US govt spending on education has stagnated over the last few years
Schools in poor neighbourhoods have been taking a bigger hit due to paucity of resources
DonorsChoose.org is a marketplace that matches donors with teachers with projects ideas and has grown at a rapid clip
The Gap/ Prompt
Most teachers have posted only 1 project. There is a lot of latent demand and willing donors that would like to contribute for a good cause
Teachers may need help/ a playbook for drafting winning project briefs
Insights into interesting patterns from DonorsChoose data may bring more visibility to the cause and the marketplace
Key Questions
What are some interesting growth and funding patterns from donorschoose transactions?
Can we showcase the above using some web based visuals for ease of consumption?
What are the predicters of a successful project brief? (will focus on this in the future)
Data
We worked with Donors Choose data including Project requests data, Project essays data, resources data and Donation data
We downloaded and crunched the common core data from NCES To get the government funding trends across years
Findings & Insights
Government spending on education has stagnated over the last few years
Most of the funding from any state goes to the same state. NY donates more to other states compared to others
A few states like CA and NY over index on online payments. May be other states should have alternate means of payment
The launch of iPad in 2010 is correlated with a sharp uptick in technology projects and a corresponding decline in books
Consumption Use Case
Have a dedicated insights playground on the donorschoose website where students / teachers / general public can engage and pitch questions they would like answered with data
Potential Next Steps
Build a predictive model for estimating the funding probability of a proposal
Build a playbook for teachers in plain english from the qualitative insights. e.g. chunk bigger projects into small ones with a clear focus and amount < $400
Can superusers act as peer to peer guides for sharpening the project proposals
Mine for favourable patterns in text data and use them to guide teachers for shaping the messaging
Analyze the patterns to funding completion. e.g. does it make sense to even leverage advertising for getting the first donor
Who should be targeted for a given project area / attributes?
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