DonorsChoose has spent more than two decades connecting public school teachers seeking classroom resources with people and institutions willing to fund them. An August 2026 survey release said the organization had raised $1.9 billion for classrooms since its founding in 2000. It also said donors had supported teachers at 90 percent of U.S. public schools.
Email did not generate every dollar in that total, but public evidence shows that it has been a significant part of the operating model. A Twilio customer case study on DonorsChoose reports that email accounted for 34 percent of revenue from citizen donors at the time described. It says the organization’s transactional and promotional email programs were generating more than $25 million annually.
That distinction matters. The defensible story is not that email single-handedly created a $1.9 billion organization. It is that DonorsChoose used email to connect individual classroom projects with relevant donors, then keep those donors informed after the initial transaction.
Email has something specific to deliver
Many nonprofit email programs revolve around the calendar: Giving Tuesday, a year-end appeal, a spring fundraiser, and a handful of organizational updates. DonorsChoose starts with a different unit of communication. Each teacher posts a project with a defined request, a funding target, and an explanation of what students need.
That structure gives every message a level of specificity that a general mission statement cannot match. A supporter can choose a classroom, location, subject, or type of resource that matters to them. The marketplace therefore produces information that can be used to make later communication more relevant.
The 2026 DonorsChoose Teacher Survey adds another layer of detail. It collected responses in May 2026 from 2,501 U.S. public school classroom teachers who use the platform and asked about their experiences during the 2025–26 school year. Because the sample consists of DonorsChoose users, its findings should not automatically be generalized to every teacher in the country.
Within that sample, teachers reported spending about $600 of their own money on classroom supplies. Thirty-seven percent said they worked an additional job, averaging 23 hours of outside work, while 40 percent said they regularly provided students with necessities such as food, hygiene products, or clothing.
Email closes the loop after a donation
The value of an owned audience is not unique to DonorsChoose. A June 2026 Forbes Agency Council roundup recommended that nonprofits invest in audiences reached through email and SMS rather than relying heavily on social platforms or short fundraising pushes. The contributors also emphasized welcome messages, automated donor nurturing, audience intelligence, and consistent impact reporting.
DonorsChoose has built those ideas into the interaction between its projects and supporters. According to its official guidance on project updates, users can follow a project, teacher, or school. Notifications can tell them when a project is approaching full funding, receives a matching offer, becomes fully funded, or expires.
The communication does not necessarily end when the goal is reached. DonorsChoose’s thank-you package guidance asks teachers to provide an impact letter and between two and ten photos. Some projects also include handwritten or illustrated thank-you messages from students.
Those elements turn an online payment into a visible sequence of progress and impact. A donor can see what was requested, learn when the project is funded, and later receive evidence showing how the resources reached the classroom. That feedback loop gives future emails context that a generic appeal does not have.
Twilio’s case study also describes automated promotional messages, customized outreach for new users, and segmentation based on donor interests. It says DonorsChoose recognized that many supporters repeatedly gave to schools in their home cities or to programs connected with particular interests. The practical advantage was not simply sending more messages, but having enough information to make those messages more applicable to each recipient.
The survey gives fundraising messages substance
The 2026 survey offers several examples of the specificity that can shape donor communication. Teachers at underserved rural schools reported spending 30 percent more out of pocket than other respondents. They were also 14 percent more likely to have an additional job.
Concern about student hunger differed by school context. Fifty-four percent of respondents at underserved rural schools said they were more concerned about hunger than during the previous school year, compared with 46 percent of all educators surveyed. That eight-point gap creates a more precise picture than a broad statement that classrooms need help.
The survey also found that more than 60 percent of respondents did not have, or were unsure whether they had, the right resources to prepare students for future careers. Sixty-three percent said they had requested more physical learning resources during the previous two years. More than 30 percent believed artificial intelligence would become important to their students’ education.
These findings describe different needs rather than one universal fundraising message. Classroom basics, student hunger, rural-school pressures, physical learning resources, and preparation for future careers can each matter to different supporters. Treating them as separate signals makes communication more useful than collapsing them into a single urgent appeal.
DonorsChoose CEO Alix Guerrier framed the survey around listening to teachers and reducing the personal financial burden they carry. That emphasis fits the marketplace itself: teachers identify what their classrooms need, while donors choose the projects, communities, or causes they want to support.
The lesson is relevance, not volume
The temptation for another nonprofit is to copy the visible mechanics: add automated emails, create more triggers, and send more matching-gift alerts. That misses the underlying advantage. Automation becomes useful only after an organization understands who its supporters are, what they have supported, and what kind of follow-up they value.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review has argued that predictive AI can help nonprofits personalize communication using past giving behavior, interests, and engagement patterns. It can also identify donors at risk of disengaging and help organizations send targeted follow-ups. The authors caution that AI should handle tasks rather than replace the human relationships at the center of nonprofit work.
Smaller organizations do not need DonorsChoose’s scale to apply the same principle. A useful starting point is separating first-time donors from repeat supporters, distinguishing interests instead of treating every subscriber identically, and showing what happened after a contribution. The technology can remain simple if the information behind the message is accurate and relevant.
DonorsChoose’s history does not prove that email is the right answer to every fundraising problem. It demonstrates something narrower and more useful: email becomes valuable when it carries a specific request, reaches someone with a reason to care, and returns with credible evidence of what happened next. The channel works because the relationship has been designed to continue.