[ghufran_syed]

This looks great, thanks for building this!

The problem of how to get revenue, not just donations for something like this is an interesting one. One idea it might be worth exploring is charging colleges in order for them to be able to contact students through the site as part of their efforts to increase diversity (It would need to be opt-in for the students, to maintain their privacy). If you can keep students on the platform through college, you could do the same for employers looking to increase diversity in hiring - maybe the way to do that is encourage students to “graduate” to being volunteers on the platform when they finish high school? Then the (college) students would get the benefit of support and outreach from employers for internships during college, as well as the psychological and learning benefits of tutoring others who are a few years behind them.

I think it would also be interesting to consider making some kind of private social network for your student “alumni” - having a peer group can be super helpful for low-income students in college, so this would hopefully keep them involved with upchieve, make them more likely to succeed in college, and hopefully let you charge companies looking to recruit them.

Happy to chat about this or any other crazy ideas, contact details in my profile

[alymurray]

Great ideas, thank you for sharing! I'm also really excited about the potential of current student users to become tutors in the future. Community service is a great way for high school students to build their college applications too, so I think there are actually probably students who would want to use UPchieve both as a student and a volunteer at the same time. Right now our platform would require them to have two accounts, but it's something that we might try to facilitate in the future.

[okprod]

They're nonprofit, so the revenue possibilities are endless -- activating program participants into donors like you say, corporate sponsorship, foundation grants, partnerships with academic institutions, special events, etc.