Pledge for America's Schools is a demo app for DonorChoose's Hacking Education contest.
Pledge for America's Schools engages local merchants to participate in raising money for school projects listed at DonorChoose.org. Local merchants can pledge to support projects with coupons in kind. Merchants pledge with coupons, people buy the coupons, and the money goes to the school projects via DonorChoose.
Everyone wins! The students get the funds, the merchants get to support the local schools without opening their wallets and in the process win new customers, and the donors get coupons in return. Pledge for America's Schools also stimulates the students to encourage their local merchants to participate by pledging.
In addition, we are introducing a customizable Pledge for America's Schools’ VIP Card that schools can use to raise funds. Schools will have their branded VIP Card to sell in their community to raise money. To launch a VIP Card, the school only needs to recruit local merchants to accept their VIP Card for a special offer, such as 10% off on food and beverages. The school can tap into the TAPTIN platform to link merchants to the VIP Card and publish what merchants offer to holders of the card. All proceeds from the sales of the VIP Cards go to the schools.
The Pledge for America's Schools Android app is a production-ready app, except for a few pages requiring new APIs from DonorChoose and to process payment directly to DonorChoose’s PayPal account.
Regardless of whether we win the contest or not, we also intend to launch an iOS app and a website. The Pledge for America's Schools website will include pages for schools to setup VIP Cards and for merchants to easily pledge for DonorChoose projects and select local schools’ VIP Cards to honor.
