Launch HN: Charityvest (YC S20) – Employee charitable funds and gift matching

[Leonidas243]

Stephen, Jon, and Ashby here, the co-founders of Charityvest (https://charityvest.org). We created a modern, simple, and affordable way for companies to include charitable giving in their suite of employee benefits.

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 product at (https://charityvest.org/workplace-giving). If you’re interested, we can get your company up and running in 10 minutes. Or, please feel free to forward us on to your HR leadership at your company.

Our giving funds are also available for free for any individual on https://charityvest.org — without gift matching and reporting. We’d invite you to check out the experience. For individuals, we make gifts of cash and stock to any charity fee-free.

Happy to share this with you all, and we’d love to know what you think.

[tylermenezes]

How do you do payouts to nonprofits? Are you partnering with/running your own donor advised funds, like Benevity?

As 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.

[Leonidas243]

This is a big point. And we ensure our payouts to nonprofits happen on a regular basis.

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.

[mike_d]

Do you hold payments or wait for minimums before mailing checks? I'm just curious if smaller non-profits that don't have donation volume face any downside.

[Leonidas243]

The minimum contribution, grant, and payment out to nonprofits are all $20, so we never run into a situation where we wait to send payments to nonprofits.

[arkitaip]

Why not issue payouts instantly or at least on a daily basis?

[Leonidas243]

Since the only validated interface with have with charities is through the mail (they have to keep an updated address with the IRS) we send them payments on monthly consolidated paper checks. Sending on a greater frequency would be much more costly and administratively painful for them.

[boilerupnc]

About 7 years ago, my team was asked to assist at a university hack-a-thon focused on addressing inequalities, poverty and health. We wanted to bring attention to our dev cloud platform, but had no money budgeted for prize give aways. Out of need, we decided to try a hack ourselves. In the 3 week lead-up to the hack-a-thon, we short-listed 4-5 approved charities that qualified for matching employee credit. Using our dev cloud platform, we quickly stood up an internal facing crowd-funding site explaining our goal to raise funds to internal employees. These funds would be assigned to one of the short-listed companies, but was as yet unassigned. During the hack-a-thon, our selected winner was given the opportunity to pick which charity should receive the prior raised funds. We then completed the matching funds forms for all contributing employees and asked them to sign and submit. It was a great experience on so many levels. We raised $800, definitely more than we would have normally received for a hack-a-thon prize. It was matched for another $800 by our company a few months later during the annual cycle. A children's hospital received an unexpected $1600 for their discretionary fund (crayons, art supplies, music, ...). We had a real-world example of how our dev platform could bring quick value to an idea. It really got us thinking about how much more efficient our corporate matching processes could be. I salute initiatives like the OP.

[emosenkis]

Any chance of providing a donations API? This sort of no-fee approach would be amazing for building all sorts of charity-focused apps, from walkathons to nonprofit crowdfunding campaigns, public matching campaigns etc. The minimal functionality would just be to allow a site to direct a user to a page that allows them to complete a grant for a particular amount to a specific nonprofit and receive a callback when the grant is submitted.

[Leonidas243]

We would love to build an API. We constantly have conversations about it amongst our team. It's just a matter of priorities. Agree it would be amazing to see people build more charity-focused apps integrated with our funds.

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.

[sna1l]

How can you find out more about the specific investments that Charityvest will be making? Our definition of highly liquid and "safe" might be different :)

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.

[Leonidas243]

Today we only invest in money markets. Asset preservation is our top priority, and we can't ever have balances down in our app. That would be a terrible experience for our donors. So we'll only move beyond money markets with great caution. Our platform automates so much of the aspects of processing charitable gifts, even a small financial return is gross margin profitable for us.

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.

[sna1l]

Awesome!

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.

[elliekelly]

> Also, is there something inherent about Schwab/Fidelity/etc charitable index funds that make the fee load so high?

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.

[diddid]

For some reason I hate the combination of companies and charity. If a company wants to be charitable they should pay their employees livable wages and give them quality benefits. Everyone wants to show how charitable they are but nobody wants the janitors to be able to support their families.

[eru]

Googlers for example already earn very livable wages.

(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.)

[perl4ever]

The janitors are contractors.

[ninetax]

> “HSA for Charity.”

Nice rebranding on DAF, which get a bad rep as a rich persons tool to avoid taxes.

This is pretty genious

[oplav]

DAFs at established administrators, like Fidelity/Vanguard/Schwab, rely on brand name so that users trust the money they donate to the DAF will be granted to the non-profits they make recommendations to.

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?

[Leonidas243]

Trust is an important factor for us. You're right, and YC helps, but we also have other structures that make things transparent.

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!

[JustARandomGuy]

> 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

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.

[uranium]

Am I reading this right, that even if it's an employer-provided plan, you can't do paycheck withholding? That seems like a big speed-bump.

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.

[ashbyf]

Co-founder Ashby here!

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.

[Judson]

I had a chat with someone working on a similar product in this space. The problem being solved here is the matching component of charitable giving (which you mentioned).

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.

[Leonidas243]

Absolutely. We have found matching programs are painful to run.

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.

[Leonidas243]

Our app can do regular automatic deposits from user's bank accounts today! Many of our users love it. They fulfill their personal commitment to give automatically.

And thanks for the support!

[donor20]

Great idea - we did this by hand with a normal DAF - but a lot of work.

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.

[Leonidas243]

Yes we can! Here's a quick article outlining the details. https://support.charityvest.org/en/articles/4142972-can-i-do...

[jaykornder]

I'm a CharityVest user and the product has changed my approach to giving.

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.

[bryanmgreen]

Can you outline what the hard benefits are of a corporation paying $2.50/employee/month are, for the corporations and/or employees and/or charities?

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)

[Leonidas243]

Absolutely.

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.

[emosenkis]

Are you working on expanding beyond US nonprofits? That would be a requirement for competing with Benevity for customers that are multinational corporations.

[Leonidas243]

Eventually we can, but given our stage, we're focusing on US giving.

Our focus right now is to make the giving experience amazing for employees of SMB and mid-market companies.

[jakswa]

My company uses this! And they provide some matching on donations, so it felt worth it to go in and find a worthy charity.

[chrisfrantz]

How do you handle employees donating to a cause the company may not want to associate with? For example, the NRA is a registered nonprofit but I don’t think you’ll find many startups interested in donating to their cause.

Edit: Separately, I do think this is a worthwhile idea and I hope you succeed!

[Leonidas243]

Great question. We have existing customers who are doing this today—they have guidelines for charitable organizations they don't fund.

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.

[chrisfrantz]

Got it, glad to hear you’ve thought about this. Can I also say I’m glad you’re deciding to charge the company instead of the individual users or the charities themselves.

Whenever I see companies targeting the nonprofit space but planning to monetize on the nonprofit side, I’m always skeptical.

[mike_d]

> For example, the NRA is a registered nonprofit but I don’t think you’ll find many startups interested in donating to their cause

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/

[adam]

This sounds great. We already use https://percentpledge.org though. How is this different?

[Leonidas243]

Percent Pledge focuses its giving on cause portfolios, and you can't give to specific organizations.

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!

[epa]

How do you make money?

[Leonidas243]

In two ways: 1. We charge a per employee per month SaaS subscription to companies for our workplace giving product. 2. We invest a portion of the balances in our charitable funds (aggregated across all users) in safe, highly liquid assets to create a financial return. The money is not restricted in any way and is available for granting to nonprofits at any time. Robinhood uses this same model with uninvested cash in its app.

[westurner]

What a great idea!

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.

[Leonidas243]

Thanks! Our matching system issues an identical grant from the fund of the matching company. It goes out in the same grant cycle as the employee grant so they go together.

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.

[westurner]

> Our matching system issues an identical grant from the fund of the matching company. It goes out in the same grant cycle as the employee grant so they go together.

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...

[Leonidas243]

Separate data records, yes, separate payment, no. The charity receives one consolidated check in the mail each month across all donors (one payment), and the original donor's grant will be on the data sheet as well as the matching grant from the company's corporate fund (separate records).

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.

[westurner]

Thanks for clarifying.

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

[Leonidas243]

CSV: yes if they request we’ll happily provide.

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.

:-)

[westurner]

It may be helpful to integrate with charity evaluation services to help donors assess various opportunities to give.

Charity Navigator > Evaluation method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_Navigator#Evaluation_m...

[ajmadesc]

A bit petty but, clicking the masthead on the support page, I expected to be directed to the homepage. Not have it reload the support page.

[protomyth]

I really don't think it's very friendly to need to create an account to see what charities are supported.

[Leonidas243]

We have all 1.4M eligible US charities in the IRS database.

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!

[protomyth]

Did you get your list from https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizatio...

[Leonidas243]

Yes we do start with the IRS EO BMF.

[oneyellowbrick]

Love the idea! Keeping track of receipts is such a pain this tool looks like it automates everything.

[absaminaeem]

Best work keep continue ...