By Oliver
Thursday,
Jul 31, 2008 at 2:35pm
We’re super excited that Joe, Peter, and Eric over at Social Action Labs are building a WordPress plug-in that promotes DonorsChoose.org classroom projects!
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.
If you have a blog and are willing to also give this cool free functionality a test-drive, do take a moment to pledge your support for the project at ThePoint.
Oliver
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By Boris
Thursday,
Jul 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.
- Boris Kerzner, Software Engineer
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By Mike
Friday,
Apr 18, 2008 at 3:27pm
Many of our generous institutional funders have funded half a classroom project’s costs, encouraging donors to make up the other half. We’re pleased to announce the first half-off sale using DonorsChoose.org’s new “match offer” technology. The Pumpkin Foundation / Joe and Carol Reich, known for their efforts to support charter schools throughout New York City, are offering to fund 50% of all projects at the city’s charter schools if someone like you provides the remainder. By completing these projects, you will double the impact of your donation. Click here to see all the projects eligible for the NYC Charter School Match Offer. The sale will continue until the grant is used up.
You can find out more about how Match Offers work over on our FAQ page. (Note, we’re still wrestling with what to call this new philanthropic beast — Double Donations? Red Zone Funding? Half-Off Sale? Eleemosynary Price Reduction Event? — so watch this space for its future name, or better yet leave your suggestions in the comments!) We’re hoping that The Pumpkin Foundation / Joe and Carol Reich grant will lead the way, and more foundations and companies will promote certain kinds of projects and match their grants with your donations.
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By Oliver
Sunday,
Apr 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!
Oliver
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By Oliver
Monday,
Mar 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!
Google has posted the “TechTalk” on YouTube. The talk was about 45 minutes followed by 10 minutes of Q&A.
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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By Oliver
Saturday,
Feb 23, 2008 at 9:44pm
We recently enabled prospective donors to be notified of projects matching their interests via an RSS feed. This will be most useful to folks with feed readers (eg. Bloglines, Google Reader) or “personalized homepages” (eg. MyYahoo, MyMSN).
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.
Techies should peruse our Developer Guide for more information. You can also email us with any questions: apiquestion (at) donorschoose (dot) org.
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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By Oliver
Saturday,
Feb 16, 2008 at 10:29pm
Until a few days ago, prospective donors who wanted us to notify them about classroom projects of specific interest to them had but one option: email alerts.
They would enable “Update Me” on their donor account page at DonorsChoose.org and then use our “Manage My Interests” functionality to specify exactly which types of classroom projects they want to hear about. When a teacher posts a new classroom project that matches their specified criteria, we let them know via email.
We’re pleased to announce that this same “alerting” functionality is now available via an RSS feed!
Like our email alerts, you tell DonorsChoose.org exactly what types of classroom projects are most meaningful to you. Then we let you know the moment our teachers have posted those projects. But instead of an email, we’ll notify you in an RSS feed that’s custom-built just for you.
For example, you can create a feed of projects from high-need classrooms in Mississippi, or projects that are already partially funded and focused on teaching music in high school classrooms, or projects specifically for autistic students at Charter Schools.
Here’s more information on how to setup a feed of classroom projects.
We hope you find it easy to use, and put it to work finding and funding projects in high-need classrooms!
Oliver
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By Oliver
Tuesday,
Nov 13, 2007 at 6:20pm
When we decided to make DonorsChoose.org available to public school teachers nationwide, we knew that we’d have to apply cutting-edge technology to scale our back-office procurement, fulfillment, customer service, and financial operations.
We announced today that we’ll be doing this by plugging DonorsChoose.org into Ariba’s on-demand “Spend Management” systems!
We know that these back-office functions aren’t exactly the sexiest aspects of what we do. But they are critical to efficiently bringing classroom projects to life at scale. So we’re very excited to apply Ariba’s technology to help us serve even more teachers and students.
Our tech team has already started on the integration work and we’ll be cranking to get our systems connected as soon as we can.
Initially, most of the improvements that the Ariba systems will deliver will be behind-the-scenes, so you donors and teachers won’t notice any changes to the parts of our website you use. We’ll be sure to let you know if/when we change anything that will alter how you interact with DonorsChoose.org.
Oliver
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By Oliver
Wednesday,
Oct 31, 2007 at 1:54pm
Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?
I’m not sure, but perhaps the answer is “Yes” when we’re talking about DonorsChoose.org web traffic and The Colbert Report!
We worked hard to prepare our site infrastructure to handle the increased attention of the Blogger Challenge that started on October 1. The Blogger Challenge got off to a roaring start and we’ve been amazed and humbled throughout by the incredible support of the blogosphere, which has come together to provide so many students with access to the classroom resources they need to learn.
For the first 2.5 weeks of October, we were gracefully handling many new site visitors, lots of donations, and tons of views of our challenge thermometer “widgets” (which are being featured on some of the web’s highest-trafficked blogs).
But our site was flat-out overwhelmed by the massive traffic that resulted from Stephen Colbert and Craig Newmark’s announcement around midnight on Thursday, October 18.
As we scrambled to increase capacity, we continued to receive big spikes in web traffic from the re-airings of that Colbert show on Friday, October 19 in the morning, afternoon, and early evening, and across US time zones.
Since no new Colbert episodes were airing last week (October 22-26), Comedy Central re-ran the previous week’s episodes! These additional re-airings generated many more big spikes in web traffic, mostly in the 24 hours starting on last Wednesday at midnight: between daily re-airings and the staggered showings across time zones, we think the Colbert show that introduced DonorsChoose.org may have aired between 3 - 9 times during that 24 hour period. Amazing.
This was GREAT news for the teachers who use DonorsChoose.org to get much-needed resources for their classrooms. But not so great for our web servers.
The DonorsChoose.org tech team has been working like crazy to handle this huge increase in web traffic. For example, if our servers are temporarily overwhelmed, the site will now remain available but show a “Sorry!” message if users try to make donations or post new projects. We are also caching the site much more aggressively.
However, yesterday one of our changes to increase server capacity didn’t sit well. The result was the inconsistent availability of DonorsChoose.org from 8:45pm ET yesterday evening - 9:30am ET this morning. (We thought we had the problem licked at around 1am ET and called it a night, only to find out that our fix didn’t stick.)
We have since stabilized the site, are monitoring it carefully, and quickly making improvements behind the scenes.
All of us at DonorsChoose.org are deeply appreciative of your patience while we beef-up our site to smoothly handle all this great attention!
Oliver
CTO, DonorsChoose.org
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By César
Thursday,
Sep 27, 2007 at 6:02pm
DonorsChoose.org has introduced a new teacher points system in order to provide the best service and support possible to all our teachers.
The core reason behind this change is that certain types of projects consistently require more time and money to fulfill than others. For example, it takes a DonorsChoose.org staff member just a few minutes to fulfill a project that requests only classroom materials and the total cost is less than $400. But it can take us 30 minutes of staff time to fulfill a project that requests a class trip.
We of course want teachers using DonorsChoose.org to continue to request funding for field trips, class visitors, and other special requests! However, if we’re flooded by too many labor-intensive projects, it could prevent us from serving teachers well.
Our new points system enables DonorsChoose.org to be more scalable and sustainable by having teachers earn and spend points for their classroom projects.
In the new system, teachers will still earn points by confirming their project funding promptly and returning completed Thank You packets on time. However, the old categories of Freshman, Honor Roll, Dean’s List, and Valedictorian have been replaced by a “points spending” system which works as follows:
Each type of classroom project will cost a certain number of points to post.
- Projects requesting $400 or less in materials from eSchoolMall will cost 1 point.
- Projects requesting more than $401 but less than $800 in materials from eSchoolMall will cost 2 points.
- Projects requesting $801 or more in materials from eSchoolMall will cost 4 points.
- Class Trips and Class Visitor projects will cost 6 points.
- Special Request (previously known as ‘Other’) projects will cost 8 points.
- Any project that combines more than one of the project types described above will be charged only once, but the charge will be based on the most expensive type of resource they are requesting (e.g. a project that combines a class trip and $820 in eSchoolMall materials will only cost 6 points).
New teachers will start their accounts with 3 points. All teachers who were already registered at DonorsChoose.org (with 0 or more points) when the new points system was introduced received an additional 3 points in their account. Teachers are allowed to have up to 8 projects in process at once.
The more points teachers earn by submitting prompt confirmations and timely feedback, the more trips, classroom visitors, and special requests teachers can submit!
We are excited that this new points system will work well for teachers while at the same time enabling DonorsChoose.org to efficiently fulfill many more classroom projects than ever before.
- Cesar & the DonorsChoose.org Team
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