Givvy Charitable Giving Site Launches at TechCrunch50

Posted on September 9, 2008 by John Treadway

- 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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Givvy at TechCrunch50

Posted on September 8, 2008 by John Treadway

Tomorrow we are launching Givvy at TechCrunch50. We are in the DemoPit (made it through a few rounds, but not to the big stage…). This is the culmination of nearly 9 months of work by a great and dedicated team. Stay tuned for our official press release announcing the launch. Early feedback from beta users has been quite favorable, but we know there’s a lot more work ahead of us.

Seth and John are at TechCrunch50 and are looking to meet with potential partners, press/bloggers, and investors who might be interested in what we’re up to. Call or text John at 617-290-3955 if you want to meet. Or stop by our table in DemoPit on Tuesday - we’ll be there all day!

Come learn more about the future of charitable giving management.

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Meet The Givvy Team

Posted on September 7, 2008 by John Treadway

We’ve been working hard for nearly 9 months on Givvy.  Before we launch I though it might be worth getting to know a bit about our small but totally rockin’ team.  This is in alphabetical order…

James Andrews

James is a co-founder and one of our two developers.  James worked for John at Digibug (sold to Zaah Technologies this Spring) and has a long list of great web sites to his credit.  James has done work for sites such as LL Bean, American Express, and Creative Memories - among others.  James was the lead Web developer for CambridgeSoundWorks and is great both at coding and managing the systems end of things (which at Givvy means Amazon’s Web Services infrastructure).

There are several interesting tidbits about James to share.  First, he is totally self-taught.  James wanted to build Web sites - so he did, starting back when he was a tech support rep at TIAC at the dawning of the consumer Internet.  The quality of his work and his total dedication are truly amazing, even more so in light of his informal path to developing his skills.

James is also a total Star Wars fanatic - to the extent that he participates in charity events and parades as an Imperial Guard (yes, the bad guys… always way cooler to play the villain!).  His group has raised thousands of dollars for charities - and they all have a great time!

Seth Lipkin

Seth is a co-founder and our other developer.  Seth’s past credits include some very cool games for Atari for a company called GCC (Seth - if you had stuck with video games you’d be a mega gazillionaire by now…).  He’s also one of the two guys who built the original MeetingMaker product that was marketed by Jim Manzi’s On Technologies in the mid-90’s.  This is one seriously smart dude, as you will see.  He spent the last several years building imaging applications for folks like Wal-Mart (portrait studios) and Adobe.  Seth’s a Cornell computer science guy.

In addition to being a superlative engineer, tackling some of our biggest technical challenges at Givvy, he’s also a competitive Scrabble player.  At one point Seth was ranked just outside the top 50 players nationally.  On the side, Seth manages Cross-Tables.com, the site that all competitive Scrabble players use to track their tournaments and rankings.

John Treadway

John is the idea guy and CEO.  John founded Digibug in 2003 (sold to Zaah) and was part of the team that founded Financial Fusion, an e-finance spinoff of Sybase that went from $0 to $30 million in sales in 36 months (from inception).  John built and ran Financial Fusion’s customer service, Web hosting and education business units before taking over the marketing and business development functions.

As was already mentioned, John’s the idea guy at Givvy.  And the sales guy, finance dude, and marketing wonk - among other duties.  The original concept for Givvy came from John’s right hemisphere last Fall.  A lot of the feature specs, information architecture, and navigation was designed by John.  That means if something is really lame or unusable, blame John (and then he’ll make it better).  Fortunately, John does get credit for recruiting such a great development team to build Givvy.

While John doesn’t march in Star Wars gear (like James), or easily decode 8-letter anagrams (like Seth), John’s interests include running (3 marathons and several half-marathons), biking, skiing, coaching kids sports, and  helping to raise our two wonderful kids.

Of course, outside of the core founding team there are several others giving us advice and support.

Site design and CSS was created by Mike Cormio at Coresecure, Inc. It looks great!

Special shout out to the great folks at Network for Good.  Without their support and ability to create new functionality so Givvy can work the way we envisioned, Givvy would be a lot less interesting.

Advisors include Carol Yelverton, Vice President at O’Neill and Associates and a long-time communications and strategyexpert in the nonprofit sector; Michon Schenck, an experienced technology executive with broad operational and executive experience, and; Myron Kassaraba, a strategy and business development consultant with lots of great advice.   There are many more of course, including Larry Weber at W2 Group, Greg Gibson, Helen Rosenfeld and several others.

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Private Beta Early Feedback

Posted on September 2, 2008 by John Treadway

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.

  1. for external donations the ability to edit or delete them later
  2. ability to make a donation for someone doing a fundraiser without sharing your personal information with the charity
  3. set up alerts to make one-time donations in the future
  4. be more explicit on the costs related to the donation (see * below)
  5. 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)
  6. ability to record non-cash donations - volunteering, etc.
  7. 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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How can you get there if you don’t know where you’re going?

Posted on August 29, 2008 by John Treadway

Most journeys start with a destination.  Some don’t and that can be fun sometimes too, but it can also lead to bad endings (at worst) or a mediocre experience (more common).

Most charitable giving by individuals is a journey with no destination in mind.  Or, perhaps an idea of a destination in the back of their mind but no turn-by-turn directions or map to follow.  Someone calls - I give.  I get a mailing - I give.  A co-worker asks me to sponsor their bike ride - I give.  I really care about inner city education… but they didn’t call, write or send a friend or colleague after me.  Oh well, maybe next year.

How many great local nonprofits are in your community?  Don’t know?  You’re like most people.  So you gave to the public radio station with the huge new edifice on the Mass Pike during their fund drive, but not to the soup kitchen that actually feeds some of your neighbors?

What if you were to sit down and create a plan?  One that set goals for the amount, types of charities, regional reach and other factors?  Do you think a written plan might help focus your giving to help you get where you want to be?

Start with the destination in mind.  You might not get all the way there, but at least you’ll be in the neighborhood…

Sign up for the Givvy Beta and see our easy to use tools for creating a simple but effective giving plan.   Today - now.

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Back in Stealth, but Still Up

Posted on August 26, 2008 by John Treadway

We went back into stealth mode due to requirements of our DemoPit participation in TechCrunch50.  There’s a link on the home page to log in and another request access to the beta (we’ll send you the passwords to get past security).

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Bugs we know about…

Posted on August 25, 2008 by John Treadway

We had a couple of bugs that have been fixed.  Right now we are working on an issue with sending emails for registration confirmation, etc.  Other thann that no big deal breakers yet…

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Givvy Beta 1

Posted on August 25, 2008 by John Treadway

Well, it’s been a long time coming - but the first beta of Givvy is now live!!!

We’re very excited to have you visit Givvy and give us a try.  We are working on some additional content to introduce the site to people, but here is some guidance to get you started.

Givvy is designed to help you plan and manage all of your charitable giving in one place:

  • Our Givving Plan is a great tool to help you focus your giving.
  • You can create a Givvy Portfolio and fund it with a recurring monthly or quarterly donation to help you meet your giving goals.
  • You can record donations from outside Givvy using our “Record External Donations” functionality.
  • Our donation reports give you a complete view of all of your donations to help you with your planning and to enable you to see if you’ve already donated to a charity this year.
  • Member funds allow people to create charity portfolios that others can use in their donations.  You can create a Member Fund for a specific cause, like cancer, or a more general fund.  Share it with your friends so they can give to the same organizations you support.
  • Invite friends to join Givvy, and “friend” existing members to collaborate and share more information to help you give even better.

That’s a good start.  Most of all this beta test is an opportunity for you to tell us what you like, don’t like or wish you could see on Givvy.  Thanks!

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Good News on Givvy Beta

Posted on August 22, 2008 by John Treadway

I just got off the phone with our really excellent partner and we should have a solution in place by Tuesday or Wednesday “at the latest.”  That means we expect our beta to be live middle of next week.  Fingers crossed!

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Beta Update…

Posted on August 21, 2008 by John Treadway

We had hoped to go into beta yesterday or today but are running into a few issues that may take some time to resolve, with one of the issues related to a partner API that’s not behaving as we had expected.  I’m sure we’ll get this all turned around quickly, but at this point I’m not sure if it’s tomorrow or next week since we are reliant on this partner to respond.

Stay tuned!!

update:  working with partner on this.  will know more tomorrow, but signs are encouraging (they’re a great partner)

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