181. Fundraising on Zoom?! How Tech is Powering Missions to Grow Impact - James Citron
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Overview
Meet James. He's the CEO of Pledge, the leading charitable donation platform powering virtual, Livestream, and e-commerce fundraising. Pledge recently created the first Donate button built for Zoom, the first round-up application for Shopify, and today, over 25,000 nonprofits operating in 100 countries have received donations via Pledge. This hard-wired champion of kindness is walking us through the current state of virtual, fundraising and hybrid events and, what it all means for nonprofits in the future. And besides being just about the nicest guy in the room, his story of what Pledge did to save more than 1,300 Afghan refugees is the thing of philanthropic heroics.
Today’s Guest
James Citron, CEO, Pledge
“Analysts predicted one out of three nonprofits were going to go out of business last year. Think about the cataclysmic effect on the world, if one out of three nonprofits were to go out of business. Those that innovated around virtual, many of them had their best years ever.”
Episode Transcript
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Episode highlights
James’s story and journey to where he is today (4:00)
History and mission of Pledge (10:00)
The current state of virtual events, online fundraising, e-commerce fundraising, and text messaging (14:00)
A powerful story of how Pledge was leveraged to create deep impact (22:00)
Pledge’s flagship features and how you can leverage them today (25:00)
James’s advice for leveraging an entrepreneurial mindset in nonprofits today (28:00)
A powerful moment of philanthropy in James’s life (31:00)
James’s One Good Thing: Just try it. (34:00)
Powerful quotes
“Because every company I'm going to build from now is a company a tech company with a social mission. So that's what led me to start Pledge.” -James
“Pledge was founded several years ago, and we envision a world where it's very easy, integrated donation to everything that we do.” -James
“All of us have gone through such incredible challenges, growth, and evolutions over the last 18 plus months and there's more changes to come. And for us, when we saw the move, the shutdown with the pandemic, to us that meant let's open up our platform, let's make it as accessible to anyone.” -James
“So the analysts predicted one out of three nonprofits were going to go out of business last year. I mean, think about the cataclysmic effect on the world, if one out of three nonprofits were to go out of business. Those that innovated around virtual, we have a number of examples, many of them had their best years ever.” -James
“Virtual events dramatically increased audience.” -James
“We survey often our nonprofit partners, and what we hear is 80 to 90% of them are planning on virtual as always a component of what they do.” -James
“We all have to meet donors and humans where they are.” -James
“Nonprofits don't have the budgets, the technology, oftentimes the developers, but companies like ours are built to make things so easy, so accessible, to just try it.” -James
“The beginning of every single entrepreneurial success, that turns into something really big, it all started with just trying something out.” -James
connect with pledge
Website / Twitter / Instagram / Facebook / LinkedIn
connect with James
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Episode Sponsored by
Studio Selfie
Jonathan McCoy, James Citron, Julie Confer, Pippa & Becky Endicott
