Give Forward

When someone is first diagnosed with cancer one of the most common questions they ask is “how am I going to pay for treatment?” says Jeannie Moore, Patient Support Manager at the Colon Cancer Alliance. While most non-profit cancer organizations are not in a position to directly provide funds for each patient, they can now direct the patient or patient’s family and friends to GiveForward.

At GiveForward, we are thrilled to announce that we are making 2010 “the Year of the Partnership.”  Since the beginning of the year, we have teamed up with some wonderful non-profit cancer organizations such as Alex’s Lemonade Stand, the Colon Cancer Alliance, and the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults.  Through these non-profits, patients and caregivers are referred to our site and services if they need to raise money for a loved one’s medical expenses.  You can check out our full list of partners on our spiffy, new Partners page.

Help Us Spread The Word

Teaming up with these non-profit cancer organizations provides a vital way for GiveForward to connect with those in need of our fundraising services and that’s why we need your help.  If you know of any cancer non-profits that would benefit from partnering with us, please contact us here.  We are always looking for ways in which to reach out to people in need and our partners provide the most important link for that!

GiveForward is excited to be participating in midVentures25 competition– an event that brings together 25 tech start-ups, all competing for the chance to win valuable prizes.  We will be among the “best investor-ready early-stage start-ups” Chicago has to offer.  Win or lose, the event is a great opportunity for GiveForward and the other start-ups to pitch our businesses to over 400 investors and attendees.

Judging the competition are online innovators such as Andrew Mason, CEO for Groupon, and Chuck Templeton, the founder of OpenTable.  The top 5 finalists will get the opportunity to do a 3 minute pitch for the audience and judges before the ultimate winner is chosen. 

Grand Prize includes hosting from SingleHop, software development consulting from Pathfinder Develoment, tech consulting from midVentures Group, legal services from Pasky IP, online advertising TheNextWeb,  an HP Business Netbook from ChicagoMicro, and $1,000 cash from Inventables.

midVenture25 was founded by Geoff Domoracki, CEO of midVentures, a technology based consulting firm and Jonathan Pasky, a patent attorney and founder of boutique Intellectual Property firm, Pasky IP.

The Demo Day and Conference takes place today, March 11th from 5:00 to 10:00pm at 200 S. Wacker Drive.  The event is open to the public, (with an admission fee of $10), and we encourage you to come out and support GiveFoward! 

For additional information on the event and midVenture, please click here.  For tickets, click here.

Dear GiveForward Users, Fans, and Friends,

Today GiveForward hit $1million in donations when Ariela A. donated to Team Nicole’s fundraiser.

Words cannot describe how happy we are to have gotten to this point.  In a little over a year and a half, GiveForward has helped people raise $1million for lifesaving things like chemotherapy and organ transplants.  We’ve helped people travel to get the care they need and covered living expenses while undergoing treatment.  But most importantly, we’ve helped build communities around people who are sick, helping them know that they are not alone.

We couldn’t have gotten to this point without you, our friends, users, and supporters.  So, thank you.

This moment is particularly poignant for me because we hit $1million on my late Grandfather’s birthday.  He was my first investor in GiveForward and the one who encouraged me to follow this dream.  He was fortunate enough to be able to afford treatment for his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but during his battle he reflected on how expensive the process was and how lucky he was to be able to focus just on getting well unlike his companions in treatment.

Ethan, too, has lost loved ones to cancer.   He knows first-hand how important it is to create a sense of community around someone who is sick.

We could not be prouder of the direction GiveForward has gone in since we hung our virtual shingle in August of 2008.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who have made this dream a reality.

With deepest appreciation,

Desiree & Ethan

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While GiveForward may be one of the few sites focused on helping people raise money for medical expenses, the reality is that people have been raising money like this for years.

We’ve all seen change boxes at convenience stores collecting money for a child’s surgery or driven by a church hosting a spaghetti dinner for a congregation member with cancer.  Over the last 10 years, people have taken these fundraising efforts online, first sending emails and creating websites asking for checks via snailmail and later creating sites with PayPal buttons going into personal accounts.

The PayPal Donate button has become fairly ubiquitous across blogs and smaller non-profit websites.  So, it is no wonder that we are frequently being asked why GiveForward is better than a PayPal button.

Here is our answer…

1. Expertise – We understand the strategies that make peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns successful. We are constantly adding new tips and best practices to our blog and have fundraising experts on staff available to answer questions and provide fundraising tips to our users. PayPal is a merchant processor not a fundraising expert.
2. Ease of use – We have had users start fundraising pages and raise $15,000 within 24 hours of signing up for an account.  We made our platform very simple and straightforward.  If an individual can send an email, they can use GiveForward.
3. Superb customer service - Although we provide a turnkey platform that anybody can use, when a user does ask for help, we pride ourselves on our ability to assist. Whether this means providing fundraising tips and advice over the phone, recommending a useful cancer support organization, or even helping users draft press releases for their local newspaper, we do everything within our means to make sure our users achieve their desired results.
4. Trustworthiness – The GiveForward platform is more trustworthy than a PayPal system. Donors feel more secure knowing that they are donating through an intermediary like GiveForward that holds the donations in escrow rather than going directly to an individual’s PayPal account.
5. Ability to leave comments – Upon making a donation, the donor has the ability to leave words of encouragement for the beneficiary. We’ve heard on a consistent basis from our users that this moral support from friends, family and strangers throughout the world is equally as important as the actually monetary contributions.
6. Easily measured progress— Unlike a PayPal button, GiveForward pages track the success of a fundraiser, making it easy for donors to see and build off of the momentum of a well executed fundraiser.
7. Ability to donate anonymously or semi-anonymously—PayPal requires donors to give their name and email address, making it impossible for people to leave anonymous gifts.   GiveForward protects donors by allowing them to donate completely anonymously.  Or, for those donors who may not want to display the amount, they can leave their first name and comment but hide the amount given.
8. Integration with Social media—GiveForward provides seamless integration with Facebook upon checkout, allowing donors to help spread the word quickly about a fundraiser.
9. Visually pleasing layout – Users have the ability to add pictures, calendars and even video to their fundraising pages to help bring their messages to life.
10. Personalized URL – Each GiveForward user selects a personalized URL for his or her fundraiser (e.g. www.GiveForward.org/Johan) making it easy to share with friends and family around the world.
11. Emailing system – Each user has the ability to import contacts from Gmail Yahoo! and MSN accounts to easily spread the word to friends and family.
12. Added visibility – Because each fundraiser is in a searchable database, anyone who is browsing the GiveForward site may choose to donate to fundraiser.
13. Automatic thank you notes - Every time a person donates, the donor receives an automatic thank you note from the organizer of the fundraiser as well as from GiveForward.
14. Ability to thank donors individually – In addition to the automatic thank you, GiveForward users can send personalized thank you emails directly to their donors even if the donor is anonymous.
15. Automatic Donation Alerts – GiveForward sends an automatic donation alert to the fundraiser’s organizer every time a donation is made.
16. Technical support – GiveForward staff members are available to answer technical questions five days a week.
17. Automatic email receipts to the donors- If  a 501(c)(3) has been set up for the individual beneficiary, this email serves as a tax-deductible receipt to the donor.
18. Lastly, we have a strong reputation and proven results – The GiveForward name and feel of the website engenders a sense of community that encourages donations and generosity. The Chicago Tribune has labeled GiveForward “the future of medical fundraising in the Internet Age”.  And with numerous projects on the site raising $10,000, $20,000 and even $30,000+ we have the track record to back it up.

GiveForward is looking for bright, enthusiastic, highly-motivated rising juniors, seniors, new graduates and grad students who want to really sink their teeth into a project and run with it.  You must have excellent writing and communication skills, and a sense of humor is a REQUIREMENT. Additionally, the ability to finish a two pound burrito from Chipotle in one sitting is viewed favorably (see below).

If you are interested in applying, please send a resume and a short cover letter explaining why you want to work with us to jobs@giveforward.org.

Please include which position you are applying for in the subject line. We are currently hiring for the following positions:

Fundraising Coach Extraordinaire: Are you a fundraising king or queen? Do you enjoy helping people and coming up with creative ways to raise money for good causes? If so, you could be perfect for this position.

We need someone who is an excellent communicator both with emails and on the phone.

Responsibilities will include:

* Working closely with individuals and organizations to help them better understand the ins and outs of online fundraising  (don’t worry, if you don’t know the ins and outs, we’ll teach you)
* Reaching out to new users to help them do a better job of fundraising
* Helping to write fundraising tips on the GiveForward blog
* Serving as the “face” of GiveForward to the Giveforward community and the outside world
* Issuing checks and personalizing the letters we send to beneficiaries
* Ensuring that our users have the absolute best user experience possible

read more…

I hope everyone’s holiday celebrations have been great.  I decided to take a little time away from planning my new year to tell you all about our great new interns here at GiveForward.  They have all taken some time away from their work to give me information I’ve been badgering them for.  Since we usually save the best for last, I’m going to start off by telling you a little about myself.

My name is Rob Vizza, and I work with Public Relations and Marketing for GiveForward.  I am currently in my fourth year at DePaul University where I keep busy with my fraternity (Phi Kappa Psi) and play for the Men’s Rugby Team.  I love Arnold Palmer’s, Italian food, the Chicago Bears, Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, rock music, Kevin Smith Movies, and going on random nightly adventures.  I can’t stand cheese, low ceilings, and Nicholas Cage’s acting.  In my free time I like to do community service, write screenplays, play sports, and just have a great time with my friends.  I got involved with GiveForward through a meeting I had with Ethan about doing fundraising for my fraternity.  He informed me that he was looking for interns, and I was excited to work with GiveForward.  This experience has been great.  I have never worked in a more positive environment.  Enough about me, lets meet Leigh.

Leigh Johnston grew up on the east coast in Stafford, VA—a small area that can’t seem to decide if it wants to be part of the Washington D.C. city life or not. She went to school in Blacksburg, VA at the ever-fabulous Virginia Tech, and then earned her Master’s in Pennsylvania at Carnegie Mellon. Despite being an east coast girl for so long, Leigh isn’t sure how she ended up in the Midwest, but is okay with being here. “My favorite things in the whole world are zombies, diet coke, sushi, Neil Patrick Harris, pumpkin spice-flavored berry chill, good paperbacks, stellar concerts, Threadless t-shirts, and my cat. Oh, and my fiancé. I like him too.” Leigh said.  In her free time Leigh likes to watch zombie movies, drink diet coke, eat sushi, swoon over Neil Patrick Harris, eat berry chill, read books, go to concerts, buy things at Threadless, and throw cat toys for her cat.  Leigh chose GiveForward because Ethan’s craiglist ad for a social media maven required burrito-eating skillz, and she figured there’d be a lot of Chipotle involved in this internship. So far, she hasn’t been disappointed. Leigh said, “GiveForward is doing great things and I’m stoked to be a part of it.”  Leigh is our Social Media Maven here at GiveForward  Next is our Fundraising Coach Extraordinaire, Erica Trzeciak.

Most GiveForward users know Erica as the girl who sends them all those nice emails.  As our fundraising coach, Erica works to make sure users get the most out of their fundraising experience and guides them on the road to a successful project.  Erica grew up in La Grange, IL.  She graduated last year from the University of Massachusetts with a B.A. in Psychology.  She is currently studying for the GRE’s to go to grad school next fall for Forensic Psychology.  Erica loves the color green, football (Go Bears!), finding new music, watching karaoke (not participating), gummi worms, gummi bears, and gummi peaches.  She watches the travel channel with hopes of one day visiting every continent, maybe even every country if her future finances allow it.  She is a terrible liar, but admits to reading the Twilight series multiple times and seeing New Moon in theaters at 3:15A.M.  She can’t stand Miley Cyrus, claiming that evens out her Twilight obsession.  She loves Christmas music, and is very critical of tacky Christmas decorations. “I chose GiveForward because I wanted a new perspective on giving back to the community.  I’ve done so much work with philanthropy, community service and fundraising on my own, that it’s nice to be helping on a large scale now.  Helping other people help the causes they care about so much is more rewarding than I could have ever imagined,” said Erica.  Lastly lets meet Sarah Seely.

Sarah grew up in Wrentham, Massachusetts.  She is currently studying sociology at DePaul University where she is putting the super in super senior.  Sarah likes incorporating guacamole into every food she eats, listening to trashy rap music, and wowing people with her extensive football knowledge.  When Sarah isn’t working at GiveForward she enjoys watching Cash Cab, starting but not finishing books, smiling at babies and dogs on the street while completely ignoring the adults attached to them, and constantly ignoring the pile of dirty dishes in her sink.  When asked how her experience with GiveForward has been Sarah said, “I love GiveForward!!!! Ethan and Desiree are awesome bosses, we’re like one big happy beer and burrito loving family.  It’s wonderful to help people and organizations that are doing awesome things.  It warms my heart everyday.”  I hope you all find our GiveForward Interns as awesome as we do!  Good luck with sticking to your new year resolutions!

-Rob

Some of you might have noticed that we recently changed the GiveForward slogan to “Fundraising Made Simple.” from “Changing the Face of Philanthropy.” I thought I would take a minute and tell you why we made the switch.

When we first started GiveForward, we weren’t exactly sure what it would turn into. On one hand, we thought that our site would give young people, who are not typically seen as society’s philanthropists, an easy way to give to the projects they cared about most.

On the other hand, we saw GiveForward being a tool for smaller non-profits to jump into the peer-to-peer fundraising arena where big non-profits like Susan G. Komen, American Cancer Society, and Leukemia and Lymphoma Society were raising billions. We thought that equipping small and medium sized organizations with the same resources as the big guys would also change the face of philanthropy.

But what we found out is that people wanted to use our site to raise money for people they care about. Nearly 75% of our fundraisers now are raising money for a loved one’s medical expenses. Whether they’re raising money for chemotherapy, an organ transplant, or even living expenses while undergoing treatment, the majority of our community is on GiveForward to raise money.

Because of this, we’ve changed up our strategy a bit. Now, we focus all of our efforts on helping our users become the best fundraisers they can be. We have always offered our Fundraising Bootcamp and Fundraising Tip of the Week. Now, we have our Top Ten Fundraising Tips we’ve gleaned from our master fundraisers on the site. We also have 2 fundraising coaches, Erica and Sarah, who are here to help you with any fundraising questions you might have. And, as always, Ethan and I are here to help.

So, in a way, we’re doing what we’ve always done…make fundraising a fun and easy process that brings people together. Now we just have a slogan that reflects that…Fundraising Made Simple.

You asked, we answered. Based on our user feedback, we’ve rolled out some brand new features for your fundraising pages!

New totally awesome feature #1: Automatic E-mail Summary

At the end of your fundraiser, you’ll now receive an e-mail with a summary including your total raised, list of donors, comments, etc. This way you have the information to keep and can share the comments with whomever you were fundraising for!

Awesome New Feature #2: Donation E-mail Alerts

Instead of refreshing your fundraising page with anticipation every five minutes, go on with your life! We’ll e-mail you as soon as someone donates to your cause.

Awesome New Feature #3: Archived Fundraisers

Missing your old fundraiser? Wishing you could go back to the good ol’ days and relive it? Fear not, from now on GiveForward will keep up an archived version of your fundraising page! People will NOT be able to donate to it, but you can go back and share it with others, contact your donors, etc.—especially helpful if you accidentally delete that summary e-mail!

We made these changes to GiveForward because YOU asked for them—if there are other features you wish you could see on the site, contact us on our twitter page or our facebook fan page. Hope you love the new features!

I just realized that Thanksgiving weekend marked the 2 year anniversary of when a little voice in my head woke me up at 1am and told me to “Get started!”  On reflecting how far we’ve come since then, it occurred to me that while I often get asked “How did the idea for GiveForward come about?,” I haven’t actually written the story down.  So here it is.

Before starting GiveForward, I worked at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City giving grants to colleges and universities for their entrepreneurship centers.  It was an incredible learning experience in strategic giving, as I got to see first-hand how much access to information people and foundations with money have before they give.

I remember being distraught when Hurricane Katrina hit because I, and so many of my colleagues, wanted to employ the same practices we used every day with the few dollars that we personally had to give.  But, there was no easy way to give directly to a family wanting to rebuild.  We talked openly about how much more we would give if we knew money wasn’t being lost in the bureaucracy of the whole situation.

I thought to myself that there should be a site where people can give directly to people and causes they care about.

But, I didn’t do anything with that idea until my 25^th birthday.  I was planning on leaving Kansas City to move to Chicago, and I was trying to think of my ideal job (a strategy my former boss Judith Cone encouraged me to do).  I was imagining everything I loved about my current work and what my personal passions were (corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, and strategic giving).  Ideas flowed through my head, and I landed on this idea for an adult internship program, where 20-somethings could leave their boring, entry-level jobs to temporarily pursue another field with the hopes of transitioning into that industry.

I sat in a restaurant waiting for my friends, imagining how I would fund such a project, when the idea of raising the money from friends and family came to me.  Having been involved in web design with Kauffman, I instantly thought about trying to do something online.  Then I remembered the conversations we had about fundraising for Katrina, and it was like a light went on in my entire body.

I knew right then that this was THE idea.  Create a site that lets people raise money for anything…charities, new companies, research projects, volunteer travel, even medical expenses.

For the next few months, I investigated competitors, looking to see who was doing what.  I was both excited and surprised to find out that during the moments my idea was being born, Change.org was debuting online.  A few months later, I met Andrew Mason, who was founding ThePoint.com, and I began to wonder if I wasn’t too late to get started.

Having no money and no networks in Chicago, I tabled the idea for a while.  But every so often, ideas would pop into my head about new ways people could use the site.

In November of 2007, on a long, soul-searching trip to Costa Rica (where I was born), I started thinking more and more about this site.  Change.org had proven to be a site for non-profits; ThePoint was more about social action than philanthropy; and I knew the need for this service still existed.

Then one night, this little voice in my head woke me up, and it literally whispered “get started.”  I got up, made a pot of coffee and worked at my laptop from 1am until 7am writing what would be the foundation of my business plan.

I had been throwing around names for weeks, and the next day it came to me.  GiveForward.org.   I wanted the name to convey what we were asking people to do…give small amounts of money for people and causes they care about now.  I never was comfortable with the idea of waiting until later in life to give back, so this name was perfect.

What was even more perfect, though, was the fact that someone had let the domain “GiveForward.org” expire two months before.

A few days later, I emailed the Small Business Opportunity Clinic at Northwestern University’s Law School.  I knew I needed help getting started, and I had funded similar programs at other schools.  When Tom Morsch responded positively to helping me…and to the idea, it gave me the confidence to tell my family about my plans.

On December 19^th, I sat down and told my grandparents all about the idea.  They called me a little bit later and told me they were sending me a small check to help me get started.  It was one of the last times I spent with my grandpa before he lost his battle with lymphoma, and it is a gift I will never be able to quantify.

I then found Prosper.com, and miraculously hundreds of people came together and loaned me another $10,000.  My mom, my sister, and a few friends chipped in, and I also did three face to face fundraisers in Kansas City, Chicago, and New York.

With enough money in hand to get started, I began looking for the ideal web developers to make GiveForward a reality.  In January, I found the Ocean Agency, a local, young, and eager development company who understood my vision and was excited to be involved.  In late January I signed my first contract.

After that, I literally told everyone I met about the idea.  One thing most entrepreneurship students learn is that nothing is created in a vacuum.  You have to tell people about your ideas so they can help you.  This is how I met Ethan Austin.

A couple months later at a Super Bowl party, I was telling a friend about the company I was starting.  She mentioned that a friend of hers from college had an idea for a fundraising site for marathon runners to raise money for their favorite charities.  I got his number, and about three weeks later we had a three hour conversation about my plans for GiveForward and his idea for his site.  We decided to have him come to Chicago to meet in person in mid-March.

In March, we met, and within a few hours, we knew that this was a partnership that could really take off.  We understood each other, fed off of each other’s ideas, and had a similar way of looking at the world.

While Ethan was getting things ready to move to Chicago in May of 2008, I finished the business plan and did the early design planning with the development team.  By early June, we had hired our first team of interns.  And on August 14^th, the site went live.

Since then, we have helped hundreds of people raise nearly $600,000 to have life-saving procedures, go on amazing volunteer travel opportunities, and support the charities that mean the most to them.

It is our sincerest hope that we will be able to continue this amazing work for many, many years to come.

Hopefully, you found this story interesting.  At the very least, thank you for reading and for supporting GiveForward.org.

Desiree Vargas

President & Co-Founder

GiveForward.org

When a friend or loved one gets sick or goes through a particularly hard time, we all react differently.  Some of us shower that person with attention, phone calls, and offers to cook dinner or drive to appointments.  Others send flowers and a heartfelt card expressing our sympathy or inspiring our friends to rise to the challenge ahead.  Then there are those of us that recoil, avoid calling, emailing, or stopping by, all the while letting the guilt of our inactions pile on.

Likely, we have all found ourselves responding in more than one of the above ways.  But the reality is that each one of these reactions stems from a feeling of helplessness—fear that we cannot help a person that we love out of the situation they are in.  So, we respond in the way we were taught, or in the way we would like to be treated, or we don’t respond at all and try to deny that this terrible thing is happening to someone close to us.

At GiveForward, we hear stories every day of people battling an illness or battling the financial burden that an illness has caused.  Often, the problem is insurance related, and a friend or family member needs money to have a lifesaving procedure or needs to be released from the insurmountable debt that such procedures have put them under.

We knew when we started GiveForward that there were hundreds of thousands of people each year in this position.  In fact, the ability to fundraise for medical expenses is one of the main reasons GiveForward allows people to raise money even if they are not a non-profit.  So, we were not surprised when medical expenses fundraisers began to accelerate on the site.  But what has shocked us is the role that these fundraisers are playing in the lives of the people who love and care about the person battling or recovering.

Nearly every day now, we receive letters of gratitude…not from the people receiving money but from friends and family who feel empowered by the ability to share in their loved one’s struggle.  It’s not about the money.  It’s about the knowledge that they can be a piece of making someone they care about’s life a little bit better.

Even if fundraising isn’t the answer, if you have a friend or loved one experiencing a particularly rough patch right now, you’re probably not alone in recognizing it.  Get together with friends and find a way to help him or her…you’ll be amazed how strong you will all feel in the end.