Goodkind

Better Giving Studio identified this concept through the 2020 Reimagine Charitable Giving Challenge, an open innovation component of the program which sourced nearly 400 digital giving products and concepts. The concept summary below is inspired by and derived from the Challenge entry submitted to the Challenge. 

Why BGS is Excited

• The platform allows nonprofits to easily share compelling, personalized videos with donors.
• Nonprofits can plug-in to existing comms channels like SMS or WhatsApp and receive analytics to understand how campaigns perform — make creating, sharing, and learning easy.
• By offering donation forms next to each video, nonprofits can increase donor retention and recurring gifts. 

The Opportunity

Looking around the charitable landscape, it’s hard not to be impressed: organizations, full of everyday people doing the extraordinary, all determined to make the lives of others better. Despite this outstanding work, nonprofits constantly face threats that weaken or shrink donor bases, and changes in total donations are a product of existing donor contributions, not net new donors. In an increasingly crowded field, the entire process of soliciting donations needs to be rethought.

The Concept

The founders of Goodkind believe that giving rates are dropping because as the world has gone digital, charities have been unable to drive empathy through new media and channels, and traditional channels (direct mail, face-to-face intercept, telemarketing) no longer resonate with their audiences. 

The Goodkind software platform empowers organizations to drive donor empathy through the power of human storytelling by sending personalized, low production, first-person videos to donor bases at scale, with embedded calls to action. This is facilitated through a combination of mobile and web applications that automate the creation, moderation, and distribution of personal video. Using AI to analyze and improve the video stories shared on the platform helps organizations optimize their outreach. 

The combination of AI and modern analytics provides a critical feedback loop to charitable organizations so that they understand which content is resonating, which emotions drive the best response, and even who in the organization is the most effective storyteller. 

Providing a memorable and personalized donor journey to thousands of people can be hard for most charitable organizations. Using AI and modern software, Goodkind builds next-best-action custom journeys for each donor. Because the solution uses channels (email, SMS, Whatsapp) and tools charitable organizations are already familiar with, it shortens onboarding, setup, and time to launch. 

Given the level of personalization that their video stories provide, Goodkind’s users span all age groups, all ethnicities, and multiple countries (currently four and counting). To date, their open, engagement, and conversion rates have been high across all segments. Data shows Goodkind has a particularly high-value when it comes to tapping into givers under age 34, a result attributed to the fact that much of media consumption among young people is low production, first-person video content, much like the content on the Goodkind platform.

The acquisition cost of a recurring gift is typically 100%-200% of the gift’s annual value when accounting for the staff time and resources required for face-to-face fundraising. This model rests on the assumption that the donor will give for many years. Unfortunately, donor churn often surpasses 50% per year (FEP). So charities lose money on half of their campaigns. Goodkind users are acquiring monthly supporters for under $20— between 4% and 8% of the cost of traditional channels. They’ve also seen conversion rates from 4%-15% on donation appeals, as well as consistent engagement rates in excess of 80%.