Recent learnings: exploring a pledge minimum

At Founders Pledge , we’re proud to publish all our research on our website, because we’re committed to sharing our expertise and being transparent about our methodology - that is, where our high-impact funding recommendations come from.?

In that same spirit, as a lot of what we do is also about fostering and scaling a global community, we wanted to start sharing our learnings in that space, too.?Since our inception in 2015, we’ve grown rapidly into a community of over 1,700 founders, and faced ups and downs along the way. We’ve certainly learned a lot! Some of the principles we’ve found successful in growing and engaging our community include:

• The power of peerage: Community is a powerful connector and motivator for many of our members; bringing them together at dinners and retreats to learn from one another is crucial to invigorating their giving;
• Handing the spotlight to others:? Since 2015, we’ve hosted countless dinners with experts on topics as diverse as global catastrophic risks and animal welfare and put on a handful of intimate retreats for our members to dig deep into motivations around effective giving;
• Remaining laser-focused on delivering value for our members: We continue to grow our community, and recently hit $8.5 billion in pledge value. To do so, we’ve doubled down on our core offering, delivering better value for our members, more consistently (more on that below).?

We live and breathe our core values: maximize impact, follow?data, take action, and energize others.?With these guiding principles in mind, we’re constantly piloting and testing new approaches. Of course, not all our pilots succeed!

Recently, we tested setting a minimum pledge amount of $1 million for new members. Ahead of the test, we analyzed data on what drives giving to high-impact charities. Our hypothesis was that shifting to a minimum pledge amount would help us focus our efforts on members who would derive the greatest value from our services (a better use of our time, and a more valuable experience for them), and thus ultimately direct more money to high-impact funding opportunities.?

As we trialed the approach, we collected feedback from our existing members about the shift. Many of them are amazing advocates for us and bring in new members from their networks via referrals. They told us they found it difficult to know how much someone may be inclined to pledge, meaning they would struggle to confidently refer people, or hesitate altogether if we set a pledge minimum. They also reinforced the importance of other characteristics, such as someone’s enthusiasm for effective giving, their existing levels of generosity, their likelihood of becoming an advocate, and the trajectory of their business, in identifying and bringing in new members. Beyond these reservations, and most critically, the concept of a pledge minimum aroused connotations of exclusivity which seemed to go against everything we, as both a charity and an impact-driven organization, stand for.?

Part of cultivating a strong and engaged community means taking feedback seriously - so when our members told us the minimum threshold felt alienating, we decided not to go ahead with it and rethought the approach.

We got rid of the $1 million pledge threshold (but maintain our existing 5% minimum), and instead are finding other ways to ensure we’re providing optimal service to our members - namely, applying the right levels of resource at the right times depending on where they are on their journeys. To do so in a way that maximizes both the value members derive from us, as well as our team’s time, we’re being explicit about what someone’s experience at Founders Pledge will look like. For example, with founders who may be years away from an exit, we make clear which of our services to expect now (e.g. our events and retreats) and which will be relevant when they’re nearing liquidity or actively giving (e.g. our 1:1 advising). We’re finding this transparency ensures a more seamless experience for and higher levels of engagement from our members overall, while in turn allowing us as a team to more strategically deploy our resources by focusing time and energy where it will yield the biggest returns – a critical principle for a non-profit that champions cost-effectiveness.

We test things and gather data for a reason. Our original hypothesis may have been proved wrong, but in the process we’ve learned something new and important that might otherwise have passed us by, and we’re more impactful for it.