DonorsChoose engages the public in public schools by giving people a simple, accountable, and personal way to address educational inequity. In this clip, board member Stephen Colbert tells our story.
To date, teachers at 83% of all the public schools in America have posted classroom project requests on our site. Projects range from paper and markers for a poetry writing unit to violins for a school recital. More than 4 million “citizen philanthropists” have supported such projects, channeling books, field trips, technology, and other resources to more than 40 million students nationwide. In all, we’ve generated $1 billion for learning experiences designed by our country’s most dedicated public school teachers.
GOOD Magazine highlighted us as one of 30 Places We Want to Work, while Fast Company named DonorsChoose one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World—the first time a charity has made this list. Through its dedicated team and culture, DonorsChoose earned recognition as the #1 "Best Nonprofit to Work For" by the Nonprofit Times.
Team Overview
As a Customer Support Specialist at DonorsChoose you’ll answer between 60 - 100 emails a day (depending on the day). These inquiries will span a variety of different topics across the entire teacher and donor lifecycles.
You may help a donor navigate our marketplace to support a school in their hometown. Or you may help a teacher get donations multiplied by qualifying for a partner-backed offer. You may walk a mother through surprising her daughter (a first-year teacher!) by fully funding her classroom project. Or you may spend some time tracking down a shipment of live crickets (yikes!) for a sixth grade science class. And sometimes you’ll have to do things like explain policies that won’t make the customer super happy, deliver difficult news about eligibility, or simply help a customer reset a password. It’s not all glamor and live insects, but at the end of every day you’ll have helped a bunch of people bring joy to a bunch of students!
In addition to this core work, sometimes you’ll be assigned capacity building work as workload and time allows. This capacity-building work is defined as work that executes against a CS manager’s OKRs and will be done in close collaboration with your manager, who will fully scope and define the work. This work could look like:
- Attend and participate in trainings as scheduled by your team leaders.
- Provide feedback to your peers on their tickets.
- Update or write public-facing help content.
- Hop on the phone to resolve a particularly gnarly issue. (We work primarily in email right now, but sometimes it’s just easier to get on the phone and hash it out!)
- Answer support questions for colleagues across the organization.
- Update our internal training decks or be asked to facilitate a session.
- Add information into our knowledge management system
- Lead mini-projects or fact-finding missions — and present ideas or findings to teammates, managers, or others across the organization.
The majority of your time will be dedicated to core ticket work. When time, performance, workload, and need allow, capacity-building work may be matched with you. The breakdown between core ticket work and capacity building work for a Specialist will vary as our volume fluctuates. Typically, we estimate that you can expect this breakdown of work:
Q1+Q2: 95% core ticket work, 5% capacity-building work
Q3: 90% core ticket work, 10% capacity-building work
Q4: 80% core ticket work, 20% capacity-building work
Qualifications
- Professional. You are the face of DonorsChoose to many of its customers. As such, you hold yourself to a high standard. You are task-driven, productive, attentive, collaborative, and accountable. Particularly as a remote professional, you can work autonomously and don’t require a ton of supervision.
- A solid communicator. It is your job to be clear and concise, to gain agreement on issues, to match tone and be understood by customers who have varied technical experiences and diverse backgrounds. You will also use these skills to engage with our customers on our Equity Focus when they reach out to us. You are a great writer and are not afraid of the phone.
- Thoughtful. You take pride in your work and care about outcomes. You think “What if I were in this position? What would I want to hear right now?” You foster positive experiences even when it means saying no or sharing difficult or highly-technical information.
- Productive. We have high expectations for the quantity of work that you will do each day, while maintaining an excellent quality of support.
- Tech comfy. You’ll use Zendesk (a ticket management platform), the DonorsChoose administrative site, and other third-party applications (Slack, GSuite, and more) in your daily work. You are supporting the use of a two-sided marketplace and want to learn the ins and outs of how it all works. You know basic troubleshooting techniques.
- A learner. You recognize that you are always in a position to learn and that you can learn from anyone at any time, including customers. This makes you flexible to change and open to feedback on your work.
- Decisive. You’ll make judgement calls and decisions based on your knowledge of our policies and processes. You have a bias toward action. You recognize you might make mistakes or occasionally say the wrong thing to a customer, but are confident in your ability to own mistakes and learn from them.
- Resourceful. Not every question has an easy answer, but you’re totally into figuring things out. You’ve used multiple methods to investigate and successfully discovered the answer to something tricky. (And you’ll be able to tell us about this in an interview!)
- Generous. Once you figure something out, you’re excited to share the new information. You want to lend your ideas to the team and make everyone around you stronger.
You might also be: (not required, but let us know if this is you!)
- A customer support pro. You already have experience providing customer support and genuinely enjoy working with people to solve problems. You’re interested in a career in customer support and contributing to projects that directly impact the culture and effectiveness of Customer Support at DonorsChoose.
- Interested in crowdfunding platforms, two-sided marketplaces, or K-12 Education.
- A seasoned work-from-home pro. Or, in the least, committed to and eager to try it out.
The Details
- Location: Remote in CA, CO, FL, GA, IL, IN, MD, MI, NJ, NY, OR, TX, or WI
- Schedule: 40 hours per week (schedules can be flexible Mon - Sun)
- Compensation: Starting at $17/ hour and commensurate with experience
- Benefits: This role is eligible for a competitive benefits package, which includes a rich employer-paid individual and family health, dental, and vision plan;an annual professional development stipend;15 days paid vacation and 10 paid national holidays.
- DonorsChoose is a fully vaccinated workplace and all new employees, regardless of their work location, will be asked to share proof of full vaccination against COVID-19 within two weeks of their hire date or request an exemption from this policy due to a disability or sincerely held religious belief or practice.
Hiring Process Outline
We are aiming for a start date of June 6th, 2022. Every application is reviewed by a member of our team and we will be reviewing applications on a rolling basis. To help you prepare for our hiring process, here's an outline of what you can expect:
- Assignment - We rely heavily on email customer support to resolve tickets. We will use this to assess how you might respond to different customer issues. Our recruiting software helps us review submissions anonymously to reduce bias in our process.
- Phone Screen - A chance to connect with our hiring manager to discuss your interest in the role and any questions you may have. The anticipated duration is about 20 minutes.
- Interviews - A chance for you to meet with your potential future teams. These will take place virtually and the anticipated duration is about 2 hours.
Please submit your resume online and answer the application questions.
A Final Note
The DonorsChoose team works toward a nation where students in every community have the resources needed for an excellent education. To do this we hire and support a diverse team of the best and the brightest talent available.
We are an organization increasingly representative of the varied races and ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations, religious and political beliefs, and abilities that comprise our nation. DonorsChoose focuses on attracting, retaining, and advancing diverse talent because it makes us more effective, high-performing, creative, and resilient.
If you are passionate about our mission, highly skilled in your field, and looking for a place where you can bring all of yourself to work, we want you.
If you are passionate about our mission, highly skilled in your field, and looking for a place where you can bring all of yourself to work, we want you.
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