Toronto startup Giveffect just launched a custom, white-label crowdfunding solution for charities, a much needed initiative in the space dominated by Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
Charities have always been active fundraisers, but popular crowdfunding platforms that often focus on the latest gadgets, products and personal projects lacked features most charities require, such as automated tax receipts and integration into existing CRM.
“We’ve completely bootstrapped Giveffect up until now, and now we’re able to expand and launch a crowdfunding enterprise software. We give nonprofits and charities their own Indiegogo built into their website. Non-profit crowdfunding is here to stay. It’s simply not a trend anymore, and we’re here responding to the shifts in fundraising demand nonprofits are seeing,” Anisa Mirza, co-founder and CEO of Giveffect told BetaKit.
It’s been two busy years at Giveffect. In its first year, the team focused on building up its own platform, serving charities in Canada, UK, and the US. In its second year, Giveffect moved to a new office space at George Brown Digital Media and Gaming incubator, doubled its headcount, reached profitability, and launched a much anticipated white-label crowdfunding enterprise software.
Charities that sign up with Giveffect to run crowdfunding campaigns often never experienced this type of fundraising before, but that’s changing quickly.
“We had a very positive experience with Giveffect. The actual product itself was easy to use, allowed for our donors to write us messages, upload photos.Our charity focuses on raising funds to supply computers for youth, so this was a great fit. We’ve raised double our goal, and 90 per cent of our donors were new. We didn’t think that was going happen! It changed our perspective on fundraising in general, and was a great learning experience,” says Justine Katz, Development Officer at Sky’s the Limit.
Given the success, it isn’t surprising Sky’s the Limit jumped on the chance to become one of the first clients for the new white-label product, and launched a fundraising campaign on their home site, powered by Giveffect.
Here’s how it works: Charities sign up, set up fundraising goals, explain the context for the project, upload photos, and share the campaign widely. They get to either integrate the whole Giveffect experience into their own sites, or use the platform as a stand-alone product. In return, Giveffect alleviates typical administrative burdens like tax receipts generation and secure online donations processing, and provides charities with a treasure trove of analytics. Charities get to see funds raised in realtime, get overall statistics on how well their campaigns are going, and learn about the donors’ age, gender and geography. Giveffect charges a small processing fee.
“We owe a lot of our success to our donors, and supporters, and charities that use our system, the support of tech and startup community,” Mirza told BetaKit. A passionate advocate for nonprofits and technology, Anisa Mirza and the twin co-founders Allan Shin and Kevin Shin are quickly becoming a fixture in Toronto’s startup community. The team participates in hackathons, events like Digifest and mesh, and wins over its non-profit clientele one success story at a time.
Most importantly, Giveffect connects charities with the new generation of donors, who rarely even own a check book. This new generation of donors respond with a shrug to street solicitations for cash donations, feel somewhat out of place at formal gala dinners, but rarely say no to causes and projects backed by family and friends, and self-organize with lightening speed.
Good to know charities aren’t getting left behind, because the future of fundraising is digital.