Fundraising + Daily Deals = Business Inspiration; Stacey Boyd realized she could apply the idea behind sites like Groupon to help educators raise money

December 2, 2013 Leave a comment

Fundraising + Daily Deals = Business Inspiration

December 2, 2013

For Stacey Boyd, inspiration was all about making a quick connection between two very different ideas. The former teacher and principal in San Francisco was reading a newspaper story about the school budget cuts in California on her iPad. Then she turned the page and saw a story about how daily-deal sites likeGroupon GRPN -0.55% and LivingSocial were providing a new revenue stream for local businesses.“I thought to myself, ‘How interesting that those two institutions that are really the lifeblood of any community—schools and businesses—should be on these different trajectories,” says the 43-year-old. “Businesses have found this new way to make money, while schools are struggling more than ever.”

So, she thought, why not bring the two ideas together and create a fundraising platform for schools?

Usually, when schools want to raise money, they have kids sell things like wrapping paper, giant candy bars and magazine subscriptions, Ms. Boyd says.

The website she created, Schoola, lets parent-teacher associations take a different route, enlisting local businesses to do a deal for the school. The businesses offer coupons through the site and give the school a cut of the profits the coupons bring in—typically, 30%.

“I just figured, why are we forcing people to buy things they would never normally buy?” Ms. Boyd says. “If we get them buying from the local businesses they already frequent, they’re happy, it’s good for the local businesses, and the school ends up making more money.”

The idea took off. After only a year, 15% of all U.S. schools have created a fundraising page on Schoola. Ms. Boyd also recently launched a spinoff site, Schoola Stitch, which sells donated clothes and gives a portion of the proceeds to schools. More than 3,000 schools have signed up to do a clothing drive.

“The rapid growth has been crazy,” Ms. Boyd says. “We already have tens of thousands of items. “I got warehouse space in August that I thought would last six months, and by October we already needed more space.”

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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