DonorsChoose: Enhancing America's Classrooms with Small Diverse Businesses

Amy Soler, senior director of direct fulfillment at DonorsChoose, the leading nonprofit crowdfunding platform for public school teachers in the United States, was preparing for the last board meeting of the 2022–23 school year. Soler led the DonorsChoose direct fulfillment team, which had been piloted two years earlier to enable DonorsChoose to integrate more small diverse businesses in its supply chain. Increasing the representation of these businesses in the DonorsChoose supply chain was crucial: it had become a core part of the company’s equity mission. However, sourcing from small diverse businesses could be effort intensive, and Soler needed to figure out how to make this process financially sustainable and scalable in the long term. In preparation for the upcoming DonorsChoose board meeting, Soler considered several questions: First, how could her team partner with more small diverse businesses? Were there any technologies that could help the team explore the growing list of potential small diverse businesses? The manual work that her team was doing to identify and onboard them as suppliers was not sustainable for the long term. Second, how much inventory would DonorsChoose need to buy from the small diverse businesses and stock in advance at its warehouses in Pennsylvania and Arizona? How could Soler and her team get better at inventory forecasting? Third, who was the right partner for third-party logistics? Soler and her team had faced some operational challenges with their current provider and were implementing short-term solutions. Was there a different third-party logistics company, or a combination of companies, with which the DonorsChoose team members could work as they continued to source more classroom supplies from small diverse businesses? This field-based case has been successfully taught at the Darden School of Business in the second-year MBA elective on strategic sourcing. This teaching plan assumes an 85-minute case discussion suitable for undergraduate- and graduate-level supply chain management courses, in addition to Executive Education programs. It would also be suitable in a first-year MBA or undergraduate course on strategic sourcing, with an emphasis on integrating SDBs in the supply chain.