GiveForward Founder Interviewed by MetroGREEN+Business

Co-Founder Desiree Vargas was recently interviewed by Metro Green Business about the success of GiveForward, and since that interview we are excited to announce that we have raised just over $1.3 million dollars!

In the article, Desiree talks about how she decided to start GiveForward and discusses how our first success story positively affected our site.  She also talks about the evolution of our site becoming primarily focused on medical fundraising. 

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Q&A: Desiree Vargas, Co-founder and President of GiveForward.org

By James Leggate

GiveForward.org is a Web site which lets anyone raise money for any charitable cause. By using the site, fundraisers avoid the hassle and expensive of traditional methods like mailings and phone calls. Instead, GiveForward suggests that users use more of a viral marketing method, letting their family and friends spread word through e-mails and social networking sites. Desiree Vargas, co-founder and president of GiveForward, spoke with MGB about some of the philanthropy the site has generated and how they do it.

How did you get the idea for GiveForward.org? 

The short version is that there were a couple of different inspirations for GiveForward. First was Hurricane Katrina. My colleagues and I we were all strongly encouraged to give to the Red Cross, but we wished we could help more directly by giving to a family that we knew was trying to rebuild. That put the idea in my head that small-scale donors should have a bigger say in how their money is used.

About a year later, on my 25th birthday, I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my career, and I started thinking about launching my own company. I came up with the idea for an adult internship program. While trying to come up with a way to fund the company, I thought of asking friends and family for mini loans. Then I tried to imagine a service that made this possible, and I couldn’t think of any. Then I started thinking about all of the worthwhile projects going on around the country and world that do not have non-profit status, and I thought there should be a tool to help those people raise money online.

The name for GiveForward came from the idea that a lot of people think that they should wait until later in life to give back, when a large sum can make a bigger difference. But, if we all got in the habit of giving a little bit of money every month for the rest of our lives, we will have given more and made a bigger collective impact.
   
How much money has been raised so far through the site? What have been some particularly successful projects?

In a little over a year, we’ve helped raise nearly $800,000 for a variety of projects. Our first big success story and still our largest fundraiser to date was in March 2009 when a young woman raised $32,000 on our site to pay for the operation to donate her kidney to her sister. The story was the first time a project really went viral. They had hundreds of people donating their Facebook status bars, their story made it into the Chicago Tribune, and they raised the money from friends, family, and strangers all over the country.

There have been so many amazing stories on the site. As a child of a single parent, one of my personal favorites was a 17-year-old young man who created a page to help his mother pay their rent, as she had been sick and was having trouble keeping up with everything. He did the fundraiser over his birthday and asked people to contribute in lieu of gifts. They raised enough money to pay their rent and expenses, and his mother donated the rest to a center for domestic violence. I love this story because it’s such a great example of how people are willing to help if you just ask.
   
You provide a lot of fund raising tips on the site. How did you develop these? Has anyone surprised you with the methods they have used?

My partner Ethan Austin is the brains behind the fundraising tips. In law school, he raised money for St. Jude’s as part of his marathon training. He ran around (and still does) in a banana costume and handed out flyers for his fundraiser. He was so blown away by the generosity of friends, family, and even strangers on the street that he decided he wanted to make this his life’s work.
 
Our fundraising tips in our blog come from our experiences, advice from experts, and from successful techniques from our users. One of the most amazing days on the site, for example, was when the friends of a young artist diagnosed with cancer created a page where they committed to sending a collection of 15 prints to anyone who donated over $200. In one day, they raised $15,000 from people all over the world, most of whom did not even know the artist who was sick.

Your fees are noticeably lower than other online giving sites. How can you afford this?

In truth, we can’t afford our low fees right now. Both Ethan and I have not taken a salary since we launched GiveForward. We both work nights and weekends to pay our bills so we can spend all day, every day helping GiveForward grow. Every cent that people pay in fees goes back into the site.
We decided to make our fees as low as possible for a couple of reasons. First, we wanted people to know that we are here to help, and we’re not here to make an insane profit. Second, we wanted to make choosing GiveForward a no-brainer. The lower our fees, the easier it is for people to give us a try.

The reality, though, is that our percentage is workable if we have the volume. So, we’re working as hard as we possibly can to get more projects to the site and to help make the projects that are here the most successful they can be. 

We are also in the process of building an API (application programming interface) for GiveForward that will allow non-profits and healthcare providers to offer customized versions of GiveForward within their own Web sites. We have two big partnerships in the works that should boost volume considerably.

We are also blessed a bit by this bad economy; since before we launched the site, we have had an amazing stream of interns willing to work for experience. They are the backbone of our company.

On the site, you wrote that you were surprised that one of the most popular uses has been to raise money to pay medical bills. Has this changed your outlook in marketing the site? What do you think GiveForward.org’s primary purpose will be in the future?

If there is one thing we have learned in the process of building GiveForward, it is flexibility. We originally started GiveForward thinking that some people would use the site to raise money for their favorite charities, some people would use the site for group fundraisers like a little league team, and then we thought there would be a healthy section of the site devoted to medical fundraisers.

In the beginning we focused our energies on diversifying the kind of projects on the site. But after about 8 months, it became abundantly clear that medical expenses fundraisers was where we were raising the most money, doing the most good, and having the biggest word of mouth expansion. 
In August of 2009, we decided to shift all marketing and communications strategies to medical.  While we still encourage other types of fundraisers on the site, this is our main focus as a company. Since making that shift, we have grown by more than 300 percent.

For the next few years, I see strategic partnerships with health care organizations being our biggest focus. But, we will be watching to see how people use the site and will adjust our strategy according to what our users need.