June 29, 2009
Givvy.com and the Givvy charitable giving solutions we have developed are for sale. This is a “best offer” scenario – the site will be shut down by the end of July if it is not acquired or taken over. Givvy launched a week before Lehman went under and was never able to raise the capital required to make this a success. Feel free to spread the word.
What: Givvy.com is a charitable giving portal. There are many features, some of which are not turned on at the moment. Here is a list of the features/functions of the site:
Currently Active/Viewable Features ($ = revenue)
- Charity Mall ($) – utilizing the industry-leading Mall Networks online affiliate shopping mall infrastructure, people can shop at their favorite stores and generate a donation for their charity. The charity mall generates merchant rebates/commissions. These are shared between Mall Networks, Givvy and the users’ charity.
- Donate to Any Charity – through our partnership with Network for Good, Givvy members can donate to any of the eligible charities contained in our list of 1.4 million IRS-registered nonprofits.
- Facebook Connect Integration – people can join through Facebook and their Givvy activity can be posted to their Wall/profile. Note – the posting steps are nearly done.
- Friends – you can get your friends to join and earn a donation bonus based on what they earn for their charities. This is a multi-level marketing system where the shopping activity of up to 2 levels of friends can generate additional donations for you.
Currently Inactive/Hidden Features
- Company Giving Campaign Pages ($) – this system allows companies to set up campaign pages for their employees for their annual giving campaigns. There are two clients for this system and they both paid an annual subscription fee for this service. The market for this is hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses. Features include branding control (logo upload), and more.
- Charity Portfolios – assemble a list of charities and allocate a one-time or recurring donation
- Charity Member Funds – portfolios that you can share with your friends
- Social Friends – with profile pages, the ability to share your donations and charities with friends, etc
This technology/site will appeal to companies with an interest in charitable giving, or those who have large user bases to leverage this into. Revenue is negligible and costs are fairly low. The site is hosted at Amazon, and is written using PHP and the Symfony framework.
Please contact me if you are interested in learning more.
John
jtreadway@givvy.com
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Posted by John Treadway
April 8, 2009
It’s not too late to shop online for Easter. Get special deals and earn money for your charities at Givvy.
Special offers below – or visit the Givvy Mall for more ways to earn for your charity!
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Holiday Giving, Special Offers | 
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Posted by John Treadway
April 6, 2009
Givvy has just relaunched after a few months of re-development work by our crack development team.
Say hello to the Givvy Mall!
The new Givvy Mall (http://shop.givvy.com) allows you to shop at over 500 of the leading online merchants and earn money for your charities. We still have all 1.4 million charities in our database, and you can still donate online.
What’s New?
What’s Changed?
We really took a hard look at what people were using and decided to strip the site down to some basics. We’ll add some of the old features back at some point, but for now we have eliminated portfolios, member funds and our own concept of friends & profiles. Friends and profiles in the future will just be Facebook and other networks. That’s coming very soon.
Portfolios and member funds may be a bit murkier. These were just not getting used by most people. In the future, we do expect people to be able to want some way to create collections of charities to support. But for now we’ve taken them out.
Givvy@Work
We are still offering Givvy@Work, but not for free. We took down the link to create your Givvy@Work network as we are doing some development on this feature. Companies who want to offer employee fundraising campaigns can contact us for more information.
Stay tuned for more on our plans for Givvy over the coming weeks!
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Development, Features, Fundraising, Launch | 
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Posted by slipkin
January 3, 2009
Givvy launched at TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco on September 9th, just about one week before the failure of Lehman Brothers which sparked the financial crisis. We had a modest amount of coverage only being in the demo pit, but did get on CNET TV with Rafe Needleman. Overall we did pretty well in 2008 given the environment and the lack of funding. Here are some of the highlights:
- We generated over $47,000 in donations for 137 charities from Givvy members. That’s great!
- We launched two workplace giving campaign sites – one for ITA Software in Cambridge and another for Direct Energy out of Toronto. Both were very successful, especially ITA, and we hope to do more of these in 2009.
- Our free nonprofit charity database, GivvyBase, was launched in October. With over 1.4 million charities, this is the core of our giving system.
- In late November we quietly released Givvy API to enable developers to search GivvyBase and access our listings. We’ve had some interesting conversations with potential users in a number of interesting applications.
There are many things we did not get done in 2008 that we had hoped for – not the least of which was getting funded. We have a few revenue models – one of which is proven and ttwo others are being tested.
Givvy should have an interesting 2009. Thanks for your support!
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Posted by John Treadway
December 2, 2008
We’ve been working for a bit on an exciting new set of features for companies — Givvy@Work. We went live with one company a few weeks ago, and have just about wrapped up some small enhancements.
The basic idea is that any company can create their own Givvy@Work network and upload their logo. Then, anybody with a company email address can join the network (any employee can be the first to create the network too). Then, the network owner/administrator can create campaign pages with a fundraising target and a list of charities to donate to through Givvy. See a sample campaign page here.
Givvy@Work administrators can see who is donating, how much, and what charities are getting supported. Some companies out there charge real money for this – and perhaps we’re crazy to give it away. But we are!
We have plans for more features (matching donations, etc.) and we will charge for these. But for now, and in this time of need, have a freebie on Givvy!
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Posted by John Treadway
October 17, 2008
One of the most frustrating mega-charities in the U.S. is the Red Cross. American Red Cross provides services to hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents every year – for disaster relief, blood transfusions, health education and more. Despite their $3 billion plus annual budget, the American Red Cross has been struggling to find the money to pay for all of the work they need to do for victims of Hurricane’s Ike and Gustav and other disasters. They’ve had to take out loans and get emergency assistance from taxpayers.
One of key programs of The American Red Cross is to provide shelter, clothing, and financial assistance to people who have lost their homes due to fires or other circumstances. This is a massive organization performing very difficult and expensive services both here in the U.S., and overseas.
Make a donation today – even $20 can help. At Givvy we will match the first 5 donations – up to $250 total – to the American Red Cross that go through Givvy. This is a tough year for all of us, but think of those who are even less fortunate and open your wallets just a little today.
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Posted by John Treadway
October 14, 2008
Calling all nonprofits! GivvyBase version 2 is now live. Find your charity and update the information in our database. Add your description, events, volunteering opportunities, jobs and contacts. GivvyBase is free and will shortly have an open API so anybody can access information on your nonprofit.
Tell all of your friends at nonprofits too!
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Posted by John Treadway
October 7, 2008
I just had a very nice meeting with the George McCully and his team over at the Catalog for Philanthropy. Catalogue is a great effort, started in Massachusetts (where they are well-known) but with a desire to be more of a national effort. This is the 11th year for the Catalogue and they have profiled over 900 charities in that time. The result is a very nice printed “catalogue” that gets sent to the top 120,000 households in Massachusetts.
Their core screening qualification is fairly simple. First, your organization must be some form of public benefit that impacts the quality of life in a philanthropic or charitable way. There are over 36,000 nonprofits in Massachusetts, but George only counts 3,000 or so organizations in his “target.” Gone from the list are churches, clubs, dues-paying associations, business groups, sports leagues and other organizations that primarily benefit a specific community. The Catalogue is making no judgment on the value of supporting or joining these organizations, but they don’t meet the test of providing a broad-based public benefit.
If the Massachusetts experience holds nationally, then the “1.4 million registered IRS charities” may be narrowed down to less than 140,000 “Catalogue-worthy” organizations. George also culls organizations that are above $3m in annual revenues, which actually doesn’t impact the number of organizations all that much since most are well under $3m (in the U.S., only 35,000 or so 501c3 organizations exceed $3m revenue out of 1.4m total nonprofits).
So, when people throw around the “1.4 million IRS nonprofits” number, it may be accurate, but it’s not reflective of the real situation. Perhaps at some point Givvy and the Catalogue for Philanthropy can work on creating more of a breakdown that makes it easier for people to find the great local charities that are so easily overlooked when we pull out our checkbooks…
3 Comments | Giving Patterns, Givving is Broken, Taxonomies | Tagged: catalogue for philanthropy, giving, irs, philanthropy, Taxonomies | Permalink
Posted by John Treadway
October 2, 2008
The 2008 Cone Cause Study is out. It continues to promote the mantra that cause marketing and engagement by companies has a meaningful impact with consumers, employees and other stakeholders. Here is a chart in the study (which you can download for free here).
“While the cause marketing of the past primarily targeted consumers in sales transactions, cause marketing today is often concerned with a company’s strongest ambassadors – its employees. Thanks to 24/7 technology and the increasingly blurred line between work and home, employees are seeking more purposeful work. Companies that provide substance and meaning will be rewarded with high employee pride, morale and retention. Cone’s research shows that there is a spectrum of opportunities employees feel it is important for their employers to provide, including:”
Leave a Comment » | Workplace Giving | Tagged: cause engagement, Cone, employee, employee giving, Workplace Giving | Permalink
Posted by John Treadway
