Product Overview

Amy Soler, senior director of direct fulfillment at DonorsChoose, the leading nonprofit crowdfunding platform for public school teachings in the United States, was preparing for the last board meeting of the 2022–23 school year. Soler managed the DonorsChoose Direct Fulfillment (DF) team, which had been piloted two years earlier to enable DonorsChoose to work more with small diverse businesses (SDBs) for project fulfillment. Increasing the representation of SDBs within the DonorsChoose ecosystem was critical and had become a core part of the company’s equity mission. However, DF was expensive and time-intensive. Soler needed to figure out how to make DF a financially viable and scalable option for the long term. Soler considered several questions: First, who was the right partner for third-party logistics? Soler and her team had faced some operational challenges with their current provider and were implementing short-term solutions. Was there a different third-party logistics company, or a combination of companies, with which the DonorsChoose team members could work as they continued to grow DF? Second, how could her team partner with more SDBs? Were there any technologies that could help the team explore the growing list of potential SDBs? The manual work that her team was doing to identify and onboard SDBs as suppliers was not sustainable for the long term. Third, how much inventory would DonorsChoose need to buy and stock in advance of activating resources in the teacher shopping catalog for DCFF? How could Soler and her team get better at inventory forecasting? This case is taught at Darden in the second-year MBA elective on strategic sourcing. It would also be suitable in a first-year MBA or undergraduate course on integrating small diverse businesses in the supply chain.