Giving Days Platform Comparison

Christopher Whitlatch

The pittsburgh foundation June 13, 2016

Table of ContentsBackground 2

General Market Observations 3

CiviCore 5

GiveGab 9

Razoo 14

Tungsten 18

Give2Great 22

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Background

On May 3, Kimbia experienced severe issues during Give Local America that impacted the 47 participating foundations and the nonprofits they serve. The Pittsburgh Foundation chose to suspend operations of their Day of Giving at 5 p.m. est. May 3. The Foundation publicly announced that it would reschedule a makeup day with a trusted technical platform.

Kimbia has not finalized a report.

As part of the Foundation’s due diligence of technology solutions, Christopher Whitlatch analyzed 5 platforms based on the following criteria:

Corporate structure Platform features and benefits Hosting architecture and process Capacity Pricing Support and policies

The 5 giving events platforms selected for comparison are:

CiviCore GiveGab Razoo Tungsten Give2Great

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General Market Observations

There are more than 1,000 online giving platforms available in the marketplace. In general they share one or more of these characteristics:

Most platforms have organized around a single service or minimum viable product. As such, they perform limited operations, do not offer flexible programming and as such likely have a limited shelf life. Kimbia is a prime example of this characteristic. They are organized only to do days of giving, which is a profitable, but limited market. The other platform we evaluated before choosing Kimbia, Crowdrise, is similarly organized around individual giving and grew up around marathons.

Most of the companies have launched with limited private investment and are undercapitalized. Online giving does not offer a clear exit strategy and though it is a large market ($9 billion) it is fragmented into many different markets and processes so private investors tend to shy away from the investments needed for development. Kimbia’s competitors, GiveGab, is the prime example of this. They have better programming and a better platform, but are quickly running out of their initial investment and have not been able to gain additional investment because to this point they have not taken market share from Kimbia.

The largest companies developed a product that was for a different market and adapted it to the nonprofit sector. The prime example of this is Indigogo, which developed a crowdfunding platform for startups and artists that nonprofits also use, usually at a disadvantage to the primary users.

The above characteristics place a burden on the nonprofits:

1. A nonprofit must create a profile on each platform for the online giving function that wish to perform.

2. The donor data that comes out of the various platforms usually does not connect with any donor management or financial management system the nonprofit is using. This requires that data be entered and manipulated manually. Nonprofits are already struggling with data management and visualization and online platforms are increasing this burden.

For an example, let’s look at a typical nonprofit:

To participate in a giving event, the nonprofit must maintain a profile on the platform selected by the Foundation.

To receive a grant from a foundation, they increasingly must create an account on an online grants platform utilized by the foundation.

To accept a donation on their website, they must have an account with PayPal, Network for Good or other online platform.

To crowdfund a project, they must have a profile with Indiegogo, Kickstarter or other platform. To participate in Amazon’s Smile program where they receive a percentage of sales, they must

have a profile with Amazon

And it can go on and on depending on the online giving activity. They must manage their data each time a change happens with the organization, or they begin another program, or data changes. Each one of

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these platforms also produces tons of data that is of use to the nonprofit, but as stated above must be extracted from one platform and entered into another.

Online giving has grown to a $9 billion segment of overall giving. That is approximately 20 percent of the market. What is significant is that it has grown year over year at a strong pace for the last five years.

Over that same period, map that against the investments by foundations. Unfortunately, I don’t have an accurate number, but in general foundations have made little to no investment in technology over this period. Foundations typically rent or adapt a platform for their needs, sometimes at odds with the needs of the nonprofits they are serving.

I think foundations have avoided this segment because of lack of expertise on their staffs or because online giving is not central to their operations at this time. However, can we continue to ignore a growing segment in our sector as well as a larger public movement that continues to embrace technology?

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CiviCore

1580 Lincoln Street, Suite 520Denver, Colorado, 80203www.civicore.com

Contact: TJ Bowen, vice president of Sales and Marketing 720-900-1600 tj@civicore.com

CiviCore was founded in 2000. It currently has 16 employees of which 10 are considered technical staff. The company is a partnership, but has applied and is working to become a Public Benefit Corporation. The company began offering giving events services in 2008.

In addition to giving days, the company provides year-round giving platforms, online payment processing. On the same technical platform, CiviCore offers additional services that include mentoring, client and case management and application management. Giving days make up approximately 20 percent of their business with the largest segment coming from scholarship management.

Largest giving events on the platform:

Colorado Gives: $28 million

Omaha Gives: $9 million

Amplify Austin: $8.5 million

Platform features and benefits

Administrative dashboard that enables foundation to add and update content as well as launch an event.

1-time or recurring donations Gamification including real time leaderboards and donation tickers Customizable donation cart including custom checkout questions Bulk upload of profile information (Has uploaded content from Kimbia profiles) Team fundraising capabilities Ticker override for loading of outside donations Match pools can be split across multiple organizations* Prize and golden ticket functionality Nonprofit organizations can run reports on their donors Standard and customizable reporting features

*CiviCore may need to build some customized applications to properly display and operate nonprofit specific match pools. This would be billed at an hourly rate and scoped before work begins.

Hosting architecture and process

CiviCore is best-in-class when it comes to architecture, redundancies and backup protections. The company utilizes Amazon Web Services. The platform is designed to scale up in high volume situations by adding virtual public facing services. In addition, file and database services have backups that can be placed in use quickly. Their design allows for transactions to continue if a database or file server fails.

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The company hosts in Oregon with a fail over in Illinois. Besides the extensive server backup, the company put in place a fail over for transaction processing after studying Razoo’s issues with GiveMN. The company’s primary processor is BrainTree, but if issues are encounter, CiviCore can transfer processing to Authorize.net. In case of catastrophic failure to their platform, CiviCore also has put in place an additional backup of a site that is hosted completely separate that is designed to process transactions outside of its platform.

CiviCore also sets up a secure channel of communications for use during a giving day to allow team members to be in contact throughout the day. There is also a plan in place to communicate with donors if the need to roll off the platform occurs.

The company has experienced an issue in 2012 where issues developed with their load balancer that caused a 40 minute outage. This event as well as Razoo’s lead the company to its current redundancy architecture and no issues have happened since.

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Capacity

CiviCore performs a load test before each giving day that they host. They test at four times expected capacity as a protocol. Capacity is measured using the number of concurrent users as well as the number of transactions per second. The company will release its load testing reports to current and prospective clients on demand.

Pricing

CiviCore uses a scaled percent-based pricing model on the funds raised through the system. Customizations are charged at an hourly rate of $125-$175 per hour.

Terms of the contract are typically for 1 year.

Pricing schedule follows.

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Support and policies

CiviCore provides on-call support for the entire period of a giving event. The system is monitored 24/7 throughout the year by on-call support center. There is no extra fee for these services.

Registration requirements for nonprofits are set by the foundation. Nonprofits may export their profile data from the platform.

Client owns all data in the system. The company states that it does not contact donors or participating nonprofits except in the case of a specific issue.

The company does not hold cash and sends funds directly to the foundation for disbursement. Typically, disbursement and reconciliation occurs within a few days.

The company has a security policy that is publicly available.

Comments

CiviCore’s platform is very flexibile and places the foundation at the controls. The trade-off for this functionality is that the design and user experience is not as compelling as some of the other platforms. However, the platform is designed well for any potential failures.

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GiveGab

119 S. Cayuga St.Suite 403Ithaca, NY 14850www.givegab.com

Contact: Charlie Mulligan, CEO. 570-313-6724. charlie@givegab.com

GiveGab was established in 2011 as a platform for volunteer matching. The company entered the giving events sector in 2015. The company is an investor-backed private corporation with 14 employees of which 11 are dedicated to technical operations.

In addition to giving events the company provides these services:

Volunteer Connection Portal Donor & volunteer engagement tools Donor & volunteer profile Campaign fundraising Event fundraising P2p Fundraising

The company has not gained traction as of yet for large giving days. Their top days are:

Mississippi’s Giving Day (Oct, 2015); $405k via 375 nonprofits Cancer Resource Center 5k (Oct, 2015); $152k Buffalo’s Giving Day (Mar, 2016); 2,196 donors Canisius College Giving Day(Apr, 2016); $225k, 1,113 donors Giving Is Gorges Giving Day (May, 2016); $105k, 119 nonprofits Hudson Valley (May, 2016); $142k, 201 nonprofits

Platform features and benefits

Unlimited fundraising pages Mobile friendly Peer-to-Peer fundraising Leaderboards Offline donations Campaign management dashboard Recurring donations Customized donation levels Customizable thank you messages YouTube/Vimeo embedding

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Hosting architecture and processes

GiveGab was built recently and as such features a very modern and strong architecture. The platform offers a well-planned backup and redundancy plan. The company also believes in its technology to the point that it details its process at https://www.givegab.com/blog/giving-day-platforms-technology-choices-big-impact/.

Hosting features:

● Modern Cloud-Based architecture hosted on Heroku and Amazon Web Services● Highly-Available● Fault-Tolerant● Redundant● Highly Secure - PCI Level I● 100% uptime and no performance degradation for all days of giving

Redundant systems include:

● H/A redundant databases with real-time data backup to different geographic locations● H/A redundant servers with real-time error detection● Redundant application binary can be deployed to back up servers automatically● All of the 3rd party providers such as Stripe (payment processing) are fully redundant

GiveGab also deploys the best in class fail over procedure running on Heroku which has a built in automatic fail over that detects errors and immediately moves to back up databases with no-impact to a user.

The company is working on a systemic fail-over plan similar to CiviCore’s. The difference is GiveGab’s system would send traffic to participant’s websites.

The company has a critical communications template and customizes with their client’s before a giving day.

The company has not experienced any issues to date with its platform.

Capacity

GiveGab load tests its site prior to a giving event. They describe their testing protocol as top to bottom:

● We load test read only data retrievals as well as writes through to our database● We optimize sizing and performance for every day of giving site based on results● We load test our:

○ Web Servers○ API○ Database○ CDN

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● We leverage a highly-cached CDN in front of each giving day site and our API for optimized performance

○ Static assets such as pictures, CSS, JS, etc are served up around the world from geographically located edge servers to reduce latency between users requests and the content

GiveGab reports that the platform can handle 250 plus requests per second on its smallest web server footprint (1GB memory) and this can scale linearly as they have the capability to add an infinite number of web servers. The company has set a requirement that pages load in under 500ms. If this is exceeded the platform detects the event and adds more servers.

The company provides a copy of its load test report before any giving event.

Pricing

The company charges a $25,000 set up fee, but states that it can be waived for larger partners. They collect a transaction fee of 5 percent on top of 2.7 percent plus .30 cent per transaction credit card fees.

GiveGab prefers five year contracts, but can do as little as one year.

GiveGab uses Stripe for processing with Braintree as its back up. The company does not allow a client to spec their own payment processor.

Support and policies

GiveGab provide a differentiator when it comes to service as they provide full customer service support at no additional cost which includes handling donor and participating nonprofit questions:

● We have a full customer success team that provides full support leading up to, during and after the event (currently 3, adding 2 more by Fall 2016)

● Leading up to is standard 8 AM - 5:30 PM EST, day before to day after is 24 hours, after is normal 8 AM - 5:30 PM EST

● Our team is in house and live chats with nonprofits and donors. Typical response time is 4m.

● This team provides full support to help get nonprofits registered and answer any questions

The company requires participating nonprofits to register on their site, including their bank account. GiveGab direct deposits directly to the participating nonprofit. Profile information can be bulk imported at an additional cost for other platforms. The process is documented at https://www.givegab.com/support/how-to-articles/for-day-of-giving-participants/.

The company states that data is owned by the nonprofits. Nonprofits have the option to contact donors through the site. GiveGab will only contact a donor if there is an issue.

All donations are processed by Stripe in 3-5 days. There is an option to pay the funds directly to the nonprofit or through a foundation. GiveGab will work with the foundation to pay out any prizes as requested by the foundation.

The company details its security policy at https://www.givegab.com/support/faq/is-givegab-secure/ .

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Comments

GiveGab’s platform provides flexibility and it features an excellent user experience. The question for the company is why have they not converted any larger giving days, and as they are investment backed, has this impacted the company’s financial position. Pricing is also higher than Kimbia currently with a significant set up cost as well.

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Razoo1725 Duke Street, Suite 675Alexandria, VA 22314www.razoo.com

Contact: Bethany Natoli, senior account manager. 202-803-5157. bethany@razoo.com

Razoo Global Corporation is a Delaware corporation and owned and controlled by Legatum Foundation Limited. The Legatum Group manages Razoo’s parent, Legatum Foundation Limited. Legatum is a private investment group with a 27-‐year heritage of global investment, allocating proprietary capital to businesses and to programmes that promote sustainable human development.

Razoo was formed in 2006 and the platform entered the market in 2009. Razoo also established the Razoo Foundation an IRS recognized 501 © (3) public charity that now operates independently. Razoo and Razoo Foundation operate under a Services Agreement to facilitate donations to the Razoo Foundation’s donor-‐advised fund via the Razoo.com platform. For more information on the Razoo Foundation and to view its financial statements and filings please visit http://razoofoundation.org/go/compliance

Razoo emplys 28 employees in two offices. 15 are focused on technology and the software engineering team is in San Francisco, CA. Customer service and account management teams are located in Washington, DC.

In addition to giving events the company provides a year-round fundraising platform for nonprofits.

Razoo’s top giving days include:

Silicon Valley Gives Day with more than 1,000 nonprofits Valley Gives Day with 460 nonprofits Act for Alexandria

Platform features and benefits

1. "Organization" or "Story" Page - organization pages are the bread and butter of all fundraising and donation activity through your giving portal. All project, fundraising and team pages are connected to the organization pages to allow for automatic donation distribution. Tell your participating organization page story through text, images, and video. Add suggested donation levels, custom metrics displays and project pages for additional campaign customization. Access real time donations reports, customized donation and facebook widgets to allow for secure donation processing on external platforms. Unlimited chapter administrators can access this page. Unlimited project, fundraiser and team pages can be connected to this participating organization page to encourage year round DIY online fundraising.

2. Project Pages - These fundraiser pages are created specifically by participating organization administrators to call out and raise funds for specific initiatives underneath the main organization page. Tell your campaign story through text, images, and video. Add suggested donation levels, goals, start and end dates, and custom metrics displays for additional campaign customization. Reuse your project page with a simple adjustment to the start and end date.

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Access real time donations reports, customized donation and facebook widgets to allow for secure donation processing on external platforms.

3. Fundraiser Pages - fundraiser pages can be created by any individual visiting a participating organization page. Tell your campaign story through text, images, and video. Add suggested donation levels, goals, start and end dates, and custom metrics displays for additional campaign customization. Reuse your project page with a simple adjustment to the start and end date. Access real time donations reports, customized donation and facebook widgets to allow for secure donation processing on external platforms.

4. Team Pages - A team page on Razoo unites groups of people who are fundraising for the same cause or event. Complete with a leaderboard, one-click fundraiser templates, and a real-time donation and comments stream, it couldn’t be easier to keep track of your team’s progress and cheer them on towards the finish line. Teams are ideal for any race or charity event, like marathons, bike rides, and service trips.

Hosting architecture and processes

The Razoo architecture is split into several discrete layers which provides for independent scaling:

Edge firewalls connect directly to the Internet. This layer is responsible for filtering traffic and controlling the remote access VPN.

Load balancers connect to the firewall and manage distribution of traffic. Proxy servers provide SSL termination and additional security by being a second-‐line

point of access/control. Application servers run the Ruby on Rails application and AngularJS. Redundant Database servers SQL back‐end.

This design approach uses a tiered-‐model, which is implemented within Amazon Web Services’ co-‐located/managed service environment in a Virtual Private Cloud provided by AWS.  Each tier has instances spanning more than one availability zones to allow system level redundancies.  

Credit card data is stored with with Razoo’s payment gateway provider, Authorize.net. When a donor makes a donation on Razoo, their credit card information is securely transmitted directly to Authorize.net and is never stored on the company’s servers. Razoo does not have the ability to access full credit card information. Razoo supports multiple 3rd party payment processors and allow the failover of credit card processing to other service providers in case one of them fails.

Razoo has partnered with Kount to implement a state of the art, payment processing fraud detection system. Kount is a leading innovator of solutions for fraud and risk management.

Razoo reports that it has an internal escalation plan in place during Giving Events in order to quickly and effectively get information or customer concerns to their leadership and development team if necessary.

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In 2013 Razoo experienced a system glitch during GiveMN (Minnesota) giving day that resulted in intermittent problems processing transactions during part of the event. The issue was a combination of failures with the database scaling and hosting with our prior Hosting Services provider, Rackspace.

Razoo completely re-architected their system architecture for scalability and moved their application to Amazon Web Services. They report 100% up time during giving events since this change was made.

Razoo does not make their communications plan publicly available.

Capacity

Razoo periodically load tests the site to ensure peak performance during high loads. For transaction processing, they use an asynchronous process whereby they can queue donations for processing should the payment gateway have issues keeping pace with the donation processing load. Their database is hosted in Amazon’s Relational Database Service providing scalability and stability. Additionally, the web application is built on AngularJS. This technology significantly reduces the load on servers by offloading the rendering of webpages to the client web browser.

Razoo measures capacity based on concurrent users and transactions per minute to their web servers. They report a successful simulation of over 6,000 concurrent users and 6,000 transactions per minute with no performance degradation.

Pricing

Razoo charges an annual fee based on the scope and customization of a project. Standard annual fees are based on number of chapter participants, degree of design, feature customization.

Razoo charges 2% + .30 cents to cover processing fees. Razoo Foundation also collects 4.9% of every transaction for platform costs and Razoo Foundation’s expenses.

As Razoo is different from every other foundation in that donations are receipted from their foundation instead of the participating foundation, I feel it is important to include their policy in this document:

Donations made on the Razoo Website in support of Registered Charities, Projects of Registered Charities, or Charity Fundraisers (collectively, “Charitable Causes”) are complete and final charitable gifts to Razoo Foundation and are not refundable. The Razoo Foundation is a tax-exempt public charity described in Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code which maintains a donor-advised fund. A donor-advised fund (“DAF”) is defined by Congress as a public charity that receives completed gifts from donors while allowing them the privilege of advising on the distribution of their grant to other charities and charitable causes.

A donation to a Charitable Cause made through the Razoo Website goes to and will be receipted by Razoo Foundation as a donor-advised contribution. Razoo Foundation makes every effort to honor donor advisements and is authorized to do so for advisements to public charities appearing on the Razoo Website as Registered Charities. Occasionally, for specific fundraising events, Razoo will collaborate with other local public charities. In those cases, the

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event website and other publicity will indicate if contributions will be receipted directly by the local charity, instead of by Razoo Foundation.

It is Razoo Foundation’s normal practice to regrant 93.1% less $0.30 per advisement to the qualifying tax-exempt entity and/or cause advised, and to retain 4.9% for platform costs and Razoo Foundation’s expenses plus 2.0% and $0.30 cents per advisement transaction for credit card processing costs, a total of 6.9% plus $0.30 per advisement.

A regrant to the advised charity and/or cause is generally made on the 10th of the month following receipt of the advised contribution in the previous calendar month (e.g, a donation on July 5th would be regranted on August 10th). Razoo Foundation makes every reasonable effort to respect the wishes of its donors. However, to comply with federal tax laws and Internal Revenue Service regulations, Razoo Foundation must retain the exclusive authority, discretion, and legal control over all donated funds.

Support and policies

Razoo provides standard support through the assigned account manager.

Participating nonprofit information has likely been added to the Razoo platform. A nonprofit can claim their profile and continue the registration process. Razoo does not offer bulk import or export of profile information. Razoo will customize the information a nonprofit enters to a foundation’s needs.

Razoo’s privacy and security policy is available at https://www.razoo.com/p/privacy_policy .

Comments

Razoo has been in the market the longest and has evolved over time. Their user experience is well designed. The platform and company for that matter appear to be the least flexible for a foundation. Their pricing is comparable to Kimbia with a lower credit card fee, but a higher platform cost likely due to the need to support their foundation.

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Tungsten510 West 7th StreetErie, PA 16502

Contact: Jody Farrell, partner. 814-871-4100. jpdy@atomic74.com

Tungsten was established in 2001. The company is an advertising and web design company in Erie. They entered the giving days marketplace in 2011 by building a custom site for the Erie Community Foundation. They have expanded from this first site to build custom sites for other foundations to host a giving event.

The company has 16 employees with eight assigned to their web development department.

In addition to giving events the company provides these services:

Advertising and design services Web design and marketing services

The top giving days include:

Erie Gives: grown to $3 million Washington County Gives: grown to $650K Arkansas Gives: grown to $4.1 million

Giving days represent 10 to 15 percent of their business. The company also developed a proprietary nonprofit online donation platform called GrowDough.

Platform features and benefits

The company custom designs each giving day site based on a platform philosophy that includes:

Pre-event site Registration open site Registration closed site Giving day site Post-giving day site

Features include:

Customizable, web-based, donation and resolution back-end, integrated nonprofit registration and database

Direct to payment processor (foundation choice), High-availability server platform configuration Hands-on customer support In-person Day-of support.

Hosting architecture and processes

As the site is custom developed, Tungsten will install into a variety of hosting environments. They offer three options from basic to high volume:

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Capacity

Tungsten load tests each site at 10 times capacity. As each site is custom, they do not provide an overall metric or make the information publicly available.

Pricing

Tungsten does not collect a transaction fee for their platform. They will estimate the development of the website for each project and typical development costs are $20 to $35,000.

The company uses Authorize.net as the payment processor. Customers are able to select their own processor for an additional cost. Customers choose their credit card processor and negotiate their own rates.

In addition to the development costs, the company charges an annual fee of approximately $7,000 per year to maintain future giving days.

Hosting charges are additional. There is typically a set up cost of $5,000 as well as a monthly fee depending on the hosting option selected of up to $375 per month.

Support and policies

Tungsten offers two options for day of customer support:

In-person Day-of (to help assist with donor questions and declined transactions) Skype Support (team is involved with customer support communication with customer over Skype.)

The in-person support is an extra cost.

Nonprofit profile data can be bulk imported. Nonprofits can also export the data from the site.

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The company owns no data and will not contact a nonprofit or donor unless directed to do so by the foundation.

The company does not hold cash and will disburse only to the foundation and not direct to participating nonprofits.

The company did not provide a link to a security policy, but stated it is available.

Comments

Tungsten can definitely build websites and has been successful with the giving events they have run. As they don’t collect transaction fees, there is a benefit to the donor and nonprofit. The burden is on the foundation who must pay a large investment to build and host the site as well as negotiate credit card fees.

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Give2Great

359 N. Washington St.Rochester, NY 14625

Contact: Steve Malley, CEO. 585-317-1367. steve@give2great.com

Give2Great was established in 2015. The company developed out of a project that researched online giving platforms challenges. Give2Great quickly realized that existing platforms fell short in supporting nonprofit needs, and donor preferences. With this realization, Give2Great recruited a development team that had experience e-commerce transaction development as well as current technology solutions. The company has grown to six employees and plans to offer a demonstration of its platform in July 2016.

Though Give2Great has not managed a giving event, I chose to include them as I was able to get an advanced look at the platform and philosophy. The company has deployed an agile programming environment that places the transaction experience and integrity at the central to everything they do. From this “spoke” they are able to flexibly bolt on a variety of giving experiences, including giving days.

Because of this philosophy, Give2Great has modeled the best practices of transaction processing into their platform and has the ability to respond to current giving solutions as well as future developments in online giving models.

In addition to giving events the company plans to provide these services:

Project based fundraising Idea incubation crowdsourcing and funding Corporate/employee fundraising campaign Immersive fundraising Event fundraising Peer-to-Peer fundraising Custom developed fundraising solutions Beacon App based fundraising

Platform features and benefits

Unable to provide a full evaluation at this time.

Hosting architecture and processes

Give2Great began development by reviewing the issues of other platforms and formed their architecture plan early in the process. The company plans to use Amazon Web Services and will architect the system to provide:

Unlimited scaling of public facing web servers Redundant back up, automatic fail over and traffic scaling for all database and file

servers Cloud-based fail over process Back up transaction processors Catastrophic event process

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Capacity

Give2Great intends to load test the platform and will provide results publicly. Minimum 200 donations per second

Pricing

Give2Great is finalizing their pricing program and welcomes input from foundations and nonprofits.

Support and policies

To be determined.

Comments

I look forward to reviewing the Give2Great platform. As foundations consider the sustainability of giving events, Give2Great could become the optimal technology partner.

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