Having personally benefited from some amazing New York City public school teachers during my formative years, and with my brother having spent his career teaching at public schools in high-need communities in Massachusetts, I’ve always felt strongly about the importance of empowering great teachers in our highest-need communities. So I was immediately intrigued when a friend introduced me to DonorsChoose.org in 2006, right after I’d left the Bing product engineering team at Microsoft and moved back to my hometown of New York City.

I was naturally interested in the core idea of connecting regular folks directly to classrooms in need. But given my passion for technology, I was especially excited about DonorsChoose.org not being a traditional charity that just needed help with its website, but rather a new model for charity that’s wholly enabled by technology. After better getting to know the organization’s unique blend of micro-giving, personal choice, financial transparency, and vivid donor feedback, I was convinced that this model was the future of giving. I was convinced that I could use my Microsoft experience and passion for technology to grow the organization in order to help a far greater number of teachers and students.

While I’ve devoted a lot of effort over the last 5 years to making our web experience, back office fulfillment, customer service and financial systems fully scalable, automated, and transparent, I am probably most proud of the DonrosChoose.org API.  Empowering developers with great APIs had been game-changing for so many commercial software products like Salesforce.com and Wordpress, not to mention dozens of successful Microsoft products! So in late 2007, I became convinced that an API could reap big benefits for a web-based charity like DonorsChoose.org, even though no other comparable organization had a successful API at the time.

At its core, our JSON API enables developers to pull DonorsChoose.org classroom project listings onto their websites or applications. Like most nonprofits, DonorsChoose.org has big goals and very limited resources, and the API has enabled independent developers to expand our reach well beyond our internal capacity. For example, Fortune 100 companies have built “cause marketing” campaigns with highly customized user experiences on our API, and generous software developers used our API to build 50 novel apps to improve public education in America.org in our recent “Hacking Education” contest. I also collaborated with my former Bing colleagues to build a DonorsChoose.org Map App, which provides both a novel interface for helping classrooms and showcases the Bing Maps platform.

Since I joined DonorsChoose.org, our impact on public education has been incredible. One year into my tenure, we first expanded DonorsChoose.org to help teachers in all 50 states. Now 1 in 3 public schools in America has at least one teacher using DonorsChoose.org!  When I arrived in 2006, DonorsChoose.org delivered $5 million in supplies to schools; this past school year, DonorsChoose.org delivered over $32 million! Even faced with our country’s economic downturn in late 2008, when many charities were shuttering their doors, DonorsChoose.org saw a 50% year-over-year increase in individual donations.  This school year, we anticipate hitting an exciting milestone of helping 6,000,000 students in high-need schools across the country.