Desiree Vargas, Founder of GiveForward

1. What is your experience in the nonprofit sector?

For the last three years I have worked with private Foundations either in grant-giving or strategic analysis. After studying Latin American Studies at Yale, I worked for the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, where I had the amazing opportunity to work on a program called the Kauffman Campuses Initiative, a $150 million grant program to promote entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities around the country. It was in thisrole that I began to learn about the contagious passion that young people have for social entrepreneurship. In July of last year, I left the Kauffman Foundation to work as a consultant for a philanthropic investment advisory firm called Arabella Advisors. While with them, I worked with a team to evaluate the efficacy of The Kresge Foundation's Green Building Initiative. I also co-authored a landscape piece on the field of Green Building for the Funders' Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities, which was released at GreenBuild in Chicago last year.

2. What is Giveforward?

GiveForward is a tool that helps individuals and organizations raise and donate money quickly and easily online through a platform similar to a social networking site. One of our best features is that you do not have to be a 501c3 to raise money on GiveForward. There are millions of worthy causes out there that do not meet the IRS standards for a non-profit but are in desperate need of funding. We see GiveForward as expanding the success of fundraisers that happen in our lives every day. GiveForward offers a real opportunity for non-profits, as well. GiveForward becomes an easy tool for updating donors about new activity within the non-profit and also creates a mechanism for fundraising for specific projects within the organization. We do not see GiveForward as a competitor to non-profits' own websites. We see it as a complement.

3. Why did you start Giveforward? How did you come up with the idea?

I came up with the idea for GiveForward while thinking of another business idea--an adult internship company that would help adults try out different industries without feeling trapped. I thought that if I could get a loan or donation from each one of my friends and family members that I would have enough to start it. When I went to look for tools online, there really were only systems designed for non-profits. That got me thinking. Then, I teamed up with my partner, Ethan Austin, who had experience in marathon fundraising and we started to imagine the millions of ways GiveForward could be used. We did some soul searching to see what GiveForward would be that PayPal could never be, and that's how we got to this point.

4. How is it different from other personal fundraising tools and sites?

There are several features of GiveForward that make us different from our competitors. First, our site is focused solely on giving. Our users come to GiveForward either to donate to a friend, family member, or project that they care about OR to create a fundraising profile. In addition, we are one of the only sites to allow donors to give as little as a dollar. By offering this feature in an e-commerce style platform, we allow many projects to share the credit card transaction fees. We also process our own donations, allowing us to pass on that savings to our users. A major advantage of not using a system like PayPal is that we can hold the funds until a fundraiser closes, giving us time to do due diligence on the individual or organization. In addition, we put all of the money that comes into the site into an interest earning escrow account. 100% of the interest from that account is converted into grants to non-profit projects on our site through the GiveForward Community Fund, a donor advised fund with the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. Finally, we have interactive tools on the site designed to match donors with projects of interest that they would likely never have found otherwise. Many online giving sites only offer an open search field, which limits donors to the organizations they already know or the few featured projects on the homepage.

5. What advice would you give to nonprofits who are interested in mobilizing younger people and their networks to give to their organizations?

Development officers too frequently chase after Foundation grants and low-hanging fruit. If they put half of the money and effort they put into those pursuits into encouraging small-scale donations from a broad range of young, eager idealists, they could really see a difference. Take a look at the Obama campaign. Millions and millions of dollars flow into that effort in small increments. This is the future of philanthropy: smaller, frequent donations to high-impact causes. I think that one of the best things that non-profits can do to engage younger generations is to do a little extra leg-work to reach out to these socially conscious, future leaders in a way that is meaningful to them. Snail mail, colorful pamphlets with wide-eyed children in dirt houses pulls on anyone's heartstrings, but this generation has grown up being marketed to. They know that a team of experts at an over-priced agency made that ad. And while it may work for the silver-haired retiree next-door, it won't work with today's young adults. Young people already question the value they can bring to philanthropy, given their few years of experience and small bank accounts. If non-profits want to build lifelong donors from this group, they need to prove to them now that their organizations make an impact, are results driven, and that every donation is valuable. The sites that only give feedback to donors who give more than $100 make me furious. How much more work does it take to include all donors in an email? I also think it's important that non-profits learn to understand how young people use the web. Clunky sites that require multiple steps to donate or that result in weekly unsolicited emails undermine the efficiency that makes online giving so attractive. Non-profits need to recognize cyber boundaries. Sites like MySpace and Facebook are certainly where young people are, but this does not mean that it is a free for all for email drip campaigns. By respecting existing and potential donors' time and use of these tools, non-profits can be invited into these networks through users.

6. What philanthropy or nonprofit blogs written by women would you recommend?

I enjoy Amy Sample Ward's Version of NPTech; Don't Tell the Donor, but I don't know it that's written by a woman, since it's anonymous; and Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog. I think they do a lot to encourage new practices in development using the latest technology and truly reflect an understanding of the changing landscape.

Beth Kanter, BlogHer CE for NGOS and Social Change, writes Beth's Blog.