Groublogpon – The Serious Blog of Groupon

If getting a deal on charitable giving seems oxymoronic to you, check out the Groupon we’re running all week for Donors Choose. Thanks to the matching grant provided by a generous philanthropist, you can get a Donors Choose gift certificate for 50% off.

If you’ve never heard of Donors Choose, it’s one of the great success stories in online altruism. Teachers post projects for which they need funding (e.g. “$3,000 needed for microscopes in Mr. Mellon’s 9th grade science class at Sunnyside High School”), and donors fund the projects they want to support. When a project receives enough funds, Donors Choose purchases the materials and delivers them to the classroom.

Considering Groupon’s origin as a group action/fundraising platform called The Point, creative fundraising is in our DNA. So when Charles Best from Donors Choose proposed this idea, we couldn’t wait to give it a try. By combining the ideas of Donors Choose and Groupon, each donor is empowered to effectively win a miniature matching grant – and then choose exactly where she wants her money spent.

Our matching donor has agreed to give up to $500,000, making the fundraising potential of this week’s campaign one million dollars! Hitting that number will take all the help we can get, so please share this Groupon with your friends and family.

This is hardly the first fundraiser to run on Groupon, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting. We love finding creative ways to channel the collective buying power of our customers back into their communities, and are proud to be working with Donors Choose.