syntheticzero's comments

This is well worth applying to -- amazing program

I don't know what you mean to imply with this question ---- when you donate to any non-profit, the money might be spent on any number of things, including overhead, as well as money sent on to beneficiaries. The only difference with DonorsChoose is that we actually give donors a say in how we spend their donation: on overhead, on materials sent to a specific classroom, or a combination. (Donors can decide to send a donation specifically to cover DonorsChoose overhead, in which case all the money goes into our general fund). The donor may also decide to donate to more than one proposal --- it could be two or three or five or ten proposals at once. That is also one credit card charge.

I really don't see why you assume that because the money being donated is spent on multiple things that would be separate credit card charges. That makes no sense, who does that? I can't think of any e-commerce site either in the commercial or non-profit space that would do this for no apparent reason.

I might add that, though I think this is more or less irrelevant, DonorsChoose does not send the money directly to teachers, but instead purchases the materials itself and has them shipped to the teachers (this is to reduce the incidence of fraud, and to make sure the money is spent on the materials the teacher said they would spend the money on --- the specific materials are chosen by the teacher, but we actually do the purchasing). If a donor specified all their donation go to the teacher and students, then the money they donate goes only to the vendor(s) for that proposal, who then ship goods to the teacher at their school, and the money we spend on staff expenses, web hosting, etc., etc. has to come from donations earmarked for overhead (including the optional donations).

I had to read and re-read this post before I grasped what you're trying to say here. There is no "stuffing" of charges going on here, whatsoever. The donor's credit card is only charged once, for the entire amount of the donation, including optional operating expenses donation. If the donor donates to 10 proposals, it still results in only one credit card charge.

It just seems bizarre to me that, simply by looking at a screen shot of our checkout cart, that you'd make some bizarre assumption that DonorsChoose is doing what you describe. Come on, at least do some research before posting things like this.

Hi. I work at DonorsChoose.org (as a programmer). Since I'm not an accountant I'm not entirely sure what point you're trying to make here, unless it is to suggest that in some way DonorsChoose.org is misrepresenting its finances to the world --- which we absolutely do not do. All the financial reports I've ever seen are quite clear about where the money from donors goes, how much of it goes towards operating expenses and how much goes directly to the recipients of aid. In what way does making the operational expense donation optional affect anything having to do with reporting of these numbers?

The reason DonorsChoose makes operational expense donations optional is simply to give donors a choice. They can choose to donate all their money directly to the teachers and students, or they can choose to donate part of the money to fund overhead. If they choose the former, all of the money goes to purchase materials, and all DonorsChoose overhead is drawn down from our general fund (which is currently funded from private donations and corporate donors, etc.) If they choose the latter, a portion of their donation goes towards overhead. In fact, we only currently cover about 40% of our operating expenses from the optional donation; we rely on external donations to cover the rest, but our goal is to reach breakeven (and we are on course to do so, as I understand it).

There's no sense in which the "official" "% of donations used for operating expenses" figure is fudged at all. The optional donation is precisely as described, and it's simply to give the donor choice, pure and simple.