We love the idea of layering in rich information to help donors make informed decisions! We just want to be really thoughtful about the experience. So we plan to get there, it just may take us some time.
Separate data records, yes, separate payment, no.
The charity receives one consolidated check in the mail each month across all donors (one payment), and the original donor's grant will be on the data sheet as well as the matching grant from the company's corporate fund (separate records).
Today, users create their accounts directly with our app, and they are affiliated with their corporation in our app via their email address. So we don't integrate with any HR information.
Administrators of the program can add and remove employees via copying and pasting email addresses (can add/remove many at a time). We aim to integrate with HR systems of record in the future to make this seamless.
Our workplace product does charitable gift matching automatically according to rules the company sets up, and provides reporting to company leadership on all the aggregate giving / matching / participation data across employees. A company can see their aggregate charitable impact in a broad sense.
To your second question, the giving funds belong to each donor, but companies can establish an affiliation with each donor's fund for the length of the employment, which allows us to enable that company's gift matching and reporting. It's not unlike a 401k at Vanguard for an employee—technically the employees, but the company facilitates the benefits for the length of employment.
So if an employee joins a company with a fund, we just add an affiliation between the company and that user's fund (via an email address). Likewise, the affiliation is removed when an employee leaves. Matching/reporting cease for that donor, but the charitable dollars in the employees fund will continue to be in their fund.
Since the only validated interface with have with charities is through the mail (they have to keep an updated address with the IRS) we send them payments on monthly consolidated paper checks. Sending on a greater frequency would be much more costly and administratively painful for them.
Thanks! Our matching system issues an identical grant from the fund of the matching company. It goes out in the same grant cycle as the employee grant so they go together.
We haven't yet encountered any charity that prefers to receive cryptoassets.
We have lots of dreams about thoughtful integrations with HR software, but we want the experience to be excellent, and we want to keep the experience of our existing app excellent. We'll be balancing those priorities as we grow.
The minimum contribution, grant, and payment out to nonprofits are all $20, so we never run into a situation where we wait to send payments to nonprofits.
Absolutely. We have found matching programs are painful to run.
It's also a small misconception that payroll deduction giving is pre-tax. Giving is a post tax benefit either way, so we think it's a better experience for the donor to have control of their monthly automatic contributions rather than having to bug their HR / finance department at their company to increase/decrease it.
Our app can do regular automatic deposits from user's bank accounts today! Many of our users love it. They fulfill their personal commitment to give automatically.
We would love to build an API. We constantly have conversations about it amongst our team. It's just a matter of priorities. Agree it would be amazing to see people build more charity-focused apps integrated with our funds.
We are working with a few select strategic partners to help their giving via Charityvest (that eventually would be replaced by an API). If you have an organization who might be interested in working with us, have them reach out. We'd love to chat with them.
In two ways:
1. We charge a per employee per month SaaS subscription to companies for our workplace giving product.
2. We invest a portion of the balances in our charitable funds (aggregated across all users) in safe, highly liquid assets to create a financial return. The money is not restricted in any way and is available for granting to nonprofits at any time. Robinhood uses this same model with uninvested cash in its app.
Trust is an important factor for us. You're right, and YC helps, but we also have other structures that make things transparent.
The charitable assets in our app actually go into a 501c3 public charity (Charityvest Inc), a part of our social enterprise, which has to file a Form 990 every year making its financials and board members public. We launched in 2019, so our first 990 filing is this year. We also conduct our own internal financial audit which we plan to make public on our site. Our charitable operations will be increasingly transparent.
We're also partnered with / backed by other significant institutions: Yale University, The Farm at Comcast NBCUniversal, Dwolla, Plaid, Synovus Bank, etc.
You can also follow up with any charity you grant to out of Charityvest yourself and ask them if they receive Charityvest's grants in a timely manner. Generally all charities will gladly confirm receipt of a donor gift.
Percent Pledge focuses its giving on cause portfolios, and you can't give to specific organizations.
We invite our donors to give into their own charitable fund, and support specific organizations when they feel like a strategic opportunity has arisen. Donors are more satisfied when they can give bigger on things they are really passionate about.
Percent Pledge also has a 5% fee on every dollar given through them. We have no fee. 100% of your money goes to the charities you support. We want to eliminate fees from giving!
Great question. We have existing customers who are doing this today—they have guidelines for charitable organizations they don't fund.
Today, we enable the company admin to quickly cancel any grant that gets loaded in their hopper of monthly matching grants. They can cancel any grant from their dashboard in two taps. The employee who submitted the grant for matching will get notified their match wasn't approved.
Today we only invest in money markets. Asset preservation is our top priority, and we can't ever have balances down in our app. That would be a terrible experience for our donors. So we'll only move beyond money markets with great caution. Our platform automates so much of the aspects of processing charitable gifts, even a small financial return is gross margin profitable for us.
It's worth noting, we offer a free DAF because we don't offer an investment capability for our donors today. Our DAFs currently function like checking accounts. The investing we do of charitable assets is invisible to our users.
For any donor who doesn't think their charitable assets will sit for years before being sent to charity, we're a great option for making giving much easier.
This is a big point. And we ensure our payouts to nonprofits happen on a regular basis.
We consider the innovation of our venture to be 50% compliance tech, for this very reason. Our system automates a bunch of the charitable compliance steps and allows us to issue payouts to nonprofits on a regular, predictable monthly cycle. And it's scaleable.
We consider charities to be an important stakeholder and the payment getting to the charity in a timely manner to be a meaningful piece of the donor experience.
This is one example of historic workplace giving platforms being built only for buyers, not other stakeholders.