Janelle is the Vice President of Partnerships and Business Development for Donorschoose.org, a nonprofit organization that connects donors with a wide assortment of classroom projects and supply needs. Janelle explains why a background is business is invaluable as well as why workplace culture should be just as important (if not more) than title and salary to a job seeker.
Transcript
>> My name is Janell Lynn and I serve as vice president of partnerships and business development for Donors Choose Network. Donors Choose Network is an online charity where everyday citizens can connect with everyday teachers and teachers will post requests that they need ranging from basic school supplies to 3D printers or field trips or art projects for their students or science experiments that they'd like to do, and about two-thirds of the funding that comes to our site comes in the form of corporate foundation or individual giving. The remaining one-third is all the activity that you see on a typical crowd funding site which is one-on-one donations by individuals usually using a credit card, so my team at Donors Choose basically fundraises from the corporations and foundations that donate about 38 million dollars a year to Donors Choose. My day is divided between managing the team and trying to secure and build relationships with various corporations for the most part. We have a lot of companies, Fortune 500 companies that come to us looking to give back to public school education and don't know how and so we come up with different cause marketing campaigns to help them with their business goals, as well as achieving some scale of social impact. So my day is usually a bit of hands on internal meetings and then it's a lot of external meetings, networking with companies, talking to sometimes it's CEOs, CMOs of large companies or heads of corporate foundations. So, one project that I was really excited to work on recently was with Staples; Staples the office supply company came to us and said that they had a million dollars to donate to classroom projects and they wanted to do something to get their, to show appreciation to teachers and activate a lot of buzz on social media and drive traffic to their stores and so we partnered with Katy Perry the singer/celebrity, and for every, every tour, musical tour location that she stopped at Staples basically did a flash-funding of that city; so when she went to D.C. Staples funded about 300,000 dollars-worth of classroom projects and made all these teachers dreams come true for the day. And then we did a bunch of PSAs where Katy Perry filmed and talked about why teachers are so important for the classroom and radio and print PSAs.
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