From 0 to 100: The road to our first $100K

Today, in honor of meeting our goal of raising $100,000 on the site (and Throwback Thursday of course), we are throwing it way back to the summer of 2012. That is when two best friends, Andy and Ricky, were kicking around ideas about how to help their teacher friends stop spending so much money out of pocket. They knew they wanted to help, and they worked together to figure out the best way they would be able to contribute to education.

Fast forward almost a year to March 4, 2013 when the first version of PledgeCents launched and Andy and Ricky officially became co-founders. There were 0 causes on the site, and 0 dollars contributed, but what mattered was that the idea had become a reality! It would be another two weeks before the very first cause would go live on the site. Elizabeth Monda, one of Andy’s friends from college, raised $2,600 for a community demonstration garden for her students at Corning Achievement Elementary School.

From $0 raised to those first $2,600 to the $100,000 we reached on Wednesday, October 15th, we have been through a lot here at PledgeCents. We have learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and helped a lot of teachers provide for their students. And with a goal of of all but eliminating the over $1.6 billion teachers spent out of pocket last year, we are just getting started.

Here is the story of PledgeCents so far, as told through the lessons we have learned along the way.

1. Having the right people on your team is the key to moving forward.

When PledgeCents started, the team consisted of only Andy and Ricky. As dedicated as they were to removing the financial barriers that educators face when trying to provide their students with the best opportunities possible, they knew they couldn’t do it alone. They also knew that the key to building a strong “team” was finding people who shared their vision and relentless passion for education.

For PledgeCents, that passion has brought together an incredible team of individuals all along the way. We have had such great support from our amazing team of PledgeCents Ambassadors (thanks Arash, Mallory, Madyson, Amir, Paul, Lauren, Kathryn, Naseem, Alexis, Kyle, Andia, and David!) who have been there from almost the very beginning. Because of their help and the help of fellow startups, advisors, and mentors along the way, PledgeCents continue to grow in size, bringing on two new full-time team members (one even moved to Houston for us!), and, more importantly, impact.

TBT to our first Ambassador meeting

2. Educating the educators is a difficult but worthwhile process.

When we first started building PledgeCents, we had no idea just how hard it would be to convince educators to take the leap of faith to try fundraising online instead of with the more traditional bake sale type model to which they had become accustomed. We are thankful for our early adopters like Elizabeth Monda and Kalli Harrell who helped us prove that PledgeCents really could work.

By June 2014, we had 68 schools nationwide signed up, 83 causes to date, and had raised a total of $52,000 dollars on our site. It took us 15 months for us to get to that point. Over the last 4 months, we have signed up an additional 131 schools nationwide, raised an additional $48,000, and have a total of 166 causes on PledgeCents. While we are still very much on the road to where we want to be, we are gaining momentum, and we feel confident about how we are growing. We have been mentioned as a new and exciting way for teachers to raise funds in Tech Crunch, US News and World Report, USA Today, Huffington Post, The Journal, and various other news sources since our launch. The more awareness we can bring to what we are doing for education, the more teachers and students we will be able to impact. To date, we have impacted over 26,000 students, and that number continues to grow every day!

Change comes slowly in education, and we are proud to be a part of the dedicated group of people and organizations pushing that change forward.

3. Partnering with other organizations that share your vision is an important way of increasing your impact.

While we were going through Tech Wildcatters, we decided to be bold and reach out to Mike Feinberg of KIPP Schools and ask for his help and advice. We are very lucky that our bold act resulted in having Mr. Feinberg give his full support and help to PledgeCents. We have been growing our partnership with KIPP, and it has enabled us to work with many schools and teachers here in Houston and beyond. We have continued to grow partnerships like this through our work with Teach For America, Spring Branch Education Foundation, and a variety of other public and charter schools and districts across the country.

While most of our initial work and success was driven by going from teacher to teachers (which we still do, don’t get us wrong), we are now lucky enough to have a variety of channels through which we can spread the word to more teachers at once. We will be continuing to seek out these type of partnership, and we are excited to see the number of schools and teachers on our site continue to grow.

4. Altering the entire fundraising process to make it as simple as possible for teachers makes them more likely to embrace it.

Teachers are busy. They are generally overworked, underpaid, and dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to making their students’ lives better through education. In the past, fundraising has been time consuming and often frustrating. Want to take a field trip? Organize a bake sale. Need new books for your classroom? Sell cookie dough. Or worst case, just pay for it yourself. PledgeCents exists to minimize and even eliminate these frustrations.

Teachers like Elizabeth Monda, Kalli Harrell, and Katie DeVivo who have been us since very close to the beginning have seen our website transform. From a total relaunch of the site in mid-January 2014, to more recently revamping the sign-up process, the payment process, and everything in between, we are constantly working hard to make PledgeCents easier and more effective for teachers to use. Much like our company, the entire PledgeCents process is and always will be in a state of change and growth. We are always listening to user feedback and coming up with new ideas for how to make PledgeCents better. We built the site for educators and supporters of education, and we will continue to do whatever we can to make it the best fundraising platform for them possible.

Every single day we try something new. Sometimes we are successful, and sometimes we make mistakes. Our passion for education keeps us going, and we hope that we will continue to bring more and more people on the site who are also passionate about education.

So if you are passionate about education, what can you do to help?

Spread the word! Send your friends to our site. Retweet our tweets and posts. Give to a cause and share with your network. If you are an educator, create a cause and share your experience with your colleagues. Tell everyone and everyone about PledgeCents, and encourage them to spread the word, too! Growing this movement takes time and effort, and we are willing to do whatever it takes to impact students because we believe in a better future. Are you?