Last week we did something a little different at DonorsChoose.org. Here’s what we saw and what we loved.

Thursday, March 10, was the culmination of months of planning, excitement, and and a lots of nervous jitters (we were never good at keeping secrets). The biggest flash funding of classrooms we’ve done, with 58 funders, over 11,000 classrooms, $14 million, and 47 states. Would it work? Would people be compelled to give? Finally, the #BestSchoolDay campaign launched—with the help of a lot of people—and the feedback was instantaneous and personally affecting. Here’s how it all went down…

Our pal Colbert got the party started…

Stephen Colbert kicked the day off for us with a fun appearance on CBS This Morning. There he explained what we were doing: uniting 58 actors, athletes, and entrepreneurs to donate $14 million to fully fund their hometowns or areas that meant a lot to them, and asking citizens across the country to join #BestSchoolDay by supporting a project.

CBS This Morning on Twitter

ICYMI: Stephen Colbert unveils donors for @donorschoose's #BestSchoolDay, over $14M pledged http://cbsn.ws/1nzwocm pic.twitter.com/pV24k5FSfi

Then the Huffington Post sparked the movement!

Our friends at The Huffington Post put their technological, editorial, and promotional savvy to work to build out a central hub chock full of inspiring #BestSchoolDay stories, an interactive map showing our stats and linking to projects that still needed support. They even allowed Colbert to take over their Twitter account with a hysterical and moving mix of jokes, stories, and memories.

Our teachers fueled the fire

Educators around the country knew something was coming as early as the afternoon before. They didn’t know exactly what it was, though. After they began to realize that so many projects were funded, and we had implemented a match offer for projects not yet funded, they couldn’t contain their excitement!

Their students had a blast, too

Some of the most adorable reactions we saw on social media: teachers inviting their students to thank their donors and dive into the #BestSchoolDay moment.

BayShoreMS on Twitter

You've brought lrng to read into the 21st Cent. for us! Many thanks to @tferriss & @DonorsChoose for #BestSchoolDay pic.twitter.com/xdtVfNzIHX

Los Alamitos USD on Twitter

Mrs. Keeler's class is having the #BestSchoolDay ever thanks to their new chromebooks from @DonorsChoose!!! Thanks pic.twitter.com/gEZr756oOA

Our funders rallied behind the cause

We couldn’t possibly have pulled any of this off without our #BestSchoolDay funders. Their contributions were colossal, and we saw teachers and followers thanking them—from the CBS This Morning segment to the end of the day on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Here’s a class photo of a few of them representing DonorsChoose.org on the Late Show:

The Late Show on Twitter

Thanks to all the donors who helped make it the #BestSchoolDay! #LateShow #LSSC pic.twitter.com/mPm2txXOmb

And our partners jumped in too!

Our partners are a huge part of what we do every day at DonorsChoose.org, and many of them also joined in the party. Here are just a few among the many that we saw:

PwC Foundation on Twitter

We are proud to support #BestSchoolDay by flash funding @DonorsChoose classroom projects in Jamaica, Queens & Miami with @Bob_Moritz.

Fuel Your School on Twitter

98% of teachers buy student supplies out-of-pocket. Let's give them a #BestSchoolDay to remember! http://bit.ly/1WadJQn @DonorsChoose

3M on Twitter

Let's make every day a #BestSchoolDay for students across our country w/ @DonorsChoose.org #STEM pic.twitter.com/R5553OXWFv

Intacct Corporation on Twitter

We will give away up to $2k of DonorsChoose gift cards to anyone that shares a post & tags #Intacct & #BestSchoolDay https://twitter.com/DonorsChoose/status/707923372596961280 ...

The donors are coming, the donors are coming!

No #BestSchoolDay gathering would be complete without the generous souls who fund projects on our site all the time. The quote above is just one example of a donor comment left on a project on our site. More often than not, they get personal, sharing genuine emotions with the teacher, their classroom, and fellow supporters of education. #BestSchoolDay multiplied those emotions exponentially.

We heard from classrooms across the country

As the news spread across the Internet, plenty of news outlets, both local and national, covered the excitement and impact of the event. Here’s a small sample of #BestSchoolDay stories:

• The Associated Press: “Flash funding highlights online philanthropy’s role in class”
• Rapid City Journal: “Suddenly, philanthropy pays for hard-to-reach education goals”
• USA Today: “Celebs, investors fund public schools in new campaign”
• Fast Company: “Celebrities Partner With DonorsChoose.org To Fund $14 Million In Teacher Projects”
• Upworthy: “15 celebs who just stepped up big time for classrooms in need.”

Twitter became our rallying point

The excitement for #BestSchoolDay lived and breathed on our social media channels, from the day before to well after March 10 became March 11. More than 30,800 tweets using the hashtag were sent and between the communities and people who added their voices to the mix, the campaign reached more than 200 million people on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, from Hawai’i to Maine. Thanks to our teachers, our funders, and our partners, we raised awareness, galvanized new teachers and supporters, and reached our goal to fund 20,000 projects!

What comes next

The best part of #BestSchoolDay? Last week was only the beginning. 17,700 projects are still active on DonorsChoose.org. As these projects get fulfilled, more teachers’ and students’ dreams will come true, and we’ll come that much closer to making every day #BestSchoolDay.

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you to our teachers, funders, partners, and everyone else who gave us our #BestSchoolDay!

Follow #BestSchoolDay and @DonorsChoose on Twitter!

Text: Eric Vilas-Boas
Graphics: Lynn Overmyer

The 10 Best Moments from #BestSchoolDay was originally published in Stories from DonorsChoose on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Julia Prieto

If you’re reading this, you might already know how DonorsChoose.org got its start. In 2000, almost a decade before “crowdfunding” became a buzzword, Charles Best, a high school teacher at Wings Academy in the Bronx, created a platform to fund classroom projects for teachers. After a slow start, teachers across the Bronx soon heard about the site, posting hundreds of projects.

The story that often doesn’t make the cut is what happened next, how his students helped those early projects get funded.

The high schoolers at Wings Academy, after seeing firsthand what the site was capable of, took matters into their own hands. They volunteered every day after school to hand-address letters to potential donors across the country. They mailed 2,000 letters. And those 2,000 letters resulted in $30,000 — in other words, the first major wave of real DonorsChoose.org donations.

Since then, our entire business model has integrated the spirit of that first, bootstrapped letter-writing campaign: after a project has been successfully funded, students create handwritten thank-you packages that they then send to the donors who funded their projects. In the last year we shipped 75,000 envelopes to donors full of notes from students. Sometimes those thank-yous spoke about the project in action, sometimes they asked important questions like, “Why did you choose to support our classroom instead of buying a new TV?” (The answer, if you’re curious.) Sometimes teachers will go a step beyond paper and even create videos like this one:

If you haven’t been on the receiving end of student thank-yous, here’s a bit of context: All told, those 75,000 envelopes contained over a half-million handwritten notes from students.

So, why do this? It’s expensive. It’s messy. Mail delivery systems are prone to human error. To operationalize this manual thank-you process, we employ a full-time staff and a fleet of over 100 dedicated volunteers. We consider ourselves a data-driven, future-focused nonprofit, one that always bets on technology when we can. To our knowledge, we’re the only nonprofit organization that mass customizes thank-yous at this scale. On its face, doesn’t all of that effort sound hopelessly inefficient?

Since the Wings Academy students wrote those letters, we’ve proven time and again that it’s not inefficient. It works. It’s just one part of our process that our community feedback consistently focuses on, and the data we collect backs it up, too.

Those half-million thank-yous, like the ones above, helped drive nearly $3,075,000 in donations.

Every single day, we hear about donors who share their thank-yous online and with their friends and families in real life. The experience of receiving an envelope in the physical mail, full of hand-crafted, personalized work, is the perfect treat to reward and cultivate a supporter who wants to share their experience. Donors who have children tell us they use student thank-yous as an opportunity to introduce the idea of gratitude into their homes. We often hear about donors who head to the bookstore after receiving thank-yous from a book project because they want to reply to a student’s questions and let them know who their favorite character is. The act of returning to the DonorsChoose.org website and simply writing back to the students demonstrates the type of engagement that we look to replicate across our process.

Maggie Horikawa on Twitter

One of my favourite thank-you notes yet. pic.twitter.com/UDEiTO5eUw

DonorsChoose on Twitter

Thank you to every donor who has supported teachers and education through #DonorsChoose! #ThankYouThursday pic.twitter.com/jAC5fMdSgK

The data we look at substantiates the practice too. In order to receive a student thank-you, a donor has to do two things. First, they have to donate a minimum of $50. Second, they have to give us their mailing address. To better understand the impact these student thank-yous make on our overall revenue, we compared a subset of donors who gave more than $50 and opted into receiving student thank-yous to a similar group that opted out. After accounting for additional factors that could influence giving patterns, we looked at both groups’ average giving over the following year, and discovered a pleasant surprise. For the donor group that opted into student thank-you envelopes (those sentimental, hand-crafted, physically mailed, personalized collections of gratitude) average donation size increased over the following 12 months by $41. Now multiply that by 75,000 envelopes. Those half-million thank-yous, like the ones below, helped drive nearly $3,075,000 in donations.

As of publication, three million dollars is enough to fully fund about 3,700 projects on DonorsChoose.org. It is also enough to give 225,440 kindergarteners their own copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, or purchase soccer cleats for 15,147 middle school soccer teams. The tradition that letter-writing campaign started at Wings Academy fifteen years ago continues at a scale larger than anyone could imagine.

It’s also not just business. Francesca Gino is a professor at Harvard who writes about the “gratitude effect.” Her research found that the act of giving and receiving a thank-you contributes to higher levels of self-worth and triggers helpful behaviors toward both the person we are helping and other people, too. NPR reported just yesterday that gratitude “literally helps” the heart, as in the organ beating in your chest. And…it’s just good manners, the kind that plenty of teachers strive to foster in any classroom.

The following story is true. We recently received an inquiry from a teacher whose classroom was exempt from creating thank-yous. This happens in rare cases when no $50 donors opt in. This teacher wasn’t having that. She wrote in to us demanding that her students create thank-yous for someone. In her adamant words, “It’s only right!”

We’d like to thank her for saying what we were all thinking.

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Julia Prieto is the Director of Donor Appreciation at DonorsChoose.org and she is currently buried under reams of student thank you notes. Have a look at a few of our favorites below, and the ultimate list of 2015's cutest student thank-yous here!

A version of this post has also been published on DonorsChoose.org and was adapted from a presentation given as part of Fast Company’s Innovation Festival.

How We Leverage Gratitude to Drive a Business Model was originally published in Stories from DonorsChoose on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.