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Matt Cromwell is the Head of Support and Community Outreach of GiveWP headquartered in San Diego. Follow them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube and learn more at givewp.com.
WHAT DO YOU DO?
Give is a free and open source donation plugin for WordPress. Our mission is to “Democratize Generosity” — which means we are on a mission to make giving easier and more accessible to all NGOs of all sizes. In the past online donations were a task that took tens of thousands of dollars and large development teams to accomplish. The web has evolved, and so should NGOs. Give helps NGOs get up and running with best-practice donation forms, donor tracking, reporting and more in minutes, for free.
WHY DO YOU DO IT?
We are passionate about nonprofit organizations, about Open Source, and about WordPress. We get to synthesize all our passions into Give in a really powerful and effective way that we’re proud of.
WHAT IMPACT ARE YOU MAKING?
In four years we went from 0 users to now powering 50,000 websites all over the world. Through our free resources and technical support, we’ve seen amazing stories from individuals with emergency health needs to large organizations use Give and make immediate impacts on their communities, their lives, and their neighborhoods.
WHAT (OR WHO) INSPIRES YOU TO MAKE THIS IMPACT?
We have three partners in our company. Myself, Devin Walker, and Jason Knill. We are definitely an iron sharpens iron kind of partnership trio. We inspire each other to work hard an innovate more every day. But our users are also truly, deeply inspiring. They want to do big and great things and they have little to no technical skills. They come needing a simple way to allow their audiences to donate to them, and they are surprised and so grateful when they realize how easy it is to get up and running quickly.
WHAT’S YOUR BIG DREAM FOR THE ORGANIZATION AND THE IMPACT YOU WANT TO MAKE?
Our next big goal is to be empowering 100,000 websites globally. WordPress itself powers 30% of the entire web now. Within the United States, some estimate that 50% of all NGO websites are on WordPress, so reaching 100,000 sites is very possible.
We are also ramping up for this November’s Giving Tuesday. This is the biggest day of giving of the year in the U.S. We hope to get as many stories of organizations using Give for Giving Tuesday and hope that collectively they would raise $100,000 and we’d be able to tell their stories on our site.
WHAT RESOURCES DO YOU NEED TO MAKE THOSE DREAMS COME TRUE?
We have a distributed team of 12 employees and we are our best resource to get the word out of how NGOs and volunteer organizations can install Give for free and be up and running in no time. We travel and speak at WordPress conferences, Meetups and more, but NGOs often are in different circles.
WHAT IS (OR HAS BEEN) YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE?
The online donation space is still very full with large organizations with large budgets and many NGOs don’t know that they can spend much less on their online donation platform. We are out-marketed because of these large SaaS platforms which cost a lot of money to the organization. We believe we empower them to own their own data on WordPress, and spend much less for greater gain, but getting that message past the huge marketing budgets is a challenge for sure.
WHAT WORDS OF ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR OTHER LEADERS LOOKING TO MAKE AN IMPACT?
Start with an MVP (minimum viable product) that solves a specific problem very directly. If you wait until your product is feature-rich you might never make it to market at all. Give had much fewer features when we launched, but it solved the online donation problem in WordPress and people were eager to become early adopters.
HOW CAN OTHERS SUPPORT YOU OR YOUR CAUSE?
Follow us on our blog and social channels, share and retweet our free resources, tell your NGO and volunteer orgs about Give. We appreciate it!
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