Soros Heir Is Offering Nonprofits Free Online-Giving Tools. Really.

Photo by Jennifer Gott

Jonathan Soros, an investment manager who is one of George Soros’s five children, wants nonprofits to raise money online without spending on pricey software.

So, in a move that’s raised some eyebrows, he and his wife, Jennifer, founded Give Lively, a company that started offering free digital-fundraising software to charities a year ago.

The company provides the basics: a way to generate donation forms for websites and emails. But it also gives charities the ability to raise money through text messages, the means to have supporters create their own fundraising pages, and, soon, a tool to sell event tickets. Nonprofits pay only a relatively small, but standard, payment-processing fee.

The couple wants to save nonprofits money and deliver online-fundraising services that are just as strong as what’s on the market today — if not stronger, says Jonathan Soros, 48, who spoke with the Chronicle at Give Lively’s offices in Manhattan.

Jonathan says he and Jennifer are not out to make money. Because the company offers free services, the couple — mostly known for backing liberal causes — sees it as a philanthropic project, despite Give Lively’s status as a limited-liability company rather than a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Jonathan Soros likened the couple’s funding of Give Lively to an “impact investment,” albeit one where no profit will be made.

“Effectively what we’re doing is subsidizing the entire field of nonprofits that use this product,” he says.

Most of the nonprofits that have used Give Lively so far are small. Still, some have recognizable names, like the Malala Fund, StoryCorps, and the Women’s March L.A. Foundation.

The company might be one to watch if it catches on with lots more nonprofits, experts say. But many nonprofit tech consultants and people who work at competing companies are skeptical of its offerings.

They have a basic question: How can a company delivering free services sustain itself?

Focusing First on Donors

Give Lively didn’t start out by offering online tools for nonprofits, but its goal has always been to spur charitable giving.

“We know that giving, whether money — or as studies suggest, more potently, time and effort — is conducive to happiness and personal satisfaction,” Soros says. “We have an interest broadly in promoting that behavior.”

MARK ABRAMSON, FOR THE CHRONICLE

When it began in 2015, Give Lively called itself an “incubator” for business ideas that promote “social good.” The first product started under Give Lively’s umbrella was “Small Token,” a website that allows people to contribute to nonprofits on behalf of others and send them nice notes. The site didn’t take off, Soros admits, though it’s still in operation.

Swearjar — which connected to companies’ Slack channels and had them donate $1 to a nonprofit when people typed in certain words (curse words, jargon, or other selected phrases) — and tinyGive — which generated a quick donation form for people who tweeted a charitable pledge to a nonprofit — also fizzled out.

When those ideas faded, the company made a significant shift from technology aimed at donors to technology for nonprofits, Soros says.

David DeParolesa, chief executive of Give Lively, says he and others at the company had conversations with about 25 nonprofits before building its digital-giving tools. He and his colleagues believed that free fundraising tools would be embraced, and, indeed, most nonprofits responded positively to the idea, DeParolesa says.

Many charities shared their frustrations with fees charged by other companies, he claims.

“It was something that was reaffirmed from those conversations,” says DeParolesa, a serial app developer who was working on a mobile product for the Discovery Channel before the Soroses approached him to join Give Lively. “We would hear more about the price and — especially for smaller organizations — how painful” the costs of online-giving tools were.

“Free” an Attractive Offer

Indeed, some nonprofits have found the offer of free software attractive.

Civic Nation, which launched in 2015 and houses an array of advocacy and awareness campaigns, started using Give Lively’s donation pages starting in mid-2017, says Jenn Brown, the group’s executive director. The products are simple to use, she says, and “by far the best deal for our nonprofit.”

Today, the charity, which projects that it will raise about $10 million this year, uses the company’s text-appeal services and its tool to allow donors to create fundraising pages for campaigns.

“As a nonprofit, my number one priority is to ensure as much money as possible is going toward the causes that people are donating in support of,” she says. “So my priority is to work with online processors who charge us the lowest fees possible.”

A Unicorn

But running a software company is expensive.

To generate a profit, other companies that offer similar products to Give Lively’s tack on fees — sometimes up to 5 percent, depending on the service being used and how large the nonprofit is, experts say. Most providers also ask charities to pay for a monthly or annual subscription, with the price based on how large the transaction fees are.

By not asking for any payments beyond transaction fees charged by Stripe, a payment processor, Give Lively is a veritable unicorn. Its promise of free software is virtually unheard of in the nonprofit-tech space.

And that’s made some observers skeptical. How can a software company continue to grow, improve its tools, and compete with the likes of Classy, Network for Good, and Blackbaud with only one source of funding and no revenue?

“Seems unsustainable,” says Sarah Sebastian, director of brand communications at Qgiv, a company that also offers digital-fundraising tools.

Some have questioned whether there’s another agenda. For instance, is the company looking to hook a lot of nonprofits by giving away services, only to sell its company to another vendor?

The answer to that is “no,” DeParolesa says. “Our ethos is such that the idea of selling to a for-profit entity is sort of the antithesis of how we began,” he says.

Possible Revenue?

Jonathan Soros insists he and Jennifer are committed to funding Give Lively. But he notes that the couple hasn’t completely closed the door to the company bringing in some money to cover part of its costs.

He anticipates a time when Give Lively might charge for some of the things it does, he says — though not for the “core services” if offers. It’s unclear what products might require payment in the future, but Soros suggested they would be more sophisticated than what the company currently offers.

For now, Give Lively doesn’t need to generate revenue, he says: “Jennifer and I are perfectly comfortable underwriting the product and underwriting the value that it’s creating for the community as a whole for the foreseeable future.”

Forever Free

In late August, the company put out a statement supported by the Soroses called the “Forever Free Pledge.” The pledge promises that all Give Lively’s current services — and some items still in the works, like the event-ticketing tool — will be free in perpetuity to all users, with no commitments. “We will never charge any annual fees, setup fees, hidden fees, or platform fees for our Forever Free Services,” says the statement, which went online in August. “We pledge to offer each of our Forever Free Services for so long as we run each service.”

A footnote at the bottom of the pledge says: “Stop trying to find a catch. There’s no catch.”

Limitations

Give Lively has some limitations.

The company can integrate its fundraising tools only with Salesforce. That means charities using other donor databases — like Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge — won’t get supporter data sent directly to their systems. They’ll have to download it and then manually import it into their databases — creating an administrative task that many charities don’t like.

Give Lively will be investigating ways to work with other fundraising software this year, but DeParolesa is unsure how long it’ll take to offer such services.

Today, nonprofits also need to use the payment processor Stripe as part of their Give Lively account. That service typically takes two days to verify credit-card payments for nonprofits. It takes seven days for contributions made by donors directly from their bank accounts. Among other reasons, the company uses Stripe because it offers good rates for processing nonprofit donations, DeParolesa says.

Give Lively, however, will start allowing nonprofits to use PayPal as its payment processor later this year, which charges fees similar to Stripe’s, but can send money to nonprofits faster in most cases.

Tough to Break Through

Still, Give Lively’s offer of free could be a game-changer for its competitors, observers say.

If it’s able to catch on — and if it can deliver a product that’s equivalent to or better than paid products, then it might pressure other digital-fundraising companies to lower their prices — or offer better services with features that a business producing free tools can’t compete with.

“Why wouldn’t you just move to this thing if it’s basically the same” as what other companies offer? asks T.J. Griffin, a nonprofit consultant who advises on digital fundraising.

But it’s far from clear that Give Lively will break through. In a crowded market, it’s hard for new players to get noticed, free or not, say tech consultants and others who provide such software. To be taken seriously by more established nonprofits, Give Lively may also need to attract a big or midsize nonprofit that can vouch for it, Griffin says. To him, the question is: “Can you score a large or midmarket client with a robust digital program that does a lot of online fundraising a lot of ways — and be successful?”

Some big groups, like EveryTown for Gun Safety and DoSomething.org, use some of the organization’s tools but not exclusively, DeParolesa notes.

Jonathan Soros acknowledges that it might be hard to get nonprofits that are used to doing business with other companies to join Give Lively.

“The transaction cost of shifting is not zero,” Soros says.

Still, he thinks all nonprofits — no matter their size — care about saving money: “It really feels difficult to hand over a percentage of your revenue to anybody, whether you’re small or large.”