Good+Foundation looks to the future with Give Lively

An in-depth interview with Good+ Giving Coordinator Luke Srodulski about the critical role of digital fundraising.

Good+Foundation is a leading national nonprofit, founded by New York Times best-selling author Jessica Seinfeld, that works to dismantle multi-generational poverty by pairing tangible goods with innovative services for low-income families.

Good+Foundation augmented their digital fundraising efforts in 2018 by turning to Give Lively’s free technology to power their annual appeals, events, and peer-to-peer campaigns. Jamie Feldman, VP of Nonprofit Membership at Give Lively, sat down with Luke Srodulski, Foundation Giving Coordinator at Good+Foundation, to reflect on the quickly growing nonprofit’s digital fundraising journey.

Jamie Feldman, VP of Nonprofit Membership at Give Lively: I know Good+Foundation has been serving the community for over 17 years. What is the origin story?

Luke Srodulski, Giving Coordinator at Good+Foundation: We started operations in 2001 as a community drive in New York City to get essential baby gear to new families in need. Years later, when we found that around two-thirds of the families we served were led by single mothers, we set out to work with our partners to intentionally engage fathers. Knowing the importance of two-parent households on child outcomes, we are now offering training to social service providers and advocating for policy reform that strengthens families.

JF: It’s fascinating to learn how your work has expanded. What inspires you most about this work?

LS: The forward-thinking attitude of our team. We’re always looking to advance our work, even when what we’re doing is working.

JF: How does Give+Foundation view the role of digital fundraising?

LS: It’s not just standard individual giving that makes using a digital platform so important. We typically host multiple fundraisers each year, and we sell tickets online. These events allow us to build relationships with our donors -individual, corporate and foundation - and the funds we bring in make it possible to continue donating more than $6 million worth of product annually to families in need.

JF: Thinking about the role of online donors, how critical are they in sustaining your work?

LS: Extremely. Our recurring donors provide continued funds upon which we can rely each month, and individual giving is a great way to spur community engagement. Peer-to-peer fundraisers started for birthdays, baby showers and more lead to more and more people learning about our mission and our work.

JF: Before you made the decision to partner with Give Lively, what had been your organization’s experience with fundraising technology?

LS: The biggest issue is that our technology has often been outdated and not as streamlined as it needs to be. We had been looking to move to a more affordable and streamlined fundraising platform; however, we know the value of spending more to bring in more, so we weren’t going to move to just any less-expensive platform. We were impressed by the client-centered approach Give Lively takes and how responsive the team is even with a relatively small staff.

“We were impressed by the client-centered approach Give Lively takes and how responsive the team is.”

JF: Tell us about your first digital fundraising campaign with Give Lively?

LS: Adopting the technology was pretty seamless and very user-friendly. Our first fundraising campaign we activated on Give Lively was our general giving campaign, “Help Good+Foundation Strengthen Families,” which is running throughout the year.

We link to the campaign page directly from our homepage behind the “Donate Now” button, and provided the link to any partners who wanted to share the page externally. We set a goal of $100,000 to aspire to by the end of the year.

We also created a Father’s Day campaign to promote on social media and advertise on external websites with donated media.

JF: What made these campaigns successful, and why?

LS: I would attribute any success of our campaigns largely to the ease of transferring ideas and designs over from our old fundraising partner without losing many of our old capabilities and without having to sacrifice much in terms of aligning the design with our current branding. We’ve also gained quite a few recurring donors, more than in the same period of time on our old platform.

JF: How did the Give Lively platform fit into your existing fundraising strategy?

LS: The Give Lively platform has helped specifically in terms of streamlining our individual giving. The simplicity of the campaign page displays fit well into our overall design vision for our newly rebranded website, which focuses on minimalism.

By switching to Give Lively, we plan to continue all of our previous digital efforts, such as peer-to-peer and ticketing pages for events, while saving a considerable amount of money and adding more versatile capabilities to our fundraising efforts, like with text-to-donate.

Externally, the most effective part of working with Give Lively has been the ability to market lower fees to our donors. When they hear that more of their donations will go directly into our programs, donating to Good+ becomes more attractive.

*Learn more about Give Lively and how nonprofits can take advantage of powerful, practical, and free fundraising technology.