Starbucks customers can soon donate to a nearby school’s classroom project with a click of a mouse while waiting for their venti, nonfat, no foam, extra-hot chai tea latte.
With free Wi-Fi now available in nearly all Starbucks stores, the coffee chain is opening its own digital channel this fall to give its customers free access to various paid sites and services. It has already joined with Apple’s iTunes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, and Zagat, among others.
The network, called “My Neighborhood,” features one charity: DonorsChoose.org, a Web site that allows public-school and charter-school teachers to solicit donations online for classroom projects.
The community-based channel seeks to feature local content to help people connect with others in their neighborhoods. With the use of geo-tagging, the DonorsChoose.org portal will automatically match Starbucks customers in a particular city to local elementary and secondary schools whose projects need donations. They can choose which classroom project (among 15,000 projects currently on the site) to support and donate as little as $1.
“We’re really excited,” says Nicole Velasquez, DonorsChoose.org’s program manager for the West Region. “It’s a huge opportunity for DonorsChoose.org to not only reach new audiences but make that direct connection in a way that’s even more intimate.”
During its 10 years, DonorsChoose has already secured money for about $55-millionworth of books, supplies, and technology for about 140,000 teachers. Now, it’ll have an even bigger reach and a bigger donor pool—with hundreds of thousands of customers in about 6,800 company-owned Starbucks coffee shops in the United States alone.
“Not only can you help a public school but you can help a public school in your city, the kids in your city,” Ms. Velasquez says.
Although DonorsChoose.org is the first nonprofit organization it has announced, Starbucks says it’s exploring adding other organizations that are “relevant to our customers, partners, and the involvement Starbucks wants to have in local communities.” A spokeswoman says the company will first work with charities that it has worked with previously “before we expand the list of organizations.”
