and fray our nerves trying to figure out what to give to whom and how much to spend doing it. And its the end of the year so all kinds of businesses - and charities - are trying to close their books and make their quotas. All of this collided in my inbox at work this week with this message that bought all kinds of thoughts and emotions.
Subject: PLEASE READ: This Years Holiday Drive
Happy Holidays All,
In the spirit of giving this time of year, Ipswitch employees come up with ideas every year to give back to the little ones during this holiday season. This year we are going to support Cradles to Crayons with their efforts to collect the following (in this order!!):
- Coats (new or gently used…sizes needed below)
- Socks (NEW)
- Undergarments (NEW)
- Pajama’s (NEW)
For newborns to pre-teenage children!! If you need ideas please ask me but refer to list below for the sizes in need…we can’t fill them all but anything helps!
TOTAL
0-6
mos
6-12
mos
12-18
mos
18-24
mos
2T
3T
4T
5/6
7/8
9/10
11/12
14/14+
16/16+
Boys Winter Coats
2,532
287
128
95
137
106
173
208
320
294
151
203
331
100
Girls Winter Coats
2,417
259
121
90
152
101
148
176
316
306
133
185
330
100
They are also looking for “new and/or gently used” winter garments (boots, hats, gloves) for the same ages.
I am hoping every employee in Lexington can drop off one of the above (more if you can!) to my office and then I will deliver them all on December 14th to Cradles to Crayons in Quincy, MA. That gives you all 9 shopping days J
Thank you ALL for your generosity and kindness, as always!
Let’s look at the underlying need here - there is an organization in Boston that needs five thousand winter coats for children. Five thousand children in and around Boston don’t have winter coats. I don’t know if Cradles to Crayons are even trying to address the totality of local need. It’s not that big a city or even that big a state - this seems an appalling number. Look at the difference in impact those number make in this message compared to a more generic, “we need warm clothes for kids.”
There are about 80 people working at the Lexington office - that’s about 62 coats per person, an impossible goal to be sure, but fortunately we’re not the only ones working on this. I wonder if we would do better to concentrate on a single age group or a smaller goal that we might meet, like one coat per person.
I don’t have access to any “gently used” children’s clothing although I could probably try to gather some from friends. I shopped around online and found cheap but respectable-looking children’s winter coats - a puffy down coat in a small size can be had surprisingly inexpensively, and if you’re not picky about size or color, you can do even better - and ordered a batch drop-shipped to HR. I didn’t buy 62 coats, not even close, but I think I moved the needle a bit. If there’s a coat drive where you live, you might try these links or do your own search.
As soon as I clicked to confirm my order, I started to wonder if I had approached this the right way. It has become fashionable to link charity contributions very directly with the goods or services and even with the recipients. This is good marketing - you feel better about giving a winter coat to a cute kid whose name and face you know than you do giving a few bucks to an organization that works to clothe unnamed kids. Plus, it makes the donor less concerned about the money being eaten up by overhead costs.
If that coat you give is one your own kid no longer wears, that’s a clear win for everybody. But if you do as I did and spend money on buying, and then shipping, a coat which then has to be transported so it can be sorted and given to a child, have you really delivered the best charity return on your financial investment?
Did I take the easy way out when there might have been an even easier way that’s also better? Wouldn’t I have delivered more value to the needy by simply writing a check? I would have saved the shipping cost on the coats I bought, and if the organization wanted to use my money to buy coats, they probably would get a better deal in bulk than I did online, and if they want to use my money to buy office supplies or some other unglamorous necessity, would that in any way devalue my contribution?
Charity isn’t about the warm fuzzy feeling the donor gets, it’s about improving the situation of the disadvantaged. As I’m fond of saying, I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong, so over analyze as I’ve done if you like, but at the end of the day, just do something that helps.
Entries (RSS)