Grapevine (https://www.grapevine.org/)

HQ: New York, NY (Team is fully remote)

The team: Emily Rasmussen (CEO), Arrel Gray (CTO)

The problem: New tools are needed to support everyday philanthropists. Social giving and local-scale philanthropy unfolds every day. In fact, individual giving makes up nearly 70% of the $450B Americans donate annually to charitable causes. Driven by the pandemic and racial justice initiatives, a record number of individuals made small contributions last year. Even with unprecedented unemployment rates and tough circumstances, CNBC reported that three out of four millennials donated money during the pandemic.

While these individuals are ready to help find and fund not-for-profits that need them, the tools they use haven’t evolved with the times. Donations often flow through giving circles, which pool financial resources and decide together how to allocate money to charitable causes as a group. Giving circles are traditionally in-person community-based organizations, but in this digital age, there is a huge opportunity to leverage technology to more easily power the collective.

Meet Grapevine: Grapevine makes it easier for individuals or groups to find, create, manage, and grow a Giving Circle. Single donors can easily find, connect and engage with larger communities of like-minded folks. Most importantly the platform streamlines donation processing and distribution, communication, promotion all in one place — and making these administrative details easier means donors can spend more time finding important causes to support. Grapevine just celebrated its 1-year anniversary of launching Giving Circles and $3M raised for nonprofits.

Why we’re betting on it: Today, there are over 2,500 giving circles (in all 50 states and worldwide), which have reportedly given out $1.3 billion. Grapevine offers easier member management, payment and settlement processing, and materials for communications and helps improve this experience exponentially. Nonprofits can easily collect these funds and get exposure to new donors. And there’s room for even more growth — corporations and nonprofits can set up their own Giving Circles on Grapevine to engage and expand their communities through social impact.

And while every generation is giving, millennials lead other age groups in the level of charitable giving, volunteering and activism. Their desire to make an impact on the world and see their philanthropic activity is an important part of their identity. The millennial demographic is most likely to give a few extra dollars to offset the processing fees associated with their gift. 63.6% said they would add that money to their gift! And as we know by the proliferation of direct-to-consumer startups marketed directly to millennials, they want their services to be as simple as possible.

Grapevine’s founders set off to build an online fundraising platform that would modernize giving for the next generations of philanthropists and make it that much easier. Emily spent 10 years in microfinance and nonprofit fundraising and saw first-hand the challenges that nonprofits faced in raising funds. Arrel has a great product sense and a deep understanding of the e-commerce technology stack from his experiences having had three venture-backed startups with three exits (Wonderschool, Soldsie and 17Feet) under his belt. As giving circles and social philanthropy continues to take off, donors will demand a better experience . . . and Grapevine is there.

Our take:  Philanthropy is more powerful when it is digitally enabled. The ability to purpose-build funds to go directly to a community and see the direct impact your dollar is making is huge. Sure, most social media sites have fundraising features — but these platforms aren’t built for the end-to-end experience of discovering charitable organizations and creating community around them.

We see a future where millions of individuals across the country are members of at least one giving circle, with the ease of clicking to donate on a regular basis. Grapevine’s platform will be a key driver in this shift to social and community-based giving today and in the years to come.

Please join us and join Overton’s Newly Launched Giving Circle here.

Grapevine is actively hiring for community support, growth, and software engineering members to join the team. Learn more about open roles here.