This week’s 2 for 2 episode of Whole Whale’s podcast focused on social impact ideas invited Tim Sarrantonio, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Neon One. These ideas are evaluated based on their impact, financial viability, and reach.
Ideas Covered
Tim’s Ideas
Giving marketplace – there’s a massive misunderstanding about the ways that community giving events influence overall donor behavior as well as the successful of nonprofits of all sizes, especially smaller ones. Especially given your support and very awesome analysis of GivingTuesday, you know this in general. But Neon One does some really deep work with community giving days like North Texas Giving Day. That will most likely drive $50 million+ in one day to just the metro Dallas area.
Nonprofits apply to be in their giving index, usually needing to meet some criteria. Yet what happens if we took this concept and scale it to be able to include any nonprofit, regardless of the geographic region? Would it work? And how can this be different than what Charity Navigator, Network for Good, etc. already does? How can you take the concepts of giving days, which include things like leaderboards, matching minutes sponsored by businesses, peer to peer fundraising, and other elements and really scale it up? And can you do it that still maintains the ways that giving day hosts report back on success of their work?
Smart Speaker Donor Management – we all know the rise of smart speakers in phones, homes, cars, etc. And we know that there is more artificial intelligence being leveraged in the nonprofit space, especially around focusing on ideal donor profiles and behavior.
Yet how come there hasn’t been an app that naturalizes the conversational ability for a major gift officer, peer to peer event manager, etc. to get insight into their day and start even using it to schedule engagements with donors, fundraisers, staff, etc. If nonprofits should be focusing on building relationships, why haven’t we been able to get them to leverage a tool that is starting to become a natural way we plan our day?
George’s Ideas
White label GoFundMe for nonprofit management of their audience and promotion vehicle for raising money directly for their audience. Like a Donor’s Choose but for different categories managed by the nonprofit that verifies quality.
Thank you engine service. Handwritten cards, audio messages and variable donor rewards for giving. Thanking donors takes time and frequently gets lost, this service would make $100 dollar donors feel like $1000 dollar donors with custom thank yous acknowledging their gift.