My First Year in Non Profit Tech

I just wrapped up my first year in Nonprofit Tech; along the way I've learned a lot and those learnings have grown my conviction that Fundraise Up is one of, if not, the best tech companies a nonprofit could possibly partner with.

Top 3 learnings

Learning 1: There is a real sense of PTSD around vendor relationships. In a lot of cases, vendors have misled, overpromised and outright lied to nonprofits to secure a contract. Legacy vendors have not been held accountable to performance, instead they have shifted the burden of their lack of performance to nonprofits to deal with.

Learning 2: Change management is very difficult. Fwiw, this is true in every industry but it's especially difficult within nonprofits. All departments have resource constraints and complex change is very rarely executed alone. Creating alignment on priorities and securing the necessary resources to execute change is difficult and can create a sense of exasperation for those who know their org could be doing better but feel ‘stuck’ by the inability to affect change.

Learning 3: The stakes are high. A failed project or initiative doesn't just mean a slightly lower growth number; it means fewer families being fed, fewer animals being saved, fewer resources going to help cure cancer. The last thing any nonprofit wants to do is lose ground on their mission.

The importance of innovation

When combined, these three things pose a major risk for nonprofits. They often lead to 'the devil you know' thinking. It can make it hard to trust a great thing when you see it. I believe that Fundraise Up is genuinely different. Not a little bit different, a lot different.

Most other companies in this space have tried to grow by building or acquiring more products so they can capture more ‘wallet share’. No grudge there, they are for-profit companies. However, this approach is a distraction from improving the actual effectiveness of their product. The more products you build, the more things you acquire, the more resources you invest in maintenance, and the fewer resources you have available to invest in innovation; this cycle becomes self-perpetuating. They build/acquire more, they innovate less, the gap between their performance and more innovative companies grows... but it's too late… they are too bulky to remain innovative so they come up with new ways to charge more without delivering more.

Since our inception, Fundraise Up has made tough decisions to protect our ability to do two things: be definitively the best-performing platform and continue to innovate. I’ll share an example of a debate that has raged inside the walls of Fundraise Up for years. Modal color. All brands love their brand color, completely natural. Though it seems simple, giving all customers control over the modal color has real impact on innovation. It is an additional variable that our product team must always consider. Not just in their development work, it also affects our ability to remain compliant for accessibility, which we know all nonprofits care about. We also know, based on our testing, that brand color of the modal (no matter how much you love it) doesn’t have a material impact on conversion; in some cases, it hurts it. So even though it ‘feels’ like it has to be match, even though it ‘feels’ like a small thing, it’s not as important as continued innovation. We want to protect our ability to innovate so we can continue to deliver the best possible outcomes for our customers for decades to come.

To put it simply, our product and engineering teams are spending more of their time on innovation than any other team in the industry to deliver better outcomes to our nonprofit customers.

We only win when you win

Almost all the legacy vendors in our space require lengthy contracts. Here is the problem; if a nonprofit signs their three-year contract based on a promise and that vendor doesn’t deliver... what happens? Does the vendor suffer or does the nonprofit? Yeah… that’s messed up. We see this all the time with nonprofits working with other vendors. It goes something like ‘we’re stuck in this contract for two more years’ or ‘our contract says we can’t test their product against others’. If nonprofits have an opportunity to improve their performance, no one should be stopping them from doing so.

To those in the know, it’s no secret that most companies with donation forms are attempting to directly copy what we do... there, I said it... but just because they try does not mean they will succeed. Fundraise Up is more than a modal. Our competition has years of work ahead of them to catch up to where we were in 2020 yet they say 'sign our contract, we're building that'... come on, really? These are the same vendors that created the mistrust between nonprofits and tech vendors in the first place.

Why are they asking for a contract on something we deliver without one? That's right, no contracts, no licensing fees, no professional services fees. So why can we a) actually be delivering and b) not asking you to sign a long term contract but you have to sign a contract with someone else based on the promise that they might catch up to our level of performance at some point.

We, as a whole company, put our money where our mouth is every. single. day. If you find a platform that performs better, you can leave. If our site crashes in the middle of Giving Tuesday, you can leave. Even though there are no barriers to our customers leaving, our customers stay. Why? Because it’s not messaging, sales tactics and empty promises; it’s performance and true accountability. We deliver results, we support our customers like crazy, and we do what we say we will do. Full stop.

Final thoughts

This is what makes us different. We do things no one else in the industry is willing to do. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll give us a chance to earn your business. I am, of course, biased but you don’t have to take it from me. I’d challenge you to talk to five of your peers at any of our 3,000 customers and see what they have to say. I’ll be surprised, but if you do encounter any negative feedback please ask them to reach out to me directly, [email protected].