It started with a small idea in our office. Our colleague, Julie, posed the question: “what would happen if we challenged all of the teachers in the Southwest region to tell their network of friends and family that for one day only, DonorsChoose.org will match any donation they make to these teachers’ projects?” Great question, Julie, but… there was one problem – it was April 3rd and we had to do this before April 11th or run the risk of having the Operations team put a bounty out on our heads. So, Julie – ALWAYS up for a challenge – put out the word to our teachers! And….. OUR TEACHERS RESPONDED. On April 10th, over 100 teachers participated in the challenge and they were able to generate over $24,000 in individual contributions (a total of $48,000 including the matching funds). AMAZING!
Needless to say, we were thrilled with the results of this campaign. However, we were even more excited by the response from our teachers. One teacher wrote: “Thank you so much! I see that the campaign did the trick and that my project is fully funded… Thanks so much for your work on behalf of our schools- I smiled all day.”
We hope that these teachers (and all of the teachers who saw how successful this campaign was) got to see – first hand- what some of our most successful teachers do as a matter of course! And, we hope that they continue to engage their networks to help get future proposals funded (teachers are often surprised by how happy people in their network are to help their classroom). Moreover, we hope that the donors who participated in this campaign got to see that they CAN make a huge difference in the classroom of their friend or family member.
This one-day campaign represented a core part of our mission- ordinary teachers and donors coming together to make an extraordinary difference.
Way to go!
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