Background

The #BestSchoolDay project from DonorsChoose was a national effort to get every education project on the donation website funded in a single day. The Huffington Post helped out by sponsoring and promoting the #BestSchoolDay project; Stephen Colbert is pitched in by doing a roll call of funders on his show. We were proud to design and build a live interactive map of donations to the organization.

What we made

The map has two modes: a geographic view that looks like a regular map of the US, showing the number of projects needing funding in each state; and a bubble view that sizes each state according to those numbers. Each state has a custom link to the DonorsChoose.org website, so you can narrow down quickly which kinds of projects you’d like to fund.

They gathered an impressive lineup—Biz Stone, Elon Musk, Russell Simmons, Samuel L. Jackson, Serena Williams, and Sheryl Sandberg were only a few of the people involved, each funding towns and states that they’re passionate about.

“The reason HuffPost takes on this kind of project, which not every media organization would, is because we believe in the cause and we have a trusted partner in DonorsChoose.org. We don’t just want to raise awareness and leave readers in the lurch, we want to actually have an impact. We want to bridge that gap from awareness to action — which is what Stamen has helped us do with this beautiful map. This project is a really cool combination of vision, purpose, design and impact.” — Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post DonorsChoose.org and sponsored by The Huffington Post