SimplyGiving is an online fundraising platform launched in 2011 by Kristofer Rogers to help non-profits raise funds digitally. It allows charities to create pages to raise funds for particular causes. One campaign by the Singapore Red Cross on the site raised over $150,000 in a day for victims of Typhoon Haiyan. SimplyGiving has grown to work with 330 charity partners across 16 countries. Rogers ensures the platform complies with regulations and that partner charities are fully transparent about their finances and operations to protect donors. The social enterprise model applies a 5% fee on donations to support developing new features to better serve charities and donors.

1. THEEDGE SINGAPORE | AUGUST 25, 2014 • EN3
ENTERPRISE ENTREPRENEURSHIP
SimplyGiving lends non-profits a
helping hand in their fund-raising efforts
SIMPLYGIVING
Reproduced by permission of The Edge Publishing Pte Ltd., Copyright © 2014 The Edge Publishing Pte Ltd. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
E
| BY AMY TAN |
When Zack Brown launched a project
to raise US$10 ($12.45) to make
a potato salad on crowdfund-ing
site Kickstarter last month,
Kristofer Rogers, CEO of Singa-pore-
based online fundraising platform Simply-
Giving was one of the early donors to the fun
cause. “I was very excited about the campaign
because it demonstrated the reach of crowd-funding
as a mechanism,” says Rogers. The
potato salad campaign closed on Aug 3 with
a total of US$55,492 raised from 6,911 back-ers,
according to Kickstarter. Brown now plans
to use the funds raised to host a free festival
called PotatoStock in Columbus, Ohio to ben-efit
the homeless.
While Rogers is a supporter of the cam-paign,
he initially had reservations. “I was
nervous about the campaign because you
just need one fundraiser to misappropriate
the funds and the authorities will come down
hard on the provider and crowdsourcing indus-try,”
he says. So, when he launched Simply-
Giving in 2011, he ensured that the site was
compliant with local legislation and chose to
focus on working with non-profit charities.
The first version of the site was launched with
30 charity partners in Singapore and Malaysia.
A year later, a second version was released and
as at mid-2013, SimplyGiving had increased its
client base to 330 charity partners in 16 coun-tries.
“We started with the big names like World
Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Singapore
Cancer Society and now a lot of our users in-clude
grassroots, local and community driv-en
organisations,” notes Rogers. According to
him, such organisations stand to benefit the
most from a platform such as SimplyGiving
as they often do not have the budget to hire
IT personnel to create websites or launch dig-ital
fundraising platforms.
Platform for non-profits
The site allows non-profits to set up their own
pages and raise funds for a particular chari-ty
or cause. One of the most effective fund-raisers
on the site was launched by the Singa-pore
Red Cross to raise funds for victims of
Typhoon Haiyan last year. “They were very
visionary with what they did and they
gave donors the option to donate to
them directly or via SimplyGiving.
Donors who opted for us could
create their own mini appeal,
which they could share with
friends and families. As a
result, a lot of corporates
and individuals jumped
on the cause and it be-came
a donor’s cam-paign,”
observes Rog-ers.
Thanks to this feature,
the Singapore Red Cross man-aged
to raise more than $150,000 with-in
a day through SimplyGiving. “Activity on
the site went through the roof and tested our
technology to the maximum,” he adds.
Data from SimplyGiving showed that two
of the most common factors that encourage
people to donate to a cause are leveragabil-ity
and that they are being asked to donate.
In that case, why do people shun street can-vassers
with tin cans? Rogers points out that
often, people are likely to donate to someone
they know. “I’ve had people refer to street
canvassing as running the charity gauntlet.
People don’t donate to them because they are
strangers. If someone you know asks you for
Rogers: Online giving disrupts charitable giving in that it can make anyone a micro-philanthropist
a donation, you will be happy to give it to
them. Some of them become the ambassadors
of the cause,” explains Rogers.
The act of canvassing from family and
friends is what SimplyGiving hopes to repli-cate
on its platform. “We enable fundraisers to
tell their own story and explain how they are
connected to the cause. As soon as someone
donates, they can share the cause as well,” he
says. In addition, SimplyGiving is the first res-ponsive
mobile optimised fundraising
site. “This is very important
in a region where more
than 90% of users ac-cess
the web on their
mobile,” says Rogers.
Donors are allowed to
choose from 100 curren-cies
and multiple com-mon
credit cards as well
as payment methods such
as UnionPay, eNets, AliPay
and bank transfers. Users can
also choose to donate with Pay-
Pal, even though Singaporean
residents will no longer be able
to give to foreign charities owing
to local legislation.
To safeguard the interests of donors,
non-profits have to submit an application
to be on SimplyGiving. “We cherry pick
our partners. We are fully compliant with
legislation and we benchmark this across the
region. We require charities to provide infor-mation
about their auditing, their community,
and their social network and donor base. We
cannot work with non-profits that are not ful-ly
transparent because it is a big risk,” he says.
While the process may sound tedious,
Rogers points out that this is not so as the char-ities
would already have all this documenta-tion.
“We usually turnaround an application
in as little as 24 hours to three days, provided
the charities supply the necessary documen-tation,”
he says.
In addition to transparency, he also encour-ages
charities to put in place a stewardship pro-gramme
and engage with their donors. “When
I speak to charities, one of the questions I
always ask is whether they have a stewardship
or thank you programme in place for donors
and none of them have it. They get a dona-tion
and it goes to whatever they need it for
desperately and the donor is not updated,” he
says. “While we don’t enforce a compulsory
stewardship programme on Simply Giving, sta-tistics
show that if you reach out to your do-nors,
you will raise more money because they
know that their money is affecting change.”
Social entrepreneurship
SimplyGiving applies a 5% service fee across
the board for all donations. “The site sits very
comfortably as a social enterprise because we
adopt an e-commerce model and we have a
service fee on donations,” says Rogers. “The
traditional ways of fundraising such as gala
dinners are an expensive affair for non-prof-its.
Meanwhile, five cents for every dollar
raised is compliant with legislation and pro-vides
us with the funds to invest in our tech-nology
and provide non-profits with a better
offering,” he adds.
One of the new features Rogers hopes to
roll out soon is donor genetics. “It’s like speed
dating and matches donors to the causes they
are interested in,” he says. To be sure, he does
not see SimplyGiving as a tech company. “We
don’t approach the business from a tech angle.
Instead, we see ourselves as being disruptive.
Online giving disrupts charitable giving in that
it can make anyone a micro-philanthropist. In
the old days, philanthropy was something for
high-net-worth individuals,” he says.
SimplyGiving was recently named the region-al
winner of the Community Impact Award for
Southeast Asia at the Talent Unleashed Awards,
a technology-based accolades programme de-veloped
by global IT and talent recruitment
and technology services specialist Talent In-ternational.
The award was judged locally by
Patrick Grove, CEO and founder of investment
company Catcha Group, and Joel Noeh, head
of Groupon in Asia-Pacific.
As Rogers sees it, the key to starting a suc-cessful
venture is learning from experience.
His first entrepreneurial endeavour was the
launch of a youth magazine and an online tal-ent
portal leveraging MySpace. However, this
venture folded because his investment partners
pulled out after three months. “It was from fail-ing
that I learned so much about investment
and cashflow and all these boring things that
you have to know about running a business.
We came out of it without any debtors and I
learned how to protect myself from venture
capitalists instead of being blinded by the ro-mance
of being funded,” he says.
In 2008, Rogers helped to launch GoFund-raise,
an online fundraising platform similar
to SimplyGiving based in Australia. Through
GoFundraise, he has helped to raise more
than US$100 million for non-profits. Accord-ing
to him, SimplyGiving has just completed
Series A funding but declined to reveal more
details. “In the past, you had to have a lot
going for you to be successful. Now, you just
need to have an idea and a will and it can
happen and that, to me, is an exciting reali-sation,”
he says.
SimplyGiving has about 330
charity partners in 16 countries
BRYAN TAY/THE EDGE SINGAPORE