How Donate.ly Helped Raise Millions and What AI Means for Nonprofit Fundraising | Javan Van Gronigen

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Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marquee Spark. My guest today is Javin von Groenegen, the founder of Donately, a fundraising platform that has helped thousands of nonprofits raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Javin's path to building Donately runs through one of the most viral digital campaigns in Internet history, and the experience of watching nonprofits struggle with technology that seemed to work against them. And he set out to change that and the results of the platform built around transparency, simplicity, and the belief that software should serve the mission, not the other way around. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Javan Van Gronigen: Thanks for having me, Mark. I'm excited to to get into this.

Mark Evans: Let's do the origin story. You built Donately after watching nonprofits wrestle with software that seemed like it was designed for the platform's profit rather than the organization's missions. And having worked with nonprofits over the years, I can understand the pain that they go through when they're dealing with technology and trying to get the jobs that they need done. Walk me through that frustration and the specific moment that you decided to build something yourself.

Javan Van Gronigen: The start for me was moving from Invisible Children into creating a digital agency. So that was the first jump, and we'll get back into a little of the work that I with Invisible Children here, I think, at some point. But, in essence, I was coming at it from an agency perspective. I was trying to jump in to solve problems with websites, problems with branding. And, really, what we were starting to notice is it was much more of a systems problem than a specific execution problem or a development problem. We'll talk a little bit more about that, but it's really rolling up a bit and saying, what is it underneath all of this? What are the systems, and what's the technology, and how is it all interrelated? And that's where donate.ly originally came up, was to empower organizations with a better fundraising ecosystem, something that was not a big monolithic technical tool like Salesforce, but something that could be plugged in, let people use the tools that they already had, really solve for, really, forms that were too clunky, too many fields, user journeys, donor journeys, bad email systems, the technical piece. But we had to roll it up to a system level and say, hey. Let's solve this in a way that this can be utilized not just to solve a smaller execution problem, but a systemic problem, really. And at the core of that is how does all of this glue together so that you can get new donors, email them, nurture them, and turn them into to longtime supporters.

Mark Evans: I think one of the problems with many nonprofits, especially smaller nonprofits, is that Salesforce is this giant beast. And a lot of them it's almost overkill. So you've got a lot of companies out there trying to be more user friendly and accessible. And but you're also dealing with people who from post no profits to short staff to they don't have lot of money. They don't have an extra resources. That must pose some very interesting challenges when you're trying to provide them with a product that is user friendly but also recognizes the some of the limitations they might have operationally.

Javan Van Gronigen: Especially when an organization like that comes in and says, hey. This is free for nonprofits. And I have no issues with Salesforce. Salesforce. I think it's a really powerful tool when you need the technical levels to which Salesforce operates in those types of integrations. But, yeah, you offer it for free. People jump in knowing, hey. We need to scale. We need to be able to grow. We don't want these tools that we're gonna scale out of. But the challenge is you need integration specialists, and you need contractors, and you need agencies, and embedding forms is now challenging. It is tricky to have something that is simple enough for a small team to use, but also doesn't, hinder growth or become something that they quickly outgrow. And that's that wedge that Donately has been trying to continually push itself into is to scale out of the smallest tools, but to allow entry points to things like HubSpot or Salesforce and these more enterprise solutions that maybe a team of two to three people, they're just not ready for. Too much training. Typically, if you have overhead or turnover like most nonprofits, you've got people revolving through. You don't want big tools that they need to be trained on. How do we build a system that anybody can pick up, use, but it's powerful, it's robust, It's customizable. That's where we're sitting.

Mark Evans: So walk me through your where were you before Donatly? What were you doing? What was your inspiration for starting the company? Obviously, sometimes it's it's a moment of inspiration. Sometimes it's serendipity. Sometimes there's something happens, and you just get that scratch, that issue. Yeah. I have to scratch What did the Donailey backstory?

Javan Van Gronigen: Everybody comes forward with a little bit of their family of origin stuff. I think I was raised in a family that put mission and purpose and belief really core in who I am. And so moving into the digital world, I always loved digital. Digital was always exciting to me. It was gonna be an ever changing art medium. I loved that, and I worked at an agency here in San Diego about three or four years as an art director and really realized quickly, like, I have to believe in what it is that I'm creating. I can't just be creative for creative sake. That's what founded the agency is really to do engaging digital work and help nonprofits and social enterprises really rise up in mainstream culture. That was, like, the big vision then. And then it became this technology challenge of this isn't just the agency services. The big issue here is the technology underneath it. So from the digital world into using digital with purpose and to engage people in worthwhile, like, ethically defensible organizations and missions to crafting technology that really empowers all of that work has been the journey from leaving college and trying to find my place all the way until today.

Mark Evans: You've been at it for a while now. This is a fucking new for you. There's been a lot of bumps in the road and some successes, which I'd love to talk to you about.

Javan Van Gronigen: I think I earned a lot of the is is earned either from children or from existing in the nonprofit world. We've done a ton of work with United Ways all over The United States. We worked really heavily with the United Way Worldwide for a few years. A lot of work with the UN, environmental program, and the development program. So we've worked with really large organizations, done some really powerful global campaigns. We mentioned earlier the Coney twenty twelve work, which was is dated, still to this day is something kids learn about in school around how we activate young people, and we use film and story to to change history. And so that's still something I get asked about a lot. Failures, I'd have to think maybe a little bit more about it. Not every campaign you run or product you execute or feature release is exactly what you want it to be. But I think over time, you you take those knocks and you continue to push through them and grow through them. But probably dig into that a bit more in terms of things that we've learned through the years.

Mark Evans: One of your success stories is Barstool Sports. They raised $20,000,000 to donate lead to save small businesses during the panic. How did that camp campaign come together? Because it's very high profile. What did that reveal about what's possible when you're going through that fundraising process and companies trying to help other people?

Javan Van Gronigen: I think there's a lot of similarities. I think if if you go back to the the Coney twenty twelve campaign and you look at Barstool's campaign, lot of similarities in terms of success. It's a lot of the pieces there, the strategy, the clarity of what it is you're trying to do, the consistency in how you're communicating, the investment in the ecosystem, the marketing team, the messaging, the commitment to the execution. With Barstool, they spun a Barstool fund. Barstool Sports is a podcast predominantly in the culture and sports space, and they had an opportunity during COVID as they had so many people in in in different communities closing down during COVID, restaurants and bars, and they wanted to step in to all their listeners and support them. And it was just a really easy connection, a really powerful brand with a lot of attention, a huge heart to say, hey. We're all about all these communities and the people in these communities, and so we can easily jump in with our mission as a brand to to support them. And they started spinning up fundraisers for all these local groups and keeping them in business and writing checks to literally keep pizza pizza restaurants and salons and bars open throughout that pandemic when people just weren't coming to their doors. And I think, really, the technology that Donately put at the table made that really easy. For them, they wanted to be a little more customized. They used some API integrations, embedded it into their site because they had such a core brand. They didn't wanna send people off. They had some customization of how they wanted to run and track and do thermometers and all of that stuff, and donate leads got an open API for that. So it was the right place at the right time. All the work was their brand. They just needed a platform that could empower their users to come and give specifically to their local restaurants and local businesses, and we were able to do that with them. And, yeah, they raised, I wanna say, over 40, almost 50,000,000. A lot of that was just Wow. Bigger checks offline and stuff. Think through the platform itself, these small micro gifts and stuff, think our contribution, I think, north of 24000000 or so.

Mark Evans: I spent a lot of time talking about to entrepreneurs and marketers. One of the things I'm fascinated is with how successful companies navigate the competitive landscape. Every single industry has dozens, if not hundreds of companies that are battling for market share, battling for customers. And that woody formula, sometimes it's scientific, and sometimes it's a matter of being at the right place at the right time with the right product. When you look back at Donately and the way that you've built the business, what's been the key to your success from a marketing perspective? Like, when you look at that recipe or the things that you've done, how have you been able to differentiate yourself or position the company as an alternative to platforms like Salesforce? Do you have any sort of marketing pillars that you lean on, or are there some marketing activities that you've just found to be successful while you're doing them over and over again? What has been the key to your success from a marketing perspective?

Javan Van Gronigen: I'm trying to frame this as takeaways for how people could do it. I think maybe I can just look back at some of the successes that I think were really pivotal in in allowing first Donateley to get on his feet and then to scale and grow. I think early on, having, an agency where we already had traction in the space and clients was really big for us. So being able to introduce it, pressure test it, work with clients. The customer support, I think, was one that we never really expected to be as critical as it was. But being able to talk to people and not just turn on a SaaS and walk away and push people into support channels, but really be there to say, hey. How is this servicing you? Is it better? We said it'd be better. We said it'd be more effective. Is it really and to have a service business sitting right next to a SaaS product really allowed us to be able to improve the product, learn from our clients, and really become, like, something that sat parallel to the service industry, and it became something that other agencies could use. There was a lot of benefit to that in terms of being successful as a product and creating value as well as creating a differentiation for us. So I think that was always huge is that we were able to step in and be more service oriented than almost every other product that was out there. It was our unique value proposition and still to this day is. We have two sides of the house, and we have all those services. You can run your own fundraising campaigns, or you can work with us, and we can run them for you. We can really automize all that from a service model that sits right next to it. Scott's a big piece of it. I also think pivoting is since we are still in the marketing agency world, we recognize how often those pivots are happening. You look at the trajectory of any SaaS over the five years, there was a period where social media was really valuable. There was a period where paid media had great return on ad spend, and there was a time period where influencer marketing was creating more value than your other marketing channels. I think for us, it's really been pivoting to find what's working, where we can both rent space and own space when it comes to marketing and talking about our product. I would also say there's been really strategic marketing channels that we have not invested in that when I look back, I wish we had. I think so many organizations really did good at putting a lot of effort into content creation, podcasts, doing events, fundraise events, I think, have been really successful, and I think we've missed the mark a bit in being able to produce that type of live and in person content that a lot of other organizations have been able to do. I think with their teams and their scale means they've got people that can do a lot more of that. We've participated in a lot, but I think that's probably an area of just training people that is a form of marketing and content marketing we maybe have not done best. To try to sum that up, I think pivoting has been critical. I think knowing what it takes to get started and having a base of clients that you can really test what it is you're doing and test that your marketing is actually creating the value you say you're gonna create would maybe be two areas that I think looking back would have been of nice to know then what I know now.

Mark Evans: If we all had twenty twenty hindsight, we'd all be super successful. But when you look at your marketing arsenal right now or the way that you go to market, what do you lead into? What's working? What are you staying away from? What's your formula for marketing success?

Javan Van Gronigen: I would like to talk about how much is changing right now. I think almost everything is being overhauled with the onslaught of the progression of AI. I would probably answer you a year ago. I would answer you different than I would answer this six months ago. And now today, we're upheaving pretty much everything in the marketing space when it comes to what we can do with AI in different capacities. Search completely changing. You see what used to be an SEO strategy now needing to be a GEO strategy. What the Internet saw as favorable or unfavorable to you literally two months ago is completely changed by new algorithms and new functionality with the AI changes and the LLMs and all of the alphabet soup of phrases that come along with AI and intent and sentiments and all that. So that's a big change. How you write ads, how you write copy, how quickly you can automate, it's all changing so quickly. And I think we're still working our way through the wash with all of that. What are of all these efforts, which we can now do 10 times the amount we could do six months ago, but what parts of it are actually working? What efforts are working? Typically, we're trying to say, hey. Let's do an eighty twenty rule. Let's use 80% of our budget on what's actually working and 20% on testing new things. Right now, it's almost flipped. We're almost saying, hey. Let's spend 80% on trying new things because the old stuff has just completely changed. And so Yeah. That's our motto right now is we're throwing a lot of stuff. We've got a strategic angle to it, but we're throwing a lot at the wall to see what's gonna actually pan out as successful efforts.

Mark Evans: For a lot of companies, there are two ways that you can approach AI or multiple ways. One is you can be completely scared of it and overwhelmed by what it can do, or you can use it and try to leverage it or you can lean completely into it. And I think, as you say, we're just at the bleeding edge of AI. If you're not experimenting, if you're not taking chances, and you're not putting yourself out there, then you're never gonna fully realize the potential of AI because you just won't be learning as you go. Let me take a step back. How much of your marketing do you think is being powered by AI? Writing can be scaled. Copywriting can be scaled. Lots of things can be automated. What's that balance between using AI for marketing and creativity and domain expertise and experience?

Javan Van Gronigen: I'll start by saying it's infiltrated almost every layer of the agency and donate.ly as a SaaS product. I think there's different areas, and we can dive into those. But I think first, jumping into the idea that it should be explored and adopted by everybody. And I think when I talk to people that are far smarter than me in mentoring circles, the idea is that this is going to change everything. It's going to change everything faster than anything has changed in terms of technology in our lifetime. It's going to drastically shift the jobs that we have and our capabilities as human beings and where we spend our time. A lot of people are now hiring for people's ability to adapt and change and grow with AI. If you're gonna hire people, these people need to be superhumans that can utilize AI to be a replacement for an entire team. A law firm is now one person with really good AI skills. And, yes, there is AI slop, and there are all these things. But if you look at the trajectory from 2022 until now, it went from messing up math equations to passing the bar exam to now being completely autonomous working agents in less time than it takes for us to go to high school. So you have to watch that trajectory and realize everything will be different whether you adopt it or not. And the biggest thing is to start wherever you are. Take steps forward in learning it. Hop on Gemini. Hop on I don't care what tool you use, but learn it. Right? At a strategic layer, it's doing your audience insights. It's understanding your datasets. It's researching your donors. It's message testing. You wanna write the first message, do it. Have it write 10 more pressure test those, talk about why they're good, why they're bad. Use it as a strategic tool. Use it as a systems tool, an ability to automate an ability to segment, to talk about donor segments. What matters to them? How should I tweak my messaging to speak different? Use it as a partner in that system layer of how you can enrich your data. There's so much in each of those layers all the way down to execution. And I know it is challenging to get it to support you in writing content or support you in crafting imagery or videos, and there's I would love to talk about the ethics of all that as well. Is it honest or dishonest to be utilizing AI to craft stories? Lot of thoughts on all that. But every layer of the business, it's there. It's not so much should I or shouldn't I? It's yes. You should. And then continue to explore the areas to which you can either be letting it run and you're just looped in, or you're heavily guiding it, but it's going and doing both the work ahead of you to research and then the production work behind you to just be superhuman.

Mark Evans: When you look at that as entrepreneur, founder, CEO, how do you see your role changing because of AI? If a lot of the work is being automated, a lot of the work that was by managing people and expecting certain outcomes, But now that dynamic has changed. So you're not so much a manager of people, but a manager of fewer people and more systems. Has your management style changed? Has the way that you run your company changed because of that?

Javan Van Gronigen: That's interesting you say that. Thinking back, the creative director at the agency I worked at, I kept up with her career as she grew, and that agency ended up becoming part of JWT, which is a big global agency. She became an executive creative director, which is now managing offices globally and everything. I asked her, like, how much has your job changed? And she said, not at all. I used to manage three to five people. Now I manage three to five people. And it was an interesting thought process because it felt like, how could you possibly think that way? But in a managerial perspective, it was just you have your people underneath you, and if they're doing their jobs but that is very different now. So when you ask what's changing, my time being spent finding and managing people versus adjusting the way in which I can have less people that can run these type of systems, how do we adjust our business structure to be, let's just say, half human, half AI processes and systems? The way I used to work with our design team, as an example, to deliver design files to a development team has adjusted. Because it's no longer, hey, how does a developer need this design ecosystem? It's how does an AI agent need this design ecosystem, and how can somebody manage that code base from that? When I say everything's changing over the next three to five years, that's going from film to digital, typewriter to computer. This is us shifting not just to, like, who do we hire, but do we hire? And it gets scary and uncomfortable. I don't like the idea that we're encouraging teams to be smaller. What do we do when 50% of jobs go away over the next five years? I don't know. But as a business owner, we're in a competitive world where that ability to be that effective is at the doorstep, so you need to adjust how you're operating to work it in, and you need to do it quickly.

Mark Evans: One of the pressures and challenges facing a lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs is that they may be scared of AI, and it may be something that they're not completely comfortable with or understand how it works is that when everybody else is jumping on the bandwagon, it can't be left behind. Your competitive window can shrink really quickly. And if you don't have the right tools, you're not familiarizing with the right tools. That can be a problem. Part of that reality is you can also make big mistakes too. You talked about the ethics of AI and some of the hallucinations that AI still generates and some of the ways that it can backfire from a risk reward perspective. That's just the way the game is played with AI. You're gonna burn once in a while, but probably in the long run, it's gonna be a necessity to continue.

Javan Van Gronigen: That's a great place to start. There have been a lot of people that are like, oh my gosh. I can just install this little agent on my computer. And they wanna give it access to all this data, and then all of a sudden, don't know what you're doing, and that data is spread out across the Internet. There are plenty of concerns. Don't hear what I'm not saying and jump headfirst into uploading a bunch of personal info. There are concerns for sure. And so starting small is definitely where I'd go and do not get out over your skis in terms of doing things that are going to risk data risks, safety, security, any of that stuff. But historically, you look back, and there is no company that looked at the computer and said, yeah. We're just not gonna use it. Yeah. That wasn't an option. Maybe another way to look at it is you can look at organizations that failed to pivot when the market moved. Let's say, Blockbuster Video. Let's say, the Sam Goodies of the world. Nobody's selling CDs. BlackBerry versus Apple. Those are organizations that got stuck in doing something that was of today and not tomorrow, and now we don't have them on the shelf anymore. This is another one of those pivots where it is going to change everything. And the option to just take, I'm nervous about it. I don't like it. I'm not gonna go with where it's going isn't, in my opinion, gonna be an option. Risk or not, the people are going to figure out how to use it to surpass the people who are looking at it going, yeah, I just I'm not gonna get into it. Mhmm.

Mark Evans: At the high end, you're dealing with, as you said, a lot of the other way organizations. I suspect at the low end, there's a lot of small resource strapped players that you're dealing with. How do you engage those audiences? What are the ways that you break through, especially given the fact that the landscape is so noisy? There's so many tools that you could use, including AI. What are the ways that you've managed to make sure your marketing resonates with the people that that matter to you?

Javan Van Gronigen: I would say large or small. I think the entire nonprofit world right now is in that boat. So I would say even the larger organizations are still strapped small teams, do more with less less tech, less tools, the better. For us, the thing I think stayed relatively consistent in the content marketing that we're doing is educational. I think all of those organizations need help adopting new technologies, using technologies, a lot of webinars, a lot of open discussions, trainings, content that helps you recognize what's important in donation forms, what's important in emails. There's a lot of breadth of knowledge in doing this for fifteen plus years on both the tech and agency side of things. The best thing we can do is just get in front of people with that type of useful content that trains them up and makes our product top of mind when they decide to make that decision. The technology itself, there's a lot of organizations out there that are saturating the space, and there's differences in each and every one and even educating people on that. Why when is GiveButter a better option than Donately? I'll tell you. When is FundraiseUp or Classy? There are benefits to each, and we've all found our niche and market. Now I think the best content and the best marketing you can do is really help clients realistically compare those options and find the tool that work best for them because they're gonna find it eventually. So speed to decision making, I think, is almost like a marketing tactic that I think pans out and plays out well for us.

Mark Evans: You've got an interesting perspective because you do have the digital agency on one side of the house and Donately on the other. Do nonprofits sometimes come to you and say, Javan, listen. We're having problems engaging our donors. We need your help. Is that does that happen? And if so, what are you telling them these days?

Javan Van Gronigen: We typically talk about it as on ramps. We do a lot of things. Like, say, hey. I can holistically overhaul and do the SaaS and the products and integration. Nobody comes to us being like, we're a mess. Just take care of everything. They typically come to us saying, hey. I've either got a web problem, brand problem, SaaS, tech stack problem, and we typically force them through, an audit and strategic conversation to go to the top of all of that and recognize what the problems really are before we then go back down into the weeds and execute. Typically, that's a strategic conversation of do we have strategy in alignment, then do we have the systems in alignment, and then, okay, now we can talk specific execution of web or brand or digital or technology. So they do come to us for that. And in terms of what's working right now, it does depend on where they're at. I wanted to preface my answer with that because when we get into that larger discussion, we typically realize, like, fundraising problems, they're not fundraising problems. There's something inside of there. So it's either, hey. When we talk to people, they still don't know what you do, and you really need better key messaging, and you need to hit it everywhere. Stop going off the script, social email everywhere. That sentence should be in everything that you write. Then there might be a technical problem. It's, hey. You don't your analytics are not telling you the data that you need, and so it becomes a data problem. So there's a few different ways we lean in, find those pockets. And typically it's putting that whole system together that solves the problem. Maybe try to get a couple more examples in there. I think oftentimes tech is one of those that the data going in doesn't show up in a way that could then be automated. Now a lot of times people are behind when it comes to not having some of the AI tools, speeding up what it is they're doing. Everybody's different. I think that's where there's no one size fits all where it's, oh, hey. This trend solves I wish it was that easy.

Mark Evans: I just

Javan Van Gronigen: just do video marketing through this tool, put it on this channel. It depends on your audience, depends on all those inner working areas I've been mentioning. But if you open them all up at the same time, you'll see where the wrenches are in the gears, and it's popping those out and getting all the gears set back in place. And that's typically what we see, like a systems problem more than it is a specific fundraising issue.

Mark Evans: Final question. Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities in nonprofit fundraising technology that that no one's building yet? Probably AI. But what's your take on where that that world is going?

Javan Van Gronigen: I think my big answer will be AI related. I think the most exciting thing we're doing is what we're calling our engagement operating system. So that is taking all of this stuff and building the systems around those executions. So if anybody's curious, love to put some links with the podcast around just looking into that. How do we audit, find those holes, and help you invest in all of that together versus separating brand and digital and all these tech stacks? There's ways that we can dive in and really fix that entire system. Been a we're having a lot of success with that. But outside of that, going beyond that into what's next, I do think I hate just saying AI because it's so subjective, but I think the technology advancements and how all of that is changing, I think we're gonna see kinda autonomous fundraising fundraising where we're almost just looped into the efforts more than we are leading those efforts. I would think within the next two to three years, we're really gonna see, hey. This the ability to punch in. Hey. Here's my audience. Here are my tools. Here go build marketing channels. Go build social profiles. Go out and tell that story and do all the things you need to do, and you're just checking in with me occasionally to make sure that I'm still on the right rails. But fundraising systems that really run themselves. I think that's where where we're gonna be in with how fast everything's moving. I don't think that's that far into the future. It's really gonna be if you have a good brand that works and has an audience, it can become autonomous, and then we gotta figure out what to do with our time.

Mark Evans: That's exciting and terrifying at the same time.

Javan Van Gronigen: Final question. We're great.

Mark Evans: Where can people learn more about you and donately?

Javan Van Gronigen: Donately.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I put almost everything on LinkedIn. And follow 50and50.org. Any one of those, you'll keep pretty good track of what I'm doing. Also, donatelead.com/podcast. You can get a deal if you feel like donate lead is a good fit for your organization. We, we cut some pretty good deals for podcast listeners.

Mark Evans: Thanks for a great conversation, and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of marketing spark. If you found this conversation valuable, let's keep the momentum going. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Drop a quick rating and share it with your network. You can reach me by email at mark@markEvans.ca. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.com. Talk to you next time.