Contract Term: 6 Months

Location: Remote

DonorsChoose makes it easy for anyone to help a classroom in need, moving us closer to a nation where students in every community have the tools and experiences they need for a great education. In this clip, board member Stephen Colbert tells the organization's story.

Since our launch in 2000, more than 4 million "citizen philanthropists" have donated to classroom projects on DonorsChoose, channeling books, field trips, technology, and other resources to more than 40 million students in public schools, overwhelmingly from low-income households. Along the way, the organization helped to pioneer the field of crowdfunding and is now making an impact beyond school supplies.

Through its dedicated team and culture, DonorsChoose earned recognition as the #1 "Best Nonprofit to Work For" by the Nonprofit Times.

As a branch of the Operations team at DonorsChoose, Customer Support is responsible for all one-to-one touchpoints and self-service tools that help teachers, donors, administrators, or any member of the general public successfully use our website.

As a small and mighty remote team, autonomy and ownership are of the highest value. The quality of our support is a shared responsibility across the team and we all bring ideas to the table to improve our work. We appreciate and take advantage of the time we have to get in sync — regular team touchpoints, monthly check ins with managers, and a vibrant Slack community — but we also deeply value and prioritize our ability to focus on solving customer inquiries.

Finally, we are passionate about serving our customer base — we get to help people bring classroom projects to life and enrich learning experiences! — and believe in support that is kind, personalized, and simple. We go the extra mile when we need to, give people the benefit of the doubt, and take pride in providing engaged and complete support. We get that providing exceptional support to teachers and donors adds value to the DonorsChoose mission. And we like to have a good time and not take ourselves too seriously!

As a Customer Support Specialist at DonorsChoose you’ll answer between 60 - 120 emails a day (depending on the day). These inquiries will span a variety of different topics across the entire teacher and donor lifecycles. 

You may help a donor navigate our marketplace to support a school in their hometown. Or you may help a teacher get donations multiplied by qualifying for a partner-backed offer. You may walk a mother through surprising her daughter (a first-year teacher!) by fully funding her classroom project. Or you may spend some time tracking down a shipment of live crickets (yikes!) for a sixth grade science class. And sometimes you’ll have to do things like explain policies that won’t make the customer super happy, deliver difficult news about eligibility, or simply help a customer reset a password. It’s not all glamor and live insects, but at the end of every day you’ll have helped a bunch of people bring joy to a bunch of students!  

In addition to this core work, sometimes you’ll —

• Hop on the phone to resolve a particularly gnarly issue. (We work primarily in email right now, but sometimes it’s just easier to get on the phone and hash it out!) 
• Attend and participate in trainings as scheduled by your team leaders. 
• Provide feedback to your peers on their tickets and coach newer teammates.  
• Update or write public-facing help content. 
• Answer support questions for colleagues across the organization.
• Lead mini-projects or fact-finding missions — and present ideas or findings to teammates, managers, or others across the organization.

• Professional. You are the face of DonorsChoose to many of its customers. As such, you hold yourself to a high standard. You are task-driven, productive, attentive, collaborative, and accountable. Particularly as a remote professional, you can work autonomously and don’t require a ton of supervision. 
• A solid communicator. It is your job to be clear and concise, to gain agreement on issues, to match tone and be understood by customers who have varied technical experiences and diverse backgrounds. You are a great writer and are not afraid of the phone.  
• Thoughtful. You take pride in your work and care about outcomes. You think “What if I were in this position? What would I want to hear right now?” You foster positive experiences even when it means saying no or sharing difficult or highly-technical information.
• Productive.  We have high expectations for the quantity of work that you will do each day, while maintaining an excellent quality of support.
• Tech comfy. You’ll use Zendesk (a ticket management platform), the DonorsChoose administrative site, and other third-party applications (Slack, GSuite, and more) in your daily work. You are supporting the use of a two-sided marketplace and want to learn the ins and outs of how it all works. You know basic troubleshooting techniques.
• A learner. You recognize that you are always in a position to learn and that you can learn from anyone at any time, including customers. This makes you flexible to change and open to feedback on your work.
• Decisive. You’ll make judgement calls and decisions based on your knowledge of our policies and processes. You have a bias toward action. You recognize you might make mistakes or occasionally say the wrong thing to a customer, but are confident in your ability to own mistakes and learn from them.
• Resourceful. Not every question has an easy answer, but you’re totally into figuring things out. You’ve maybe used Nancy Drew as a verb (i.e., “I’m gonna Nancy Drew this.”) and successfully discovered the answer to something tricky. (And you’ll be able to tell us about this in an interview!)
• Generous. Once you figure something out, you’re excited to share the new information. You want to lend your ideas to the team and make everyone around you stronger.

• A customer support pro. You already have experience providing customer support and genuinely enjoy working with people to solve problems. You’re interested in a career in customer support and contributing to projects that directly impact the culture and effectiveness of Customer Support at DonorsChoose. 
• Interested in crowdfunding platforms, two-sided marketplaces, or K-12 Education. 
• A seasoned work-from-home pro. Or, in the least, committed to and eager to try it out.

• Location: Remote 
• Schedule: 40 hours per week (schedules can be flexible Mon - Sun)
• Contract Term: 6 months due to seasonal workload
• Compensation: Commensurate with experience
• Benefits: This role is eligible for a competitive salary and benefits package, which includes health, dental, and vision coverage; an annual professional development stipend, and paid vacation plus national holidays. 

Submit your current resume and a cover letter addressed to Danielle Curtis, Customer Support Manager. 

A Final Note

The DonorsChoose team works toward a nation where students in every community have the resources needed for an excellent education. To do this we hire and support a diverse team of the best and the brightest talent available.

We are an organization increasingly representative of the varied races and ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations, religious and political beliefs, and abilities that comprise our nation. DonorsChoose focuses on attracting, retaining, and advancing diverse talent because it makes us more effective, high-performing, creative, and resilient.  

If you are passionate about our mission, highly skilled in your field, and looking for a place where you can bring all of yourself to work, we want you.