Donors Choose

When I was a younger I decided that at age 35 I would begin to dedicate more of my time toward philanthropic efforts. Donating. Volunteering. Stuff like that. Earlier this year I came up with a concept of creating a web site that would allow people to donate cash and equipment to their neighborhood schools.

I based this on a research report I did for an Educational Studies class back in college. I found that although public universities have been soliciting for private donations for years, public schools don't. Additionally, I called maybe a half-dozen Fortune 500 companies based in the area and found that not only did they all have money available for such a request, but that they had no record of that request ever being made on behalf of a public school.

So, for a few weeks I began planning out the checks and balances for donating. My biggest fear of donating is having the money squandered by administrators, so accountability would have to exist. Actually, the entire process would have to be as transparent as possible. The next phase was to see what type of models already existed for this type of website, and to my surprise, a single site existed that did exactly that. It's called Donor's Choose.

Now, I figured, if I proceeded I would be competing with an existing entity. Then I started to look at the big picture and it seemed to make more sense to support the great inroads these guys were making instead of potentially steering resources away. I then joined the mailing list and made a donation.

This week I received an email stating that Donor's Choose had been selected from over a thousand non-profit organizations as the winner of the Nonprofit Innovation Award chosen by the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Amazon.com. It really is a great concept, and it's a win-win situation for the community and the schools.