In one year, public school teachers across the nation spent a total of $1.6 billion of their own money on classroom supplies.

A history teacher in the Bronx set out to help these teachers who were using their own funds to improve their students’ classroom experience. In 2000, Charles Best founded DonorsChoose.org, a crowd-funding site where public school teachers can post information about their class projects, and individual donors can choose which ones they want to support financially. Since then, the nonprofit has funded more than 700,000 school projects. In 2014, DonorsChoose.org was named one of Fast Company’s 50 most innovative companies in the world. This was the first time a charity was ranked in the top 10, alongside companies such as Google, Nike, and Yelp.

 

Chris Pearsall ’06 is part of a team of 80 DonorsChoose.org employees who help turn teachers’ ideas into reality. Pearsall, who majored in organizational communication, learning, and design at IC, is senior director of brand and communications and is responsible for media relations, social media, video production and digital content, event production, and content design.

Up until last July, Mykal Urbina ’11, an integrated marketing communications major, was a partnership manager at DonorsChoose.org. She has since taken a position working on the New York Philharmonic’s corporate sponsorships.

Both Pearsall and Urbina were instrumental in the nonprofit’s #BestSchoolDay campaign, which raised more than $14 million in donations last March from more than 50 actors, athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists such as Ashton Kutcher, Samuel L. Jackson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Seth Rogen, Carmelo Anthony, Serena Williams, music producer Russell Simmons, Google cofounder Sergei Brin, and Twitter founder Biz Stone. These high-profile donors didn’t just choose one project to fund: like most donors, they funded all of the projects in an entire city, county, or state. For instance, Ashton Kutcher supported all of the projects in his home state of Iowa while Serena Williams funded all the projects in Compton, California, where she grew up.

The campaign quickly went viral, starting with DonorsChoose.org board member Stephen Colbert’s appearance on CBS This Morning and closing with the appearance of a handful of the #BestSchoolDay funders on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The movement was also covered by USA Today, the Associated Press, Fast Company, and 200 other outlets, and was Huffington Post’s main story as well. It was a trending topic on Twitter for seven hours, and it became a trending story on Facebook and Reddit.

 

ICView: What role did each of you play in the #BestSchoolDay campaign?

CHRIS: I helped drive the cross-team collaboration and media relations execution. This was by far the most complex technical “event” we’ve ever pulled off at DonorsChoose.org—funding 12,000 projects at the same time plus matching donations to 15,000 other projects. I helped connect all of our teams working on this project—partnerships, marketing, tech, operations, finance—to ensure we were all on the same page come March 10. On the media relations side, we worked with an agency to help land media stories in several hundred national and local outlets, and partnered with CBS This Morning, Huffington Post, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for our launch announcements throughout the day.

MYKAL: I worked directly with 32 of our #BestSchoolDay funders to choose the cities and states they wanted to fund, record video messages sharing their own best school days, and fund all the projects in their chosen regions on the big day. I loved being able to show them their impact in real time—via tweets from completely awestruck, grateful teachers; instant data on the number of classrooms they helped; and beautiful, handwritten thank-you notes from students across the country.

 

ICView: What’s your biggest success story?

CHRIS: This was a really big year for DonorsChoose.org, and #BestSchoolDay was our biggest day since we went national in 2007. This past spring, we hit the $100 million mark in funds raised within one school year for the first time—a milestone we’ve had our sights set on for years. It’s incredible to think that we’ve raised over $430 million in the past 16 years, and almost 25 percent of that has been in the last year.

 

ICView: How is DonorsChoose.org changing the way education is funded?

CHRIS: Our goal at DonorsChoose.org is to use our data on what teachers need most to help make education spending smarter. We have 16 years of data on what’s missing from America’s classrooms, and our data scientists have organized that information and opened it to the public to make it possible for anyone to generate insight. We look forward to the day when teachers no longer have to beg for pencils and paper. We really want to help them with those exceptional projects, like underwater robots and field trips to foreign countries.

 

ICView: What potential impact could data mining have on education reform?

MYKAL: Data mining gives teachers a voice by empowering them to share the needs of their classroom, and it arms decision-makers with the information they need to make accurate, efficient decisions.

Today, school budgets are set at a macro level, addressing broad needs with limited input from frontline educators. We believe that teachers know best what their students need and should have a voice at the budget-setting table.

We’ve learned a lot from the over 700,000 classroom projects that teachers have had funded on our site. That’s 700,000 data points reflecting the unique needs of classrooms. Using that data, we can drill down into the needs at state, city, district, and school levels. 

For example, our data shows that while science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is at the top of Chicago’s educational agenda, Chicago has a smaller proportion of math and science project requests on DonorsChoose.org as compared with the rest of the United States. 

We found that, in high-poverty classrooms, the 2008 recession led to a five-fold increase in the proportion of requests for essential materials like paper, pencils, and dictionaries, whereas in low-poverty classrooms, the recession led to no such increase in the proportion of requests for essential materials. The recession had a hugely disparate, regressive impact on our most vulnerable public schools.

In addition, the data collected gives us insight into trends: our records show that teachers were requesting class sets of The Hunger Games through DonorsChoose.org as much as 18 months before Google search patterns for the series spiked!

 

ICView: What’s one of the most unusual project requests you’ve seen?

CHRIS: One of my favorites was a teacher who wanted to create a live-action Angry Birds event at her school. She was having her students create the birds and pigs out of papier-mâché as an art project, and she had the band learn the game music to perform. Her art students also videotaped the whole thing, and they actually built a slingshot to fling the bird sculptures at the pig sculptures. The whole school came out to watch it. That’s the kind of creativity we love to see and support!

 

ICView: What’s next on the horizon for DonorsChoose.org?

CHRIS: We see three opportunities for DonorsChoose.org to help, beyond bringing much-needed supplies to the classroom:

1.   Opening our data to help make education spending smarter and more efficient

2.   Connecting teachers with entrepreneurs and inventors to bring innovation into the classroom (We’ve already worked with Makerbot to get 3-D printers into classrooms and OpenROV to make open-source robots available for underwater exploration and education.)

3.   Incentivizing teachers to bring new learning opportunities to their students through our “altruistic currency” of DonorsChoose.org funding (We’ve helped teachers bring new advanced placement STEM courses and coding curriculum into high-poverty schools by giving them DonorsChoose.org gift cards to fund “start-up costs” and then getting them additional classroom funding when their students complete courses or score well on advanced placement exams.)

 

ICView: What are the most challenging and rewarding parts of your job?

CHRIS: The biggest reward is when we have a big campaign like #BestSchoolDay and see the thank-you notes coming in from teachers and students. It’s a reminder of why we do the work we do. Teachers are the heroes on the front lines, and they deserve all the help we can give them. My biggest challenge is probably the same as any other nonprofit professional’s: having enough hours in the day. My team of four handles the workload that a team of 15 or 20 would manage at a for-profit company, but the can-do spirit and creativity from everyone on our team definitely makes a difference.

 

ICView: How did IC prepare you for what you’re doing now?

CHRIS: The opportunities I had to participate in service-oriented programs at IC have definitely helped me in my career. Leading teams for Community Plunge, touring schools with Ithacappella, coordinating programs with the Student Government Association and IC After Dark—all of those experiences gave me an appreciation for “doing well by doing good,” which is one of our mottos here at DonorsChoose.org. And I was really lucky to have role models like Terry Martinez, Kelly Stephens, Deb Mohlenhoff ’92, and Russell Martin in student affairs; Randie Blooding as our Ithacappella advisor; and my professor/academic advisor Mary Lou Kish, who helped me see how my passions and education might combine into a career.

 

ICView: Five years from now, what will success look like for you?

CHRIS: By 2021, we’re hopeful we've delivered over $1 billion in classroom resources to teachers and students. And we also have a lot of programs in development right now to support students and teachers in new ways, like helping teachers with professional development costs. Schools still need so much more support in this country, and we’re not stopping until every teacher and student has what they need for a quality education.

MYKAL: We envision a day where teachers no longer have to reach into their own pockets to fund the classroom supplies their students need most. We’ll continue chipping away at that goal every day for the next year, five years, ten years. Between now and 2021, we aim to fund at least one classroom request from every highest-poverty school in the country.