Founded in 2000 by a Bronx history teacher, DonorsChoose.org has raised $685 million for America's classrooms. Teachers at three-quarters of all the public schools in the U.S. have come to DonorsChoose.org to request what their students need, making DonorsChoose.org the leading platform for supporting public education. To date, 3 million people and partners have funded 1.1 million DonorsChoose.org projects. But teachers still spend more than a billion dollars of their own money on classroom materials. To get students what they need to learn, the team at DonorsChoose.org needs to be able to connect donors with the projects that most inspire them. In the second Kaggle Data Science for Good challenge, DonorsChoose.org, in partnership with Google.org, is inviting the community to help them pair up donors to the classroom requests that will most motivate them to make an additional gift. To support this challenge, DonorsChoose.org has supplied anonymized data on donor giving from the past five years. The winning methods will be implemented in DonorsChoose.org email marketing campaigns. --- ##Problem Statement DonorsChoose.org has funded over 1.1 million classroom requests through the support of 3 million donors, the majority of whom were making their first-ever donation to a public school. If DonorsChoose.org can motivate even a fraction of those donors to make another donation, that could have a huge impact on the number of classroom requests fulfilled. A good solution will enable DonorsChoose.org to build targeted email campaigns recommending specific classroom requests to prior donors. Part of the challenge is to assess the needs of the organization, uncover insights from the data available, and build the right solution for this problem. Submissions will be evaluated on the following criteria: * Performance - How well does the solution match donors to project requests to which they would be motivated to donate? DonorsChoose.org will not be able to live test every submission, so a strong entry will clearly articulate why it will be effective at motivating repeat donations. * Adaptable - The DonorsChoose.org team wants to put the winning submissions to work, quickly. Therefore a good entry will be easy to implement in production. * Intelligible - A good entry should be easily understood by the DonorsChoose.org team should it need to be updated in the future to accommodate a changing marketplace. ##How to Participate and Make a Submission To be considered a participant in the DonorsChoose Data Science for Good Event, there are a few requirements: - Everyone must register and accept the rules by filling out [this form][1]. This ensures you're a participant and also means you'll receive update emails from us about key deadlines and announcements throughout the event. - To submit a kernel for consideration in the main prize track, make sure it's public and [submit it here][2]. [Read more details here][3]. - To submit a kernel for consideration in the secondary prize track, all you need to do is make sure it's public and be a registered participant before the deadline. ##Prizes and Eligibility There is a total prize pool of $15,000 split into two tracks: - Main prize track for the primary event objective: build a recommendation system to match donors to classroom requests ($10,000; five winners total) - Upvoted kernels to encourage public sharing of code ($5,000; five winners total) Main Prize Track
DonorsChoose.org will award $10,000 in total prizes to five winning authors who submit public kernels effectively tackling the objective by the deadline. These kernels must be submitted for consideration by **June 20th, 2018**. Upvoted Kernels
There is also a separate prize track for public sharing of code to encourage ongoing collaboration. Awards of $1,000 each will also be made to authors of the five top most upvoted kernels as of **May 30th, 2018**. For more details about the prizes and eligibility [click here][4]. ##Timeline All dates are 11:59PM UTC: - 7 May 2018: Challenge begins - 30 May 2018: Kernels Award Announcement (Top 5 upvoted kernels) - 20 June 2018: Challenge Deadline (Kernels for main prize must be submitted and made publicly available to be evaluated for a prize) - 27 June 2018: Winners of the primary prize track will be announced ##Rules To be eligible to win a prize in either of the above prize tracks, you must be: - a registered account holder at Kaggle.com; - the older of 18 years old or the age of majority in your jurisdiction of residence; - not a resident of Crimea, Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, or Sudan; and - not a person or representative of an entity under U.S. export controls or sanctions. Your kernels will only be eligible to win if they have been made public on kaggle.com by the above deadline. All prizes are awarded at the discretion of DonorsChoose.org, and DonorsChoose.org reserves the right to cancel or modify prize criteria. Unfortunately employees, interns, contractors, officers and directors of Kaggle Inc., and their parent companies, are not eligible to win any prizes. [1]: https://www.kaggle.com/data-science-for-good-donorschoose-signup [2]: https://www.kaggle.com/data-science-for-good-donorschoose-submission [3]: https://www.kaggle.com/donorschoose/io/discussion/56026#latest-323260 [4]: https://www.kaggle.com/donorschoose/io/discussion/56026