Description: A little more than a year ago, we launched Dollar a Day to help people discover and support amazing nonprofits. It was a fun project, it's been a great year, and — although we're now wrapping things up — we still hope that others will be able to learn from our experiment and, maybe, even be able to carry it on by building something similar. To help, we'll be sharing some of our challenges and triumphs from the past thirteen months, as well as open-sourcing our site code. That way, anybody who feels inspired
Hi there! A little over a year ago, we launched Dollar a Day to help people discover and support amazing nonprofits. Although we've wrapped up, it's been a very rewarding project and year — and as part of our shut down process, we're excited to open-source the code of Dollar a Day and share our experience from the past year. We invite anyone to build their own version of Dollar a Day. Maybe it's Dollar a Week, or a version focused just on nonprofits working on environmental issues or social justice. We want
The goal was to build something small that could have a big impact. We hoped that Dollar a Day would grow organically — fueled by people sharing it with their friends. If it grew a ton, we would recruit a dedicated team to nurture and support it. If it didn't catch on, we could easily shut it down. We ended up in the middle — over $316k raised for 365 great nonprofits — and decided to wrap up the project as a year long campaign.
We received a bunch of press at launch (Oct 1, 2014), and Dollar a Day received over 400 donors the first day, and 170 the second. It was modest in internet scale, but pretty good in the nonprofit world. Ours was not a small request — $30 a month — so we were happy Dollar a Day had resonated. By the fourth day, signups began to taper off. And while the slowdown was disappointing, we soon had 1,000 awesome donors collectively donating $1,000 a day to nonprofits. And 2,500 people had signed up to receive our