Our Story

Built by a class parent. For everyone who's drawn the short stick.

KadoPool exists because group gifting had become a logistical mess, and the schools doing the most for our kids needed funding nobody had time to organize. So we built one tool that handles both.

⚡ The Spark

The class-parent
nightmare.

Teacher Appreciation Week. Silence on the WhatsApp group. You drew the short stick. Now your evening is consumed by chasing Venmo payments from "SteveJ44," reconciling a spreadsheet, and deciding whether to cover the $40 shortfall yourself.

What should have been a gesture of gratitude became a project. I felt like a debt collector, not a community builder. So I started thinking about what it would take to do this differently.

🔒 The Real Problem

The logistics weren't the worst part.

Once I sat with it longer, I realized the real friction wasn't the spreadsheet. It was the visibility of who gave what. Every classroom has families with different financial realities, but every classroom collection forces those differences into the open. Some families overstretch quietly. Others opt out, and feel awkward about it.

Every name on the card stands equally. The gift carries the gesture, not the math. No family ever feels judged.

That's why KadoPool keeps individual contribution amounts private — from the recipient, from the organizer, from other contributors. We call this Privacy Shield in the app. It's not a regulatory framework; it's a product feature, and we think it's the most important one we built.

❤️ The Other Half

They do so much,
with so little.

I'm a trustee at a Princeton-area independent school. I sit in budget meetings watching administrators make impossible choices — cutting art supplies, deferring library books, postponing equipment replacements. A few hundred dollars can change a classroom's entire year, and there's never enough time or staff to chase that money down.

When an organizer creates a pool — Teacher Appreciation Week, a coach's retirement, the daycare director who remembers every kid's birthday — they can link it to a partner organization in a single tap. When they do, 30% of our platform fee comes back to that organization automatically when the pool closes. No invoice. No application. No grant cycle.

What makes it compound: once a community knows that link exists, every event becomes a quiet fundraiser. The May teacher gift. The June coach. The fall retirement. Across a school year, a community running twelve linked pools builds something real — without anyone adding a line item to their to-do list.

"Group gifting shouldn't be a logistical nightmare or a social burden. I built this to end the awkwardness of chasing payments and replace it with a place where gratitude is the thing that lands — and the school benefits too."

Olivier Lachaud

Founder · Trustee at a Princeton-area independent school

🌱 One More Spark

My son didn't want the legos.

Last winter, he volunteered at our local food bank — assembling meal boxes, stacking trays alongside regulars who knew each other by name. He came home quieter than usual. When his birthday came around a few weeks later, he told me he didn't want the legos or the puzzles on his list. He wanted to give the money to the food bank instead.

That conversation stayed with me. Group gifts don't always have to end in a gift card. Sometimes the person being celebrated wants to give, not receive. That's what donation pools are: any organizer can designate a verified local nonprofit as the recipient — a food bank, an after-school program, a neighborhood shelter. The class pools their contributions the same way. The charity receives the gift. The keepsake carries every name.

We started hyper-local on purpose. The kind of organization a kid can walk into, see the impact of in an afternoon, and carry home as a quiet conviction. Big platforms optimize for scale. Donation pools are built for communities that already know the cause by name.

💛

"I don't want legos. I want to give the money to the food bank."

— My son, on his birthday

How It Works

The Doing Good Twice Loop

One gift. Two impacts. Zero effort.

🎁

Step 1

Parents Pool

The class collects contributions privately. The teacher receives a meaningful gift and a digital keepsake with every message.

⚡

Step 2

We Give Back 30%

30% of our platform fee goes directly to the linked organization — automatically, every month, no paperwork.

🎓

Step 3

The Community Thrives

The same kids who gave the gift benefit from better supplies, better resources, and a school that can do more.

✦ Your gift to the teacher is also a gift to the classroom.

Read the plain-language version: where does my money go? →