DonorsChoose shares tips for startups navigating uncertainty

This year, teachers have been working harder than ever to support their students as they navigate distance learning in the midst of a global pandemic.

Meanwhile, the customer support team at DonorsChoose, a platform that connects teachers with funding for classroom projects, is supporting those teachers and learning on the fly as they navigate continued uncertainty around schools and reopening plans.

We chatted via Slack with Dan Blum, Director of Customer Support Analytics at DonorsChoose, about how a flexible approach to customer service has allowed them to focus on the most important requests during this difficult time.

Read on for the full conversation, and if you like what you learn, join our Startup Central Slack Community for more conversations like this.

Full Q&A with DonorsChoose

Greg (Zendesk): Tell us about DonorsChoose, what do you do, what does the team look like?

Dan (DonorsChoose): At DonorsChoose, our mission is to get teachers connected with the classroom materials they need for their students. We were founded 20 years ago by a teacher who was copying books page by page on a Xerox machine, because his classroom didn’t have enough copies of a book for every student to read. He thought that if more folks knew exactly how much teachers like him were going without, they’d be motivated to help.

Since the year 2000, we’ve brought more than a billion dollars of resources to teachers at three quarters of the nation’s public schools, rallying teachers to tell the world what they need, connecting them with companies, foundations, and individual donors who are compelled by those needs, and then shipping notebooks, pencils, laptops, and lab equipment straight to a teacher’s classroom door.

Greg (Zendesk): Walk me through your initial needs with Zendesk and some of the things you did, to set up for growth?

We were focused on scaling and looking for customer-focused software, and we wanted a company that was growing as we were growing.

Greg (Zendesk): At what point did you notice that it was time to start making some edits to your workflows?

Dan (DonorsChoose): As we’ve started to grow, we have had a few iterations of our customer support team. We used to be silo’d based on operational function, but now we’re consolidated into one team. Zendesk has been flexible enough to adapt to each of our models since we’ve used it.

Greg (Zendesk): In terms of your workflows and overall set up, what would you have done differently or wished you’d known looking back at when you first implemented Zendesk?

Dan (DonorsChoose): I think we would have incorporated a tagging or taxonomy system immediately. Tags were used inconsistently by different teams so analytics were really challenging for years. Recently we revamped our customer issue taxonomy and incorporated it into Zendesk, so we have much stronger data now and moving forward.

Greg (Zendesk): Cut to 2020, COVID times, schools have been remote for so many months, talk me through the pivot that was made, as a business, to adapt to the changing landscape of education?

Dan Blum (DonorsChoose): It’s been a wild year, as it has for everyone. The moment when COVID hit and schools began to close, that threatened the fundamental value that we provide to our teachers. We ship materials to schools. It’s what we do, it’s what our site is built upon. And in this moment, learning wasn’t happening in schools anymore.

So, we did three things:

1. We focused on the now, making fast changes to our operations to make sure no teacher was having a box of materials appear at a closed school.

2. We focused on the future, scoping out the long-term adjustments to our model we’d need to take during months of uncertainty when some schools would be open and others closed, with potentially those changes happening rapidly and in a way that’s hard to predict.

3. And finally, we focused on the next week.