|
|
By Daphra
Saturday,
May 2, 2009 at 12:04am
Our Tech team recently unveiled ‘brand-spanking’ functionality geared at creating a better experience for users who are interested in creating a personalized DonorsChoose.org Giving Page. Setting up a Giving Page allows you to create a virtual registry of classroom projects that speak to your interests and then easily share them with your friends, family and supporters. Simply put, the Giving Page is a customizable wishlist that allows you to easily spread the ‘gift of giving.’ Setting one up is pretty simple, if you follow the steps below:
Step 1: If you don’t already have a DonorsChoose.org account Create an Account
Step 2: If you already have an account, or have just set-up an account, navigate to Create a Giving Page
Step 3: Once there, select the campaign that you’d like to be associated with
Step 4: Great, you’ve selected the campaign (here, The Great Give-Back Birthday), now you can customize the look and feel of your Giving Page. You can edit the title of your page, the message that appears at the top of your page and even upload an image to the page.
Step 5: After you’ve customized your page, you can add classroom projects that you’d like to see featured. You can elect to have your page automatically uploaded with projects by selecting one of the filter options, OR you can manually pick projects to appear on your giving page. Note: you can add or remove projects at any point during (and after) set up.
Step 6: Once projects have been added to your page, click ‘proceed.’ You are now ready to SHARE your wishlist with friends. There are five options:
- Email: This feature auto populates a message that you can send to your friends. You can easily add email addresses from your address book.
- Facebook: This feature allows you to share your giving page using “Connect with Facebook.” You can send a message to you Facebook friends or simply post your page to your wall.
- Links: Your Giving Page has a unique permalink. Post this link to Twitter, add it to your Skype/Instant Messenger status, or simply share it with friends. Donations made using this link will automatically be credited to your page.
- Widgets: Our team has created a suite of dynamic widgets that act as a miniature version of your Giving Page. Track your progress, your impact and your awesomeness using this widget. Upload it to your blog or website and get your entire network tracking your progress!
- RSS: Add a feed of your Giving Page to your feed reader or website and watch your projects come to life.
Once your Giving Page is created, consider adding a message to your email signature to help promote your classroom wishlist (ex. Join my Give-Back Birthday Party at DonorsChoose.org)
Voila, you’ve created a Giving Page!
If you’re still having difficulties setting up your page or need help troubleshooting an issue, please send our Customer Service team a note and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
By Frankie
Wednesday,
Apr 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.
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
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
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
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
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
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.
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
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
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
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
——————————-
Subscribe to our blog via email or RSS.
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
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
——————————-
To subscribe to the blog via email, please click here.
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
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
——————————-
To subscribe to the blog via email, please click here.
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
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
If you enjoyed this post, you can subscribe to receive new posts via email or RSS!
|
|
