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Great news! DonorsChoose.org made it to the Top 5 of the American Express Members Project, so we’re now one of only five organizations with a shot at $1.5 million! All winning funds will go to classroom projects on our site.

If you have an American Express card, please take a moment to vote for the DonorsChoose.org project, “Help 100,000 children thrive in the classroom” by following the steps below:

1. Visit “Help 100,000 children thrive in the classroom” on the Members Project website.
2. Click on “Vote for this project” under the photo on the right.
3. This will open up a box underneath that asks cardmembers to log in to vote. Click on Cardmember Login.
4. You will be taken to a page that asks for your User ID and password. If you haven’t registered yet or if have forgotten your login, you can register or retrieve your forgotten login now.
5. After you sign in, you will be taken back to the project, “Help 100,000 children thrive in the classroom,” but please note that your vote has not been registered yet.
6. To cast your vote, click “Vote for this Project” again. The button will disappear and it will now say, “Thank you for voting for this project”

Thank you for taking the time to support DonorsChoose.org and our teachers. If you do not have an AmEx card, please help by spreading the word to family and friends!

- Melanie, Charlotte and Linda

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Looking for a project?
- Tyler Green of the Modern Art Notes blog is encouraging his readers to support arts projects through his challenge page.
- The American Federation of Teachers highlights two DonorsChoose.org projects on its blog.
- The blogger behind Three Words Back… is offering some cool bounty for those who donate through his challenge page.

Want to hear about a feedback package?
Decorno calls her feedback from the students a “cute little packet of love.”

Looking for a holiday gift?
- Check out what the QC report and Luxist have to say about DonorsChoose.org gift certificates.
- You can bid on a signed set of the My So-Called Life DVDs on eBay with all proceeds benefiting DonorsChoose.org!

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On December 4th, Michel Martin of the NPR program Tell Me More spoke about DonorsChoose.org with founder Charles Best and Annemarie Wikstrom, a teacher in Lafayette, Louisiana, who has received materials through DonorsChoose.org. The interview can be found here on the NPR website.

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Thank you to everyone who voted for DonorsChoose.org in the American Express Members Project! Since the week that the Members Project ended, we have been asking American Express to help us find a way to provide DonorsChoose.org gift certificates to all our voters and supporters. Unfortunately, American Express has notified us that they cannot help us distribute DonorsChoose.org gift certificates to Members Project voters due to privacy issues. We are extremely disappointed because we wanted our voters to be able to select the specific classroom projects to be funded with any award proceeds. However, we’re committed to providing a DonorsChoose.org gift certificate to any American Express voter who contacts DonorsChoose.org to request one, since that’s the only way we know how to reach you! To receive your DonorChoose.org gift certificate, please email giftcertificates (at) donorschoose (dot) org and put “American Express voter” in the subject line. We will issue gift certificates until we have distributed all $100K of the American Express funds or until January 1, whichever comes first. In either scenario, the full $100K American Express award will be used to fund classroom projects which will help thousands of teachers and students in low-income classrooms.

For those interested in the legal issues, here is the response we received from American Express’ legal/privacy counsel in response to our request:

“American Express collected email addresses in The Members Project in order to contact Cardmembers during the duration of the promotion but explicitly stated that those ‘E-mail address(es) … will not be used, sold, or otherwise distributed beyond the explicit purposes of The Members Project.’ We have discussed this issue with the attorney in the General Counsel’s Office of American Express in charge of privacy policies for Cardmembers. Now that The Members Project is complete, the contract regarding use of email addresses gathered during the duration of The Members Project, which was explicitly and unambiguously conveyed to Cardmembers during the duration of promotion, will not allow (1) American Express to share those email addresses with DonorsChoose.org nor (2) American Express to send out emails to Cardmembers regarding DonorsChoose.org or any other project.”

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So, it’s officially Day 3 of the Blogger Challenge, and this is DonorsChoose.org’s first post about it. What’s with that?

Well I, for one, have been too preoccupied with 1. being über-excited as classroom projects are being funded left and right, and 2. reading the blogs of all the participants who have posted about the Blogger Challenge (and getting too frequently distracted by all the other great posts on said blogs….). So here, finally, is the official DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge launch post.

The Blogger Challenge is an initiative to engage bloggers both big and small and their readers in a communal effort to help public school students get the resources they need to learn. The challenge will last through October, with some lucky bloggers winning the Google Award, Yahoo! Award, Six Apart Award, and Federated Media Award at the end of the month. If you’d like to read more about the Blogger Challenge, check out the press release for some more interesting tidbits.

Almost anything is fair game in terms of encouraging one’s readers to donate (although let’s keep this legal and ethical, shall we?!), including offsprings’ commissioned artwork ($25), magnets ($30), ad space (top donor) and tomato costumes ($40,000).

Whether your challenge goal is $100 or $100,000, we welcome all bloggers to the fray. And donors, every little bit you can contribute helps to make projects a reality. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has already set up a challenge, donated, or spread the word!

I would say bring it, but it’s kind of already being brought… so keep up the good work! We’ll be posting about the Blogger Challenge all through October, so stay tuned. And bloggers, it’s certainly not too late to join.

Any questions/comments/problems, shoot ‘em my way - charlotte at donorschoose dot org.

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