case 2

The desired funding structure was demonstrated in the 2011 annual r\Report presentation, in which the DonorsChoose team noted that in FY2011 the charity had 370,037 donors, with many of those donors coming from California (53,426), Florida (45,417), Tennessee (25,804), New York (21,642) and Illinois (14,336). The presentation also include a list of 20 FY11 $100,000-$499,999 partners, that ranged from education related firms, such as LeapFrog Enterprises, to tech companies like Facebook and Yahoo!, to banks, including Golman Sachs and Wachovia. Thirteen FY11 $500,000+ Partners were listed: Omidyar Network, American Express Members Project, Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, bing, Chevron, Claire Giannini Fund, Horace Mann, hp, Pershing Square Foundation, Sonic, Townsend Press, U.S. Cellular and Yellow Chair Foundation. The presentation noted that they raised $32, 664, 680 in FY11.2

The team had re-organized several times since its inception. One of the more significant changes was the introduction, in February 2010, of a team member dedicated to digital marketing. He spent 18 months at DonorsChoose, experimenting with the impact digital marketing could have on the organization, using such tactics as paid search, affiliate marketing and display advertising, and including retargeting and Facebook ads. His goal was to drive donor acquisitions online. Ultimately Bisbee and her team realized it

2 DonorsChoose.org 2011 Annual Report, http://prezi.com/6vkffcihisht/donorschooseorg-fy11-annual-report/, accessed July 27, 2014.

did not make sense to use these channels to acquire new donors, as the costs and resources required to do so did not generate a sufficient return. In August 2011, the digital marketing role was eliminated.

In November 2011, the team was reorganized to better support the organization’s revenue drivers (see Exhibit 2). Several years prior to this reorganization, DonorsChoose had launched a function on the website that allowed donors to comment on their reasons for donating. One of the biggest discoveries to spring from the comments was that teachers were in fact driving much of the organization’s fundraising

— essentially, teachers were asking people to donate to projects for their classrooms. Further examination showed that teachers were the largest drivers of donations on the website (see Exhibit 2).

Bisbee, having been promoted to the position of chief marketing officer at DonorsChoose, had assumed a role that included responsibility for branding and awareness, in addition to managing the Individual Donors team. She had three direct reports. The first, the marketing communications manager, was responsible for donor retention through email marketing. This work included optimizing the emails that existed in the database — for example automated emails were sent out, such as those emails to teachers alerting them that their thank you notes or photos had been sent. The second direct report, the marketing manager, communities, was responsible for acquiring new donors through mobilization campaigns (whether they were donor-facing or teacher campaigns). This manager needed to be ready to act on any number of campaign opportunities that might arise. The final staff member on the marketing team was the senior marketing manager, engagement. This person played several key roles: identifying influential people in the database and finding ways to cultivate them, and determining which segments were important and how to pursue them. Critically, this person was focused on finding influencers, promoters and advocates, rather than top donors. Also reporting to Bisbee was a full-time intern who was responsible for social media. Despite spending very little on marketing and investing limited resources in media outreach, the team was able to maintain its strong public profile due to the quality of the team’s work and the results the organization was able to show.

The Individual Donors team collaborated heavily with the technology team. The website and user experience on the site fell within the domain of the chief technology officer. The Individual Donors team was responsible for driving potential donors to the website — or the top of the donation funnel — while the technology team was focused on converting people who visited the website. Retention was a responsibility shared between these two groups.

REFINING THE BRAND

When Best founded DonorsChoose, it was the first “philanthropic market place” — meaning that donors could choose specifically where their money went. Because of this, the name “DonorsChoose” had made a lot of sense — it described a unique type of organization in the philanthropic community. Since its founding, however, numerous organizations with similar designs had been founded, including Kiva in 2007, and Kickstarter in 2011. As more of these organizations launched, what had been unique to DonorsChoose — allowing donors to pick where their money went — became increasingly prevalent. It became apparent that the public assumed “DonorsChoose” enabled donations to any number of charities. A clarification was needed that the donations were specific to education.

Several additional factors drove the realization that the brand’s presentation needed to be revisited. Bisbee and her team found that people had trouble remembering the name. For example, DonorsChoose was often misremembered as Donors Choice. The name was also very difficult for people to understand over the telephone — was it DonorsChoose or Donors’ Shoes? In fact, Best noted that his one regret was

creating a name people had trouble remembering. Within the organization, some people believed that these issues were hurting ability of the brand to leverage word-of-mouth and viral marketing.

Finally, Bisbee and her team were very aware that the corporations donating to their organization cared about the brand recognition of the charity they were donating to. The assumption was that their affiliation with a charity would become more valuable if that charity was well known among their consumers. They realized they needed to do a better job conveying what the organization did.

Although DonorsChoose had considered addressing this issue for several years, in the summer of 2011, the organization was in a financial position to hire an agency to take on this work. Bisbee and her team began reaching out to branding agencies. In the early phases of this process, they were not even sure what the scope of the project should be: would they change their name, logo, tag line?

The team began by considering whether the organization should change its name. Bisbee and her team spoke with various marketing and branding experts and also contacted several non-profits that had decided to change their names. (Second Harvest, for example, a charity focused on addressing hunger in the United States, had recently changed its name to Feeding America.) Bisbee knew there was a major risk in changing the DonorsChoose name. Doing so would create difficulties for a variety of constituents, as DonorsChoose had already gained significant exposure with its existing name, including extensive media coverage, such as two appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Additionally, Bisbee felt that the organization’s core expertise was not in branding, and that it would not necessarily be willing to commit the significant resources necessary to accomplish a complete re-work of the brand.

In December 2011, the DonorsChoose team made the difficult decision to keep the name DonorsChoose. The board in particular unanimously felt it was too late to change the name of the organization. Bisbee’s hope was that the organization could develop a tagline and logo that, combined with the name, would be better able to convey the mission of the organization.

In late winter 2011, Bisbee engaged Siegel+Gale, a global branding agency, to generate taglines and test them out with DonorsChoose’s existing and prospective donors. They were tasked with creating a memorable tagline that included a focus on education.

Bisbee and her team provided Siegel+Gale with some context for the assignment. To begin with, the tagline at that moment in time was “An online charity connecting you to classrooms in need.” Previously, until June 2007, it had been, “Teachers Ask. You Choose. Students Learn.” (see Exhibit 3). Additionally, Bisbee and her team shared with Siegel+Gale a logo/tagline combination they admired, for an organization called Share Our Strength. Share Our Strength had gone through a branding exercise similar to what Bisbee and her team were engaged in, and had ended up with the tagline, “No Kid Hungry,” and a logo featuring an apple core with two kids’ faces outlined in the negative space around either side of the core. The organization occasionally even flipped the tagline and name, allowing the tagline to take the leading role in the overall presentation of the brand. Bisbee felt the combination was powerful, short and punchy, and was looking for something equally as strong for DonorsChoose.

Siegel+Gale took the challenge and generated a collection of taglines that were well received by Bisbee and her team. The following taglines were on Bisbee’s short list:

· Build a better classroom.

· Kids. Teachers. You.

· The gift of learning.

· Help a classroom in need.

The real test though was from the qualitative study conducted from April 23 to May 14, 2012 and the informal comments received from highly engaged donors, teachers, vendors, and corporate and foundation partners during a similar timeframe.

On May 24, DonorsChoose received the results of the qualitative study (see Exhibit 4). The survey was conducted online, and the participants included 217 DonorsChoose donors and 412 individuals who had donated to any non-profit in the past two years. Participants were asked a series of questions to provide information about their reception to the taglines and to two colour treatments of the logo and the name (DonorsChoose was being considered instead of DonorsChoose.org). The results reinforced the casual comments they had received from key constituents. Their assumption had been that the “Choose” part of name would reinforce the concept that donors could select which projects they wanted to fund, and the tagline would serve to bring out the “education” part of their mission. They found, however, that the study participants seemed to forget the name, DonorsChoose, once they heard the tagline, while the “education” portion of the message was received clearly, they did not have a sense of the model or what they were supposed to do — volunteer, adopt a kid, fund a project? The integration of “choice” and “education” was core to what Bisbee and her team needed to communicate to their stakeholders. The taglines seemed to accomplish one at the expense of the other.

Siegel+Gale left Bisbee and her team with an 82-page presentation of the detailed findings of their study and a lot to think about. Were they ready to select a tagline and move forward? If so, which one best accomplished their objectives? Was the tagline really the solution to DonorsChoose’s current predicament? Could it be accomplished with something subtler, or was there a need for a more dramatic effort? Were there other considerations or stakeholders involved in the mix that should be considered? While it was clear that the organization risked losing the ground it had gained with its existing branding, the potential of an ideally executed brand refinement could be game changing. It struck Bisbee that this issue was a remarkably simple problem, but solving it was proving to be tricky and intricate.

EXHIBIT 1: FUNDS RAISED BY DONORSCHOOSE.ORG, 2003 TO 2012

Source: DonorsChoose.org, “Impact,” October 3, 2012, www.donorschoose.org/about/impact.html, accessed October 3, 2012.

EXHIBIT 2: DONORSCHOOSE.ORG’S MAIN REVENUE DRIVERS

Note: Gift codes are DonorsChoose gift cards, which allow recipients to select their own projects for donations. Source: Company files.

EXHIBIT 3: EXCERPT FROM CREATIVE BRIEF FOR DONORSCHOOSE.ORG TAGLINE DEVELOPMENT, APRIL 12, 2012

Source: Company files.

EXHIBIT 4: EXCERPTS FROM TAGLINE RESEARCH PRESENTATION BY SIEGEL+GALE TO DONORSCHOOSE MAY 24, 2012

EXHIBIT 4 (CONTINUED)

All “Potential” responses are captured on the left and all “Current” on the right.

Source: Company files.