‘Fast Company’ Offers Glimpse of How DonorsChoose Will Use Data for Advocacy

The leader of DonorsChoose, a charity that helps schoolteachers finance classroom needs, reveals in Fast Company (March) his plans to use the data his group collects to push an advocacy agenda.

Charles Best, a former history teacher in the Bronx who founded DonorsChoose in 2000, serves as cover boy for the issue, which ranks the world’s 50 most innovative companies. A couple of nonprofits are included on the list. The magazine puts Mr. Best’s group at No. 9, lauding it as an “educational charity juggernaut” that raised $225-million so far. Its supporters have included celebrity philanthropists such as the Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and the TV show host Stephen Colbert (who now sits on the group’s board).

“Most charitable organizations—especially those with big corporate backers—try to avoid controversy like mystery meat in the school cafeteria,” notes the Fast Company writer, Peg Tyre. But the portrait she paints of Mr. Best shows a charity leader who’s spoiling for a fight—armed with mountains of data.

By last year, DonorsChoose had received more than 140,000 requests from teachers seeking money. The charity has hired a data analyst and plans to begin crunching those numbers and generating reports that show where the need for funds is the greatest—and how that compares with, say, per-pupil spending in various school districts.

“If a district is getting a relatively high per-student spending rate and there are many requests from that district for basic supplies such as paper and pencils, that will tell us that too much of that money is never leaving the central office,” Mr. Best says.

He expects resistance as his group takes on the role of watchdog, he says, and he welcomes it. “We think our reach is big enough,” Mr. Best says. “Our volume of teachers is big enough. Our teachers are passionate enough. They can’t stop us now.”

The canny use of numbers also helped vault Bloomberg Philanthropies to the upper reaches of Fast Company’s rankings (No. 2, right behind Google). The grant maker, which gave out $452-million last year, gained distinction by following the lead of its founder, the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg: By employing data “for every step of the process, from identifying priorities to monitoring progress to scaling pragmatic solutions,” the foundation “has been extraordinarily effective.”