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
September 9, 2008
- Ushers In A New Era of Charitable Giving -
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 9, 2008 –At TechCrunch50 today, Givvy, Inc. launched Givvy™, a new online service to improve the charitable giving experience for millions of donors. Givvy (www.givvy.com) is the first site to align the charitable interests and passions of donors with an integrated framework to plan, research and execute their charitable giving. Serving the needs of those desiring more control over their giving, Givvy is a free, feature-rich, and easy-to-use site with data on more than 1.4 million IRS charities and provides a centralized repository for all a donor’s giving records.
“We created Givvy to help all donors be more effective and achieve greater satisfaction through their charitable giving,” said John Treadway, founder and CEO of Givvy, Inc. “Before Givvy, most donors did not have the information, guidance and support enjoyed by wealthy philanthropists. Now, everybody can increase the impact and scope of their giving with confidence and the support of the community of Givvy users.”
Key features of Givvy include:
- “Givving Plan” – Givvy helps you create a “Givving Plan” to guide your giving activities, with goals for amount donated, types of causes supported, and more. The “Givving Plan” is your roadmap for giving.
- Donation Processing by Network for Good – All donations on Givvy are processed by Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org), one of the leading donation processing services. Your donations through Network for Good, a 501c3 nonprofit, are totally secure, and are immediately tax-deductible (check with your tax advisor).
- Charity Portfolio – This patent-pending Givvy feature helps you create a portfolio of charities where you control the donation amount and timing of your donations, the organizations you want to support, and the percentage allocation of donations across your charities.
- Member Funds – Givvy member funds are collections of charities that other donors can use in their portfolios. For example, a children’s cancer member fund with several related charities can be created and shared with other Givvy users who want to support this cause but don’t know which organizations to support.
- External Donations – Now you can see all of your donations in one place by recording those made outside of Givvy with our “Record External Donation” feature. Whether made at another site, through the mail, over the phone, or in-person, recording donations in Givvy gives you a more complete view of your giving.
- Donation Reports – Quickly get a view of your “giving footprint” with Givvy’s donation reports. See all of your donations by date, charity and cause type in any time frame, and chart donations against your Givving Plan. You can also print or email a year-end report for your taxes.
- Donation Privacy Settings – Share your personal information with only the charities you want to receive it, and donate anonymously to all of the other organizations you support. Put an end to endless telemarketing, mail solicitations and email campaigns from charities.
- Givvy Network – Give better with help from your friends and family. Connect with people on Givvy who share your charitable interests, help others discover charities you support, and invite friends to join Givvy.
- GivvyBase – The core charity data comes from GivvyBase, our free and open-source nonprofit database. GivvyBase includes data on all 1.4 million IRS-registered nonprofits. Features of GivvyBase include:
- Free – all of the data in GivvyBase is free and accessible to anybody
- Searchable – our integrated search function makes finding your charities easy and fast
- User-Editable – registered users can maintain and update the database with content, tags, star ratings & reviews, and more
About Givvy, Inc.
Founded in December, 2007, Givvy, Inc. is delivering new and compelling solutions for donors to improve their charitable giving. Givvy seeks to provide highly functional tools that are easy to use, increase productivity for donors, and result in better giving for our members. Givvy – Better Givving for a Better World™
Contact:
John Treadway
Givvy, Inc.
617/290-3955
jtreadway@givvy.com
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Features, Fundraising, News & Events, startup | Tagged: giving, givvy, Launch, press, techcrunch, techcrunch50 | 
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Posted by John Treadway
September 2, 2008
Thanks to those of you who have signed up and started using Givvy. We’ve gotten some great comments and feedback. And we’ve received a few requests for improvement.
- for external donations the ability to edit or delete them later
- ability to make a donation for someone doing a fundraiser without sharing your personal information with the charity
- set up alerts to make one-time donations in the future
- be more explicit on the costs related to the donation (see * below)
- add external donations that are recurring (e.g. if you’ve set up a recurring donation to a museum, record that in Givvy with the recurring interval set so it records automatically)
- ability to record non-cash donations – volunteering, etc.
- ability to record “leveraged” activity such as running a marathon or riding in a bike-a-thon and showing my impact as the amount donated by others
These are great suggestions. If you have more, leave them as comments or use the contact us form to send us your ideas.
* Note that we use Network for Good for donation processing and they take a 4.75% fee to cover the credit card, disbursement and reconciliation expense. See the Givvy FAQ for more information. Basically this is a low cost for most charities who often pay those fundraisers you hear from on the phone or even who process mail-in donations a lot more (sometimes as high as 80%!!).
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Development, Features | Tagged: beta, Features, Feedback | 
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Posted by John Treadway
Friends vs. 
Followers / Following
