Launch HN: Charityvest (YC S20) – Employee charitable funds and gift matching
We give employees their own tax-deductible charitable giving fund, like an “HSA for Charity.” They can make contributions into their fund and, from their fund, support any of the 1.4M charities in the US, all on one tax receipt.
Using the funds, we enable companies to operate gift matching programs that run on autopilot. Each donation to a charity from an employee is matched automatically by the company in our system.
A company can set up a matching gift program and launch giving funds to employees in about 10 minutes of work.
Historically, corporate charitable giving matching programs have been administratively painful to operate. Making payments to charities, maintaining tax records, and doing due diligence on charitable compliance is taxing on HR / finance teams. The necessary software to help has historically been quite expensive and not very useful for employees beyond the matching features.
This is one example of an observation Stephen made after working for years as a philanthropic consultant. Consumer fintech products aren’t built to make great giving experiences for donors. Instead, they are built for buyers — e.g., nonprofits (fundraising) or corporations (gift matching) — without a ton of consideration for the everyday user experience.
A few years back, my wife and I made a commitment to give a portion of our income away every year, and we found it administratively painful to give regularly. The tech that nonprofits typically use hardly inspires generosity — e.g., high fees, poor user flows, and questionable information flow (like tax receipts). Giving platforms try to compensate for poor functionality with bright pictures of happy kids in developing countries, but when the technology is not a good financial experience it puts a damper on things.
Charityvest started when I noticed a particular opportunity with donor-advised funds, which are tax-deductible giving funds recognized by the IRS. They are growing quickly (20% CAGR), but mainly among the high-net worth demographic. We believe they are powerful tools. They enable donors to have a giving portfolio all from one place (on one tax receipt) and have full control over their payment information/frequency, etc. Most of all, they enable a donor to split the decisions of committing to give and supporting a specific organization. Excitement about each of these decisions often strikes at different times for donors—particularly those who desire to give on a budget.
We believe everyone should have their own charitable giving fund no matter their net worth. We’ve created technology that has democratized donor-advised funds.
We also believe good technology should be available for every company, big and small. Employers can offer Charityvest for $2.49 / employee / month subscription, and we charge no fees on any of the giving — charities receive 100% of the money given.
Lastly, we send the program administrator a fun report every month to let them know all the awesome giving their company and its employees did in one dashboard. This info can be leveraged for internal culture or external brand building.
We’re just launching our workplace giving product, but we’ve already built a good portfolio of trusted customers, including Eric Ries’ (author of The Lean Startup) company, LTSE. We’ve particularly seen a number of companies use us as a meaningful part of their corporate decision to join the fight for racial justice in substantive ways.
Our endgame is that the world becomes more generous, starting with the culture of every company. We believe giving is fundamentally good and we want to build technology that encourages more of it by making it more simple and accessible.
You can check out our workplace giving produ...
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadAs a non-profit one of the most frustrating things is how unacceptably slow Benevity is at paying out to nonprofits. It takes 2-3 months after they receive the funds to pay them to the nonprofit. (It takes an entire month to even show up as pending, and another month to show the details.)
This does not include time for verification, which happens annually. This is just the timeline due to their inability to run a scalable organization. It has gotten worse over time.
Our partners are usually surprised when I explain this timeline to them.
(Benevity has also been completely unable to consistently update our display name across all of their partners, so we have to tell people who work at Google to search for a different name. Support has been going to "get back to me" on this for over a year.)
After having some experience as a non-profit, I would never choose Benevity for a for-profit, and if you can kill them I would be very happy.
We consider the innovation of our venture to be 50% compliance tech, for this very reason. Our system automates a bunch of the charitable compliance steps and allows us to issue payouts to nonprofits on a regular, predictable monthly cycle. And it's scaleable.
We consider charities to be an important stakeholder and the payment getting to the charity in a timely manner to be a meaningful piece of the donor experience.
This is one example of historic workplace giving platforms being built only for buyers, not other stakeholders.
Also, is there something inherent about Schwab/Fidelity/etc charitable index funds that make the fee load so high? If you could offer this at a lower rate, that would definitely interest me as well.
I actually just signed up for a Schwab DAF, so am certainly interested in learning more.
It's worth noting, we offer a free DAF because we don't offer an investment capability for our donors today. Our DAFs currently function like checking accounts. The investing we do of charitable assets is invisible to our users.
For any donor who doesn't think their charitable assets will sit for years before being sent to charity, we're a great option for making giving much easier.
One thing that would be nice would be some fixed-income related products. My goal is to build a decent principal amount and then use the interest/dividends to continuously donate, but this might be a minority strategy.
Yes, the difference is whether the account holder thinks the fees are reasonable. You might think you’re the account holder because advisers go through a lot of effort to make DAF clients feel like they still “have” the funds in the account. But you aren’t the account holder, Schwab is, and Schwab finds the high fees charged by Schwab’s charitable index funds to be perfectly reasonable. The money in “your” DAF isn’t yours.
Edit: Separately, I do think this is a worthwhile idea and I hope you succeed!
Today, we enable the company admin to quickly cancel any grant that gets loaded in their hopper of monthly matching grants. They can cancel any grant from their dashboard in two taps. The employee who submitted the grant for matching will get notified their match wasn't approved.
Whenever I see companies targeting the nonprofit space but planning to monetize on the nonprofit side, I’m always skeptical.
The NRA has really gone off the rails. I've switched my giving to the CGRF, which is much more palatable as a left-leaning gun owner. I'd suggest looking at them as well. https://www.cagunrights.org/
We invite our donors to give into their own charitable fund, and support specific organizations when they feel like a strategic opportunity has arisen. Donors are more satisfied when they can give bigger on things they are really passionate about.
Percent Pledge also has a 5% fee on every dollar given through them. We have no fee. 100% of your money goes to the charities you support. We want to eliminate fees from giving!
Nice rebranding on DAF, which get a bad rep as a rich persons tool to avoid taxes.
This is pretty genious
Other than being currently connected with YC, what else can users rely on that their donation to Charityvest will in fact be granted to the non-profit the make the recommendation to?
The charitable assets in our app actually go into a 501c3 public charity (Charityvest Inc), a part of our social enterprise, which has to file a Form 990 every year making its financials and board members public. We launched in 2019, so our first 990 filing is this year. We also conduct our own internal financial audit which we plan to make public on our site. Our charitable operations will be increasingly transparent.
We're also partnered with / backed by other significant institutions: Yale University, The Farm at Comcast NBCUniversal, Dwolla, Plaid, Synovus Bank, etc.
You can also follow up with any charity you grant to out of Charityvest yourself and ask them if they receive Charityvest's grants in a timely manner. Generally all charities will gladly confirm receipt of a donor gift.
Hope this helps!
This is an important part to emphasize, and it's good practice IMO. My work does a year end charity drive through United Way - you can donate to any charity, but the donation has to be made through United Way to get work-related benefits (for example, a pizza lunch for the dept, etc).
I donate to my college every year during these year end drives, but I also book an appointment for the end of January to call up my college and verify they've received my donation.
We are working with a few select strategic partners to help their giving via Charityvest (that eventually would be replaced by an API). If you have an organization who might be interested in working with us, have them reach out. We'd love to chat with them.
Our focus right now is to make the giving experience amazing for employees of SMB and mid-market companies.
Quick question - can you accept check donations (ie, for amounts > $10K or so?). For larger DAF balances folks want to move / family offices / etc having the ability to handle a check would be nice.
I now have a monthly total giving budget which goes into CharityVest that I can then disperse when a cause I'm passionate about comes around. I previously would mostly do one-off contributions (with a few non-profits that I regularly backed through their own tools) but it feels better to "budget" my total giving.
I'm glad to say that the product has increased my overall giving and has ensured that every dollar I've sent goes to the non-profit.
I have a DAF myself, and really love the way it separates the tax event [donating appreciated stock] and the donations to specific charities. But if it was all just about cash from my checking account, I'm not sure I'd find it worth the bother--I'd just mail checks to the charities directly. Once you can do regular automatic deposits, whether from payroll or from a user's bank account, I think it becomes a much more compelling service. I do hope you get there soon.
I do see that the gift-matching part can make it a valuable service even so. I look forward to your taking on Benevity for the gift-matching part; I've found their service and customer support to be rather poor.
Turns out, running a matching program at a company is pretty annoying at a certain size. Much less monthly charity stipends, etc.
Withholding from the paycheck would certainly be a great addition in the future, but is not necessary in the MVP to have people pay for the product.
It's also a small misconception that payroll deduction giving is pre-tax. Giving is a post tax benefit either way, so we think it's a better experience for the donor to have control of their monthly automatic contributions rather than having to bug their HR / finance department at their company to increase/decrease it.
And thanks for the support!
With your Charityvest Fund today, you can contribute stock, and/or set up a recurring monthly cash contribution from your checking account.
Surprisingly, not having a payroll integration has not been a huge speed bump. Users seem to like the ability to link their own bank account directly, without needing to mess around with their payroll system. There also isn't any tax advantage the way most payroll integrations work (it still comes through as W-2 income), and tax receipting inside of an HRIS system becomes another headache).
Worth noting that you - and everyone else on HN! - can sign up for your own Charityvest Fund for free, sans employer matching, and enjoy the benefits of the DAF for everyone.
(I agree that companies shouldn't do charity. But for very different reasons.
Just provide good and cheap goods and services to customers, and pay your shareholders and employees.
Those shareholders and employees as real person can make their own decisions on charity. No need for matching etc.
You can also consider not optimizing your taxes as aggressively, and treating the 'excess' paymnents to government mentally as if they were charitable giving.)
Some places of worship are not included as they've never filed with the IRS, but we can add them very simply.
We can support your charity of choice as long as it's legally possible to do so!
Are there two separate donations or does it add the company's name after the donor's name? Some way to notify recipients about the low cost of managing a charitable donation match program with your service would be great.
Have you encountered any charitable foundations which prefer to receive cryptoassets? Red Cross and UNICEF accept cryptocurrency donations for the children, for example.
Do you have integration with other onboarding and HR/benefits tools on your roadmap? As a potential employee, I would like to work for a place that matches charitable donations, so mentioning as much in job descriptions would be helpful.
We haven't yet encountered any charity that prefers to receive cryptoassets.
We have lots of dreams about thoughtful integrations with HR software, but we want the experience to be excellent, and we want to keep the experience of our existing app excellent. We'll be balancing those priorities as we grow.
So the system creates a separate transaction for the original and the matched donation with each donor's name on the respective gift?
How do users sync which elements of their HR information with your service? IDK what the monthly admin cost there is.
There are a few HR, benefits, contracts, and payroll YC companies with privacy regulation compliance and APIs https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=Payroll
https://founderkit.com/people-and-recruiting/health-insuranc...
Today, users create their accounts directly with our app, and they are affiliated with their corporation in our app via their email address. So we don't integrate with any HR information.
Administrators of the program can add and remove employees via copying and pasting email addresses (can add/remove many at a time). We aim to integrate with HR systems of record in the future to make this seamless.
Do you offer a CSV containing donor information to the charity?
Do you support anonymous matched donations?
Can donors specify that a donation is strongly recommended for a specific effort?
...
3% * $1000/yr == $2.50/mo * 12mo
Anonymous: yes it’s an option on our grant screen
Specific efforts: yes on the grant screen we enable donors to add a “specific need” they’d like their grant to fund.
:-)
Charity Navigator > Evaluation method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_Navigator#Evaluation_m...
According to your website, I can set up an individual account not tied to my employer and it's free to do so.
Can you also explain what the process looks like of connecting an individual account to an corporate account? (ie: I have a Charityvest account and my future employer has a corporate account)
Our workplace product does charitable gift matching automatically according to rules the company sets up, and provides reporting to company leadership on all the aggregate giving / matching / participation data across employees. A company can see their aggregate charitable impact in a broad sense.
To your second question, the giving funds belong to each donor, but companies can establish an affiliation with each donor's fund for the length of the employment, which allows us to enable that company's gift matching and reporting. It's not unlike a 401k at Vanguard for an employee—technically the employees, but the company facilitates the benefits for the length of employment.
So if an employee joins a company with a fund, we just add an affiliation between the company and that user's fund (via an email address). Likewise, the affiliation is removed when an employee leaves. Matching/reporting cease for that donor, but the charitable dollars in the employees fund will continue to be in their fund.