Customer Support Specialist

DonorsChoose makes it easy for anyone to help a teacher in need, moving us closer to a nation where students in every community have the tools and experiences they need for a great education.

Since 2000, more than 5 million people and partners have contributed $1 billion to support 2 million teacher requests for classroom resources and experiences. Projects range from art supplies to build the set for a school musical, to books and puzzles that affirm students’ identities, to bird seed for an at-home science project. We proudly serve all US public schools, public charter schools, and Head Start centers, and we combat systemic inequity by driving a majority of donations to schools that have been historically underfunded due to economic and racial inequity.

DonorsChoose has been recognized as a best place to work by GOOD Magazine and the Nonprofit Times, while Fast Company named DonorsChoose one of the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World—the first time a charity has made this list. Our dedicated team works from across the United States bring classroom dreams to life.

Team Overview

As a Customer Support Specialist at DonorsChoose you’ll answer between 60 - 100 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 be assigned capacity building work as workload and time allows. This capacity-building work is defined as work that executes against a CS manager’s OKRs and will be done in close collaboration with your manager, who will fully scope and define the work. This work could look like:

• Attend and participate in trainings as scheduled by your team leaders. 
• Provide feedback to your peers on their tickets.  
• Update or write public-facing help content. 
• 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!) 
• Answer support questions for colleagues across the organization.
• Update our internal training decks or be asked to facilitate a session.
• Add information into our knowledge management system
• Lead mini-projects or fact-finding missions — and present ideas or findings to teammates, managers, or others across the organization.

The majority of your time will be dedicated to core ticket work. When time, performance, workload, and need allow, capacity-building work may be matched with you. The breakdown between core ticket work and capacity building work for a Specialist will vary as our volume fluctuates. Typically, we estimate that you can expect this breakdown of work:

Q1+Q2: 95% core ticket work, 5% capacity-building work

Q3: 90% core ticket work, 10% capacity-building work

Q4: 80% core ticket work, 20% capacity-building work

Qualifications

• 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 will also use these skills to engage with our customers on our Equity Focus when they reach out to us. You are a great writer a