Internet fundraising pioneer DonorsChoose announced Tuesday that the head of another crowdfunding powerhouse will succeed its founding CEO, Charles Best, who announced in April that he would be stepping down.
Alix Guerrier, CEO of GlobalGiving, which raises money for international relief projects with a focus on local charities, will take the reins of DonorsChoose in March. Best will remain on the board of DonorsChoose.
The two organizations combined have raised nearly $2 billion from donors, and they share a lot of the same DNA. In particular, both take a far more hands-on approach than many of their crowdfunding peers in vetting the recipients of donors’ generosity.
Best was a history teacher at a public high school in the Bronx, N.Y., in 2000 when, frustrated by the lack of resources for classroom projects, he created DonorsChoose as a way for teachers and others to solicit support for classroom education projects. Five years later, he quit his teaching job to concentrate on DonorsChoose, which now has about 150 employees and has raised $1.2 billion since its founding.
When the time came to start looking for his successor, Best wrote the job profile: “There was a section that was titled ‘Core Candidate.’ There was one name I wrote in that section, and it was Alix Guerrier.”
The two organizations have collaborated on a number of projects over the years, including research to test the effectiveness of giving strategies, matching offers, contests, and email marketing strategies.
Vetting Recipients
Some crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe, the biggest of the bunch, have scrambled to keep scammers from abusing their platform and have run into controversy over what kinds of causes users can support.
DonorsChoose has avoided those kinds of problems by vetting project requests and shipping donated supplies directly to the schools. Likewise, GlobalGiving vets all the nonprofits that donors can support, including making site visits to most of the organizations.
DonorsChoose has an annual budget of $25 million to run its operations, which it raises through a $30 fee on each project, which is deducted from donor gifts, plus an optional 15 percent contribution that many donors (and all corporate and foundation partners) include with their gifts.
Allison Fine, a consultant and expert on nonprofit leadership and strategy, said those vetting strategies put GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose at “the top of the heap” among crowdfunding sites when it comes to trust and impact.
Fine, co-author along with Beth Kanter of the forthcoming book The Smart Nonprofit: Staying Human-Centered in an Automated World , also praised DonorsChoose for making its site “stupid simple” to use for fundraising, giving teachers a powerful tool that doesn’t require much time to learn how to use.
Fine said that websites like GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose have revolutionized giving, mostly for the better. Fears that crowdfunding would crowd out giving to established charities have not come to pass, she said; instead, they’ve engaged new donors.
“Crowdfunding has democratized fundraising for people and for causes,” said Fine. “It has allowed any person to create their own cause and have just as good a chance at fundraising for it as only a large organization before.” Also, crowdfunding sites provide immediate feedback to donors on how the fundraising for individual projects is going and how their donations are being used, and those are powerful tools to help keep people giving, Fine said.
One potential downside, said Fine, is that as crowdfunding grows in popularity, donors may get annoyed by the bombardment of pitches.
“Crowdfunding is very crowded,” she said. “We’re all being asked hundreds of times a week, and it can be hard to stand out.”
A Focus on Equity
GlobalGiving and DonorsChoose both have much more they can achieve by using artificial intelligence and other smart technologies to further customize the giving experience for donors, and to help match donors with causes, said Fine, who co-wrote along with Kanter a report for the Gates Foundation on how artificial intelligence can boost fundraising.
And those technologies can also help crowdfunding platforms advance equity, Fine said, by, for example, alerting platform managers or researchers when trends in giving are shifting away from the people who need help the most.
We have a lot of choice in what we promote, what we put on the front page, how we design the click buttons, the amounts that we set.
Guerrier and Best agree that crowdfunding sites have many ways that they can advance equity, and there is no need for them to be passive conduits of donor money.
Every morning, employees at DonorsChoose review a data dashboard showing how much money was raised per teacher the previous day, with data broken down by Black teachers, Latinx teachers, and other demographic groups. DonorsChoose also monitors how much money is flowing to the one-third of schools in the United States where more than half the attendees are students of color and where more than half are from low-income households.
Those and other metrics can help show whether donor money is flowing where it’s needed most. “Our key measure of success is how many classroom projects did we help get funded at those schools,” said Best.
Guerrier said there are many ways for platforms like DonorChoose to nudge donor giving decisions in ways that advance equity.
“We have a lot of choice in what we promote, what we put on the front page, how we design the click buttons, the amounts that we set,” said Guerrier. “All of these different tactical decisions are opportunities to be thoughtful about what goals we’re advancing.”
Best noted that three years ago DonorsChoose started asking teachers to share their racial and gender identity, where they went to college, whether they were first in their family to graduate from college, and other demographic data.
“More than 300,000 teachers have now provided that demographic information,” Best said. “It means we have the largest contact list of teachers of color of any institution in the country.”
Looking Ahead
Best said the data that’s being collected at GlobalGiving, DonorsChoose, and other crowdfunding sites can be used by researchers, other philanthropic organizations, and policy makers to spur broader changes to systems that perpetuate inequities. Both organizations are transparent with their data, and provide open source tools to help others advance those goals.
Una Osili, associate dean for research and international programs at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, noted that crowdfunding was invented long before the internet arrived. More than a century ago, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer successfully appealed to ordinary Americans to help pay for a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. Most donations were less than $1 — an early display of the power of collective fundraising.
Crowdfunding has come a long way, and there is still much more it can accomplish, said Osili, who has led extensive research on crowdfunding and other forms of giving. About one-third of households donate through crowdfunding sites, according to a study published by the Lilly school in April.
“It’s here to stay. It’s growing rapidly and expanding the donor base,” Osili said.
Guerrier will take over DonorsChoose on March 1 after some time off. At GlobalGiving, Donna Callejon, who leads the nonprofit’s disaster-response team, is stepping up to act as interim CEO.
Best said he doesn’t have specific plans for what he will do next, although he offered a hint on where he might look after a break.
“I miss teaching, and maybe I have to figure out a way to get back in the classroom,” he said.
