Shop Online, Earn Money for Your Cause

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!

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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Posted by slipkin

Givvy Charitable Giving Site Launches at TechCrunch50

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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Posted by John Treadway

Presentation Zen…

June 26, 2008

While waiting for the development team to post an update I caught up on some of my blogs that I don’t get to very often.  On of these, Presentation Zen, is truly excellent and should be on anybody’s “must read” list if they give or help prepare presentations.

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Posted by John Treadway

Net Promoter Score – Lessons for Nonprofits?

June 13, 2008

I read an article recently touting the power of a metric called “Net Promoter Score” or NPS.  You can read all about NPS at Net Promoter.  The metric is deceptively simple – and that’s the power.  It’s easy to measure and managing to it has real results.

With NPS you ask one question: “Would you recommend us to a friend or colleague?”  The answer on a scale of 0 to 10, where 9s and 10s are “Promoters,” 7s and 8s are “Passives” and any response in the 0-6 range indicates “Detractors.”  To calculate your score, you take the percentage of Promoters and subtract the percentage of Detractors.  That’s your score.

For example, if 20% of your donors are Promoters (9s or 10s), and 50% of your donors are Detractors (0-6s), your Net Promoter Score is minus 30%.  For Promoters at 50% and Detractors at 25%, your NPS is +25%. Obviously, the higher your NPS, the better.  The average for-profit business is only in the 5-10% NPS range.

If you are a nonprofit you can ask this question of all of your donors:  “Would you recommend [insert NPO name here] to a friend, family member or colleague?”  The first time you ask this question establishes a baseline.  From then on your goal should be to work like hell to get the number higher.  Why?  Obviously if a donor recommends you to their friends you’ll have the chance to gain new donors and increase your revenues.  If your number is low (or negative!) then you have to find new donors through very expensive marketing instead of the relatively free referral/word of mouth you’d get with a higher number.

You can modify this model a bit if it doesn’t quite fit, and I suspect that it would be useful in many cases to get the NPS for both your donors and those you are serving.

Here are some of the best NPS ratings, according to Net Promoter.  What’s your score?

USAA 82%
HomeBanc* 81%
Harley-Davidson 81%
Costco 79%
Amazon 73%
Chick-Fil-A* 72%
Ebay 71%
Vanguard 70%
SAS 66%
Apple 66%
Intuit 58%
Cisco 57%
Federal Express 56%
Southwest Airlines 51%
American Express 50%
Commerce Bank 50%
Dell 50%
Adobe 48%
Electronic Arts 48%

* All NPS statistics are based on Bain or Satmetrix surveys with the exceptions of Intuit, Chick-fil-A, and HomeBanc. For these firms, we used data that they provided. Their data was gathered in a reasonable (but not perfectly equivalent) fashion.

Source: The Ultimate Question, Reichheld, 2006

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Posted by John Treadway

Givvy – Giving Management + Network for Good | NetSquared, a project of TechSoup.org

May 12, 2008

Givvy – Giving Management + Network for Good | NetSquared, a project of TechSoup.org

NetSquared Logo

Hi Friends – we’ve just entered the NetSquared DonateNow Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation in conjunction with our donation partner, Network for Good.

We’re competing for a $10k prize from the Case Foundation – so if you think we’re onto something, please feel free to weigh in on the site.

Our entry is at the link leading off this post.  Thanks!

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Posted by John Treadway

Is Causes on Facebook a failure?

April 16, 2008

I just read a great post from Beth Kantor regarding the impact of Facebook on charitable donations. It raises the question of impact, but the data is still not complete. So, I’m going to take a stab here by analyzing the top charity app on Facebook – Causes.

Causes Logo

Quick note on Causes: a “Cause” is something a Facebook member creates to drive awareness for an issue,and the Cause is tied to one specific Charity designated by the Member creating the Cause. For example, the most popular Cause,”Support the Campaign for Cancer Research,” generates donations for Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.

For more on Causes, see Network for Good’s article and materials from April 1 “Causes…” webinar.

By many measures, Causes is a success. Over 8 million Facebook users have installed the Causes app according to Appsaholic (a Facebook app that tracks Facebook apps). This is an estimate based on Facebook’s published daily active users and % of total installs that are active. Today it’s 80,411 active users at 1% engagement, equals ~ 8 million installs. The Active User count has actually been steadily declining over the past several months (at one point I recall 157,000 or so active users). It’s still the 69th most active according to Appsaholic, but it used to rank a lot higher.

What does this mean? A lot of people have installed Causes, but very few people are doing anything with it (e.g. low active user count). It’s kind of a dead app, even with the large installed base. Why? Well, you get Karma points when your friends look at your profile and see that you “support” Save Darfur (with 851,808 other FB members) or Stop Global Warming (with 1.8 million other FB members). However – how do you engage with these causes once you’ve installed them?

Where’s the Beef?

Awareness and Karma points are all great, but are the charities receiving donations? The number one “cause” on Causes is “Support the Campaign for Cancer Research” with 3.1 million members. Since the cause was published last Summer the total amount donated was $61,980. 3.1 million members – $62k in donations. That’s a depressingly low $0.02 per member. I contacted one of the charities linked to a top 5 Cause to learn if they were seeing a lot of impact outside of the small $ in donations reported on Facebook. The short answer was “not much.” Not that the money they’ve received is not valued (it is) or that the exposure to their issue was not valuable (it is). The “beef” just does not appear to be all that filling.

Here are the top 5 causes on Causes and their numbers…

  1. Support the Campaign for Cancer Research: 3.1m members, $62k donated (2 cents per member)
  2. Stop Global Warming: 1.8m members, $23k donated (1.2 cents per member)
  3. Animal Rights: 1.3m members, $22k donated (1.7 cents per member)
  4. Society Against Child Abuse: 1m members, $10k donated (1 cent per member)
  5. Save Darfur: 852k members, $17.5k donated (2 cents per member)

Total donated in the top 5 causes? About $135k.

I’m going to go out on a limb here. There are thousands of causes in the Causes ecosystem on Facebook. Most have very few members and a small amount of donation volume. Assuming that some members donate to more than one cause, and that some members donate a lot to a single cause, my estimate is that the average donation per member since Causes got going was under $0.15. With 8 million members, that makes the dollar impact ~ $1.2. I’ll round this up to an even $1.5m just to be generous.

In aggregate, $1.5 million is a fairly good number. On a per-cause, per-effort, and per-member basis, it’s trivial. So, I’ll leave answering the question to you: Is Causes on Facebook a failure?

7 Comments | Development, Fundraising, Giving Patterns | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by John Treadway

Following or Leading?

April 9, 2008

Great post the other day on Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog regarding some common issues nonprofits are facing when following instead of leading.  Lance Armstrong created LiveStrong and those ubiquitous yellow arm bands.  Suddenly there were white ones (The One Campaign), red ones (Project Red?) and pink ones (from a breast cancer charity).  You could go into any 7-Eleven and find a dozen different armbands.  Is it any wonder that few of these created any value for their charities when it became a commodity?  The LiveStrong yellow band was very cool when it first came out.  Now it’s ho hum.

Same is true for jumping on the social media bandwagon.  Sure – have a Facebook page and a listing on Causes – but don’t expect much.  In fact, the number one cause on Causes is “Support the Campaign for Cancer Research” which supports Brigham & Womens Hospital in Boston.  Note that B&W is kind of hidden behind the “Cause” name chosen by the Facebook user who created the listing.

You’d think that Brigham & Women’s was doing great with over 3.1 million Facebook members supporting this cause!  That’s a lot of people for any charity.  The problem is, the Causes listing has generated a mere $61,440 in donations from the mass of “supporters.”  That’s less than 2 cents per supporter.  Now, think about your charity and what might happen if a cause is listed on Facebook.  What would you expect?  $10?  $100?  Probably not a lot more.  The last one to the table gets only the food that everybody else wouldn’t eat.

The bottom line to Katya’s post is right on – you need to focus on the basic value proposition and hard work of raising money from your donors.  Fad-following takes time, money and typically disappoints.

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Posted by John Treadway

Investor Demo

March 13, 2008

We had our first demo of Givvy today for a VC.  The site is coming along nicely and the demo was flawless.  Great work Seth & James!  There was a bit of a debate with one of the partners about whether or not we should seek to get active support from charities in order to increase our chances of success.  Something we will look into.

All in all a good meeting, though no clear indication on their level of interest yet.  In the meantime, we’re ready to go back out there and show off our stuff to potential investors.

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Posted by John Treadway

Katya – Four Things I Wish I’d Known about Social Media

January 8, 2008

Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog has an interesting post about some of the misconceptions and fears people have about embracing social media.  She lists the following four things:

  1. It’s not hard
  2. It’s about social, not media
  3. Social media cranks “word of mouth” up to 11
  4. Be different – not YASN (yet another social network)

In general I agree with much of what Katya posts, but it’s a bit simplistic.   Yes, being social in a network is not hard.  Join one and find out – it’s harder to not be social!  But making any value out of social media and networks is a bit harder if approached from a business angle.  We can join all of the networks we want, but how to translate that into more or better donations is pretty hard.

From a user’s perspective – it is about being social.  But from a nonprofit perspective, it’s about the media.  Can you engage with your donors and supporters in a deeper way through this medium than, say, a marketing newsletter or email list?  Absolutely – and that’s the value.  You can give users a great experience but if you don’t use the medium to communicate your message you’ve missed the point.

Word of mouth can be a two-edged sword.  You may be the best charity out there, but a few bad reviews can have a hugely negative impact.  So, with the extended WOM comes a commensurate increase in diligence and monitoring.  In the for-profit world it is all too often that competitors use social media to spread negative viewpoints about perfectly good companies.  Are nonprofits prepared if that happens to them?  Of course, you can’t stop it from happening – it’s already starting to take place.  The key is to see that WOM is powerful but engage WOM like you do any other messaging strategy – you gotta know what’s being said about you and be ready to reply and defend if needed.

The last point I agree with wholeheartedly.  First movers get the advantage – so the first movers in nonprofit social media get the press and eyeballs.  Everybody else is playing catch-up.  Don’t try to create your own social world if you have a small constituency – use Facebook and other platforms to spread your message to the masses.  It works!

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Posted by John Treadway