Today Forbes Magazine’s Meghan Casserly tackled the topic of female entrepreneurs and the challenges they face.  The article featured a number of “Female Entrepreneurs to Watch” including our very own Desiree Vargas Wrigley.

Desiree is excited to be in such great company and is honored by the recognition.  Thanks Meghan!

Female Founders: Overcoming The Cupcake Challenge And ‘Mompreneur’ Stigma

Lost among all the buzz about the uber-funded successes of Gilt Groupe, Beautylish and Etsy, three successful online businesses which rely heavily–if not exclusively–on the power of the female click and credit card, is the fact that all three companies were actually founded by men. No, the founding owners were not Alexis Maybank, Mariam Naficy and Maria Thomas, but rather Kevin Ryan, Vu Nguyen and Rob Kalin, respectively.

While there are several prominent women who have launched their own startups and received VC funding–including Amanda Steinberg of DailyWorth,  Rashmi Sinah, co-founder of SlideShare, Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar, Caterina Fake who co-founded Flickr and spearheaded Hunch.com–over 90% of VC money goes to men, even for businesses with a female consumer base.

Gallery: Ten Female Entrepreneurs To Watch

Why? Is a female-led venture more of a gamble? Is it that women just don’t fit the mold in an industry that places its bets based on what’s known as “pattern recognition?”

Click here to read the full article.

This weekend, the Chicago Tribune took a closer look at crowdfunding, GiveForward, and some of our World Give Day partners.

The Trib spoke with GiveForward, 33needs, EduLender, and IndieGoGo to get an inside look at how crowdfunding is changing the face of philanthropy….

Funding from the masses: Startups try to harness social networks to raise money

At first blush, crowd-funding may sound like just another attempt to raise money online by getting as many visitors as possible to donate to a cause.

But a growing number of startups see the landscape differently. They see the potential that social networks have to raise money in ways that align with how younger generations practice philanthropy.

Click here for full article.

A new trend is emerging in the tech industry.  As today’s Crain’s Chicago Business discusses, venture capitalists are foregoing Silicon Valley and looking a lot closer to home for new tech investments.  Among the growing companies offering investment opportunities is GiveForward.

Here is an excerpt from the article, to read the full story please head over to Crain’s.

Chicago is a far cry from Silicon Valley, but local VCs see fresh investment opportunities

There is romance brewing between Chicago’s venture capitalists and its web-tech entrepreneurs. It’s hardly love at first sight, though: For years, tech startups have tried to impress their deep-pocketed neighbors, only to despair when local VC firms looked elsewhere to fill out their portfolios.

Chicago is still far from a high-tech hub, and investors and entrepreneurs still look to the coasts for opportunities. But there are signs that Chicago’s web-business community is maturing, and investors are taking notice.

……

We’re giving a big shout out to Tammy Tibbetts, President of She’s the First.  Together Tammy and her organization are helping girls rock and using GiveForward to make it happen.

As Tammy described in her Huffington Post article, her organization is focused on supporting education for girls around the world and one universal language they all share is music.

During Internet Week New York, She’s the First held a benefit concert called GIRLS WHO ROCK to help raise money to educate girls in an AfricAid project.  By utilizing GiveForward and social media to spread the word and gather donations, they managed to bring in $6,000 which funded six full years of education for three girls.

We’re so proud of Tammy and the work done by She’s the First.  Keep rockin’ girls!

Tammy Tibbetts

President, She’s the First

Posted: February 22, 2011 12:32 PM

Music is Universal, Education Should Be Too

Girls around the world fascinate me endlessly. Although I’m 25, I’m able to develop a bond, and an awareness of their dreams, through social media. I’m focused on girls in my day job, where I tweet for a teen magazine, and after hours, when I’m burning the midnight oil working on She’s the First, a not-for-profit supporting girls’ education, and its benefit concert, GIRLS WHO ROCK.

One of my favorite girl stories from last week starts with Lady Gaga. If you’re among her 8 million followers, you may have seen her tweet, “Can’t stop crying watching this. This is why I make music. She is the future.” She linked to a video that’s now a YouTube phenomenon: 10-year-old Maria’s cover of Gaga’s new single “Born This Way.” Maria’s rendition, sung while playing her keyboard and wearing a plain white T-shirt, is the purest version of the original, which Gaga first performed when she broke out of an egg on stage the Grammys. Isn’t it amazing how universal music is?

Here’s another highlight: In an email I received on Saturday from Elizabeth David, the 18-year-old Tanzanian girl sponsored by GIRLS WHO ROCK, the benefit concert for She’s the First during Internet Week New York, she wrote, “My favourite musicians are Jordin Sparks, Beyonce, Bruno Mars, Willow Smith, and Shontelle.” In a country where more than half of the population subsists on less than $1 per day, there is still a following for the same artists I listen to on my iPod. Music is universal.

It was the realization that education is not universal that led me to create She’s the First with a team of Millennial women in November 2009. She’s the First sponsors girls in the developing world who will be the first in their family to graduate — maybe even the first to read and write. Did you know that of the 130 million children in the world who are not in school (an atrocity in itself), 70% are girls? In countries like Tanzania, where Elizabeth is from, 95% of girls don’t graduate secondary school. Yet research shows educating girls results in healthier, happier families and communities and stronger economies. You can read about the high return on investment in TIME magazine’s Feb. 14th article, “To Fight Poverty, Invest in Girls,” or at length in the book Half the Sky by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

She’s the First is a social-media-enabled, grassroots response to this global call to action. We partner with NGOs already working with local communities to provide education in the poorest of countries. We help our partners tap into an enthusiastic, creative donor base that they may have overlooked: Millennials, or teens, college students, and young professionals, those born between 1980 and 1995. Our supporters creatively fundraise among their social circles — whether it’s a game night fundraiser in their NYC apartment (one sponsored six girls in Tanzania) or tie-dye cupcake bake sales in their dorms (University of Notre Dame students raised $900 to sponsor three girls in Nepal). We understand most of our donors can only afford $10 here, $20 there — money they might otherwise budget for entertainment. But together, we can change a girl’s life trajectory with these small donations.

Our marquee event, the benefit concert GIRLS WHO ROCK, is one of our best ways of showing the philanthropic power of our generation. Last year, our first concert — produced entirely on volunteer effort and in-kind donations — raised $6,000, funding six full years of education for three girls in AfricAid’s Kisa Project. With a Facebook event and @GirlsWhoRockNY Twitter feed pushing ticket sales, as well as Live Tweets, Livestreaming, and online donations through giveforward.org and eventbrite.com, we showed how online action drives offline impact. Year-round, we show our donors how their support has impacted Elizabeth and her classmates Happiness and Grace, by publishing emails, photos, and videos to the She’s the First blog. My co-founder Cynthia Hellen devised our tagline, “Music is universal. Education should be, too,” and it couldn’t strike a deeper chord.

In 2011, we aim to make GIRLS WHO ROCK bigger and better, to benefit another girls’ sponsorship program. The journey is just beginning, so no matter where you live, we invite you to rock the world for girls’ education with us by following @GirlsWhoRockNY and @shesthefirst on Twitter and Facebook. That’s the first step.

Now, speaking of Twitter, I’ll admit that I was monitoring the feed for @shesthefirst while writing this post. A 13-year-old Tweeter/YouTuber started following us. Her dream? To be president of the United States. Her location? The White House (someday). Her Twitter background? A photo of Sasha and Malia Obama going to school. I couldn’t ask for a better illustration: Anything is possible with an education.

GiveForward co-founder Ethan Austin sat down with Robbie Abed of The Startup Foundry to talk a little about GiveForward’s mission and how far we’ve come in a short amount of time.

From 1 visitor a day to raising $4m for charity, Give Forward’s feel good story
by Robbie Abed on Feb 17, 2011 • 3:45 pm View Comments

I had the great opportunity to speak with Ethan Austin, co-founder of GiveForward (http://www.giveforward.org). Give Forward is a Chicago based startup that helps people raise money for their medical expenses. Ethan speaks about how they once had only 1 visitor on new years day, to being able to get funding a year later. The excerpt of the interview is below:

In one or two sentences, explain what GiveForward does.
GiveForward is a crowdfunding platform for medical expenses. In a nutshell, we make it incredibly easy for friends and family raise money for things like chemotherepy treatments or organ transplants when their loved one gets sick.

How long has Give Forward been around?
We launched in 2008.

Was Give Forward bootstrapped or funded?
We bootstrapped for the first two-and-a-half years but recently got funding.

Explain what the first 0-6 months were like for Give Forward. How did you get it off the ground?
Wow! To say the first six months were rough would be a massive understatment. We launched the site in August of 2008 and on January 1st, 2009 we had one visitor on GiveForward that day — literally ONE visitor! For the most part, our attempts at gaining traction involved coercing our friends and family to start fundraising pages. I enlisted about 25 of my college buddies and their girlfriends to run 5 miles through Central Park for the cause of their choice in in an event we dubbed “run for a reason” . I think we helped raise about $13,000 from the event, which probably accounted for like half of the donations on the site the first six months. It was kind of ridiculous back then.

We really didn’t start to see any traction on the site until about nine months in when two Chicago sisters from Depaul used GiveForward to raise $30,000 for a kidney transplant. After that, we received some media coverage and things started to pick up a bit.

[Editors note:] Give Forward has already raised $3,527,462 for medical expenses and other important causes. Talk about a startup making an impact on the world![/Editors note:]

How did you acquire funding. Was a prototype built before funding?
Last summer, we got accepted into a Chicago startup accelerator called Excelerate Labs, which turned out to be a game changer for us. Through Excelerate, we were able to demo at the House of Blues in front of 500 investors from around the county. My partner, Desiree, gave a pretty awesome presentation which really opened the doors for us. From there, Tim Krauskopf, one of the mentors at Excelerate helped us round up some investors. We also used Angel List, which I highly recommend, to secure the final part of our round.

How big is the team?
We have a team of seven right now plus a few really awesome interns.

Being a Chicago startup, do you find it harder to succeed then if you were in silicon valley as an example
Not at all. I know it’s a cliche, but the Chicago startup community is really coming into its own right now. Groupon has obviously helped to bring a ton of attention to Chicago, but things like Excelerate Labs, MidVentures Tech Week, and Social Dev Camp are changing the landscape in Chicago and helping to build a strong community here. Granted, funding is always going to be an issue and there is no Sand Hill Road in Chicago, but with tools like Angel List democratizing the VC industry, the need to be in Silicon Valley isn’t nearly as great as it used to be.

What is your biggest challenge now?
Educating people and getting the word out. That’s always been the hardest part. When a loved one is going through a serious health issue like cancer, their friends and family usually feel pretty helpless and don’t know what they can do to help. Our goal is make sure they are aware of our service. Once people find out about GiveForward, they always love it. We just need to let more people know about it.

Thanks to Ethan for the interview. All the best to GiveForward. For more startup news, follow us on twitter @startupfoundry.

You can also follow the author on twitter @robbieab.

BuzzRaid.com is a website that reviews startups and websites.  Recently, they posted a review about GiveForward that provides an objective look at our company and the services we provide.

Feel free to check out the site here or read the review below for more information on what they consider our strengths and details on how they believe we can continue to work to expand on the services we provide.

A big thanks to BuzzRaid for taking the time to evaluate GiveForward.

GiveForward – Fundraising for Out-Of-Pocket Medical Expenses

GiveForward located at giveforward.com is a startup that is focused on making it easy for people to have fundraisers to cover out-of-pocket medical expenses as well as pets medical expenses and other causes. The company has claimed to help raise over $3.5 million so far (since 08?) for families with out-of-pocket medical expenses.

The company has investments from Tim Krauskopf, Ed Chandler, New World Ventures, David Cohen, Social Leverage and Excelerate Labs. GiveForward is located in Chicago, Illinois.

Why It Could Be Big:
There are plenty of people out there who are having trouble with outrageous medical expenses for life-saving surgeries that may not be covered by their insurance. If GiveForward can help people with these expenses during tough times it can help a large number of families and become a stable business at the same time. At this point they charge a 7% fee which may seem a little high but does include the credit card fees of 2.5%+ as well as SSL encryption and more. The amount they take is less than most traditional charities and having stable revenue will let the company expand with more options instead of having to scrape by and end up closing like many in this space have.

GiveForward looks to have a good plan in place to verify campaigns which would be one of my main concerns when donating money. They verify personal information as well as talk to references and do their own research. There is typically no fool-proof model to completely stop fraud but the process they have in place should weed out almost all. Overall GiveForward could be big if they can continue to make it a simple process to start and manage fundraisers while adding in social aspects to help it spread through Twitter and Facebook.

We are very excited to announce GiveForward has raised $500,000 in its first round of funding.

After meeting some fantastic people during our participation in Excelerate, we were able to do some creative fundraising and are now ready to expand on the services we currently provide.  With this backing we will now be able to grow our team and bring on additional fundraising coaches so we can continue to provide the best service possible to our fundraisers.

Feel free to check out the story featured in the Chicago Tribune, TechCrunch and FastCompany:

Chicago startup GiveForward raises $500K

By Wailin Wong
Posted today at 8:45 a.m.

GiveForward, a Chicago-based startup that helps people raise money for out-of-pocket medical expenses, has raised $500,000 in its first round of funding.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley and Ethan Austin started GiveForward in 2008 and had looked for some funding at that time, but “what we kept hearing from investors is: ‘You should be a non-profit,’” Vargas Wrigley said. She and Austin funded the company themselves, with Vargas Wrigley waiting tables at Cafe Ba Ba Reeba in Lincoln Park in the meantime.

The GiveForward platform allows people to create personalized fundraising pages and share their cause through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. GiveForward collects the donations, which can be done through credit or debit cards, and passes them along to the beneficiary after deducting 7 percent for processing fees. The company said its users have raised $3.5 million since the company’s inception and about 10,000 users have joined the site, with almost half of them signing up in the last six months.

In 2010, GiveForward was one of 10 companies chosen for the inaugural class of Excelerate, a Chicago-based program that awards funding to startups and provides mentorship from experienced investors and entrepreneurs. Through the Excelerate program, Vargas Wrigley and Austin connected with Tim Krauskopf, a serial entrepreneur and former Motorola Inc. executive who had co-founded Spyglass Inc., the software firm that developed the basis for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

Krauskopf gave the GiveForward team advice and cultivated a group of investors behind the scenes. He became the lead investor for the company’s fundraising round, which also includes several angel investors and New World Ventures, the Chicago venture capital firm that invests on behalf of the Pritzker family.

“There are a lot of fantastic new tech ventures coming out of Chicago right now and GiveForward is one of the best,” Krauskopf said in a statement. “It is a truly viral service that leverages social networking for a real, productive purpose.”

The $500,000 will allow GiveForward to expand its staff. Austin and Vargas Wrigley drew their first paychecks in January and recently hired a marketing employee and an in-house developer. Vargas Wrigley said the startup plans to hire another five to seven people this year, with most of them serving as fundraising coaches that work one-on-one with the site’s users.

GiveForward also plans to work more closely with hospitals and private clinics so doctors and nurses can recommend GiveForward to the families of patients that might be struggling financially or could benefit from the support of an online community, Vargas Wrigley said.

Vargas Wrigley said her startup’s success in getting funding speaks to how “the funding climate is changing in Chicago.”

“Companies really can be mission-driven or social ventures and still produce return,” she said.

GiveForward Raises $500K To Be The Kickstarter For Medical Expenses

By Leena Rao
Posted today at 2:40 p.m.

GiveForward, an online fundraising tool for medical expenses, has raised $500,000 in funding from Tim Krauskopf, New World Ventures, David Cohen, Ed Chandler, Social Leverage and Excelerate Labs.

GiveForward, which was incubated in Chicago’s Excelerate Labs, wants to become the Kickstarter for medical expenses. The platform allows anyone to create customizable fundraising pages where friends and family from across the world can donate online.

To make money, GiveForward deducts 7 percent of all donations. Since 2008, 10,000 users have joined GiveForward with the startup helping families raise nearly $3.5 million for their loved ones’ out-of-pocket medical expenses. GiveForward also gives users tips on fundraising, allows them to socialize their pages on Facebook and Twitter and more.

For more information about BBB accreditation:  Click here.

Alex French from Details Magazine highlighted GiveForward in a recent article about “Entrepreneurial America: Seven Cities that have caught startup fever”.

GiveForward was mentioned alongside Groupon and Threadless as leading the pack of Chicago-based startup websites.

Thanks for the shoutout, Details!

Congratulations to our awesome GiveForward community member, Joe Curtin! He was featured in the Wall Street Journal for his altruistic work in Nepal! We spoke with Joe about how he found GiveForward, and it’s definitely an interesting story.

While making a 112-day road trip he had always dreamed about, Joe re-connected with a woman he had met at a wedding several years prior, and the two agreed to keep in touch. Shortly after the road trip ended, Joe traveled to Asia for a while. He found Nepal to be especially eye-opening, and after deciding to help this poverty-stricken community of people who had been so hospitable, all he could think about upon his return to the US was: “how on earth can I raise money for a school half a word away?”

Joe mentioned this dilemma to his friend from the wedding and she told him that she had been using GiveForward to raise money for a friend with an ill daughter. “That was the first I heard of GiveForward, and the rest is history,” Joe says.

This month, Mr. Curtin will give $11,000 to the Nabin Primary School in the Kavre district of Nepal, enabling it to purchase a plot of land and to build a new building and playground.

Joe Curtin

“I told him I wanted to quit my job and join the Peace Corps, and he said you don’t have to wait for a government agency, just pack your bags, fly to a country and start working,” Mr. Curtin says.

So he did just that: He quit his job with aerospace and defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. and flew to Nepal for two weeks.

“I didn’t think I was adding much value to the world by sitting at a desk, and I’d had enough of the corporate world,” Mr. Curtin says. “In Nepal, I met the most generous people in the world who have very little, and I wanted to do something to help.”

After visiting a number of organizations across the country, he came to the Nabin Primary School and learned of the school’s intention to build a new school and playground. Without purchasing the privately owned land, estimated at $11,000, he said, the school would not have been able to qualify for a number of government programs and grants.

A spokesman for the World Bank said Nabin is one of thousands of government-run schools across Nepal receiving funds and training from the United Nations Children’s Fund in partnership with the country’s Department of Education.

“Eleven thousand dollars is nothing in the Western World,” Mr. Curtin says. “In Nepal, where the average person lives on a few dollars a day, it seemed implausible.”

When he returned home in October, he says he solicited friends, family members and “anyone else he could reach” to collect money through the fund-raising Web site GiveForward.com.

Within two months, he had reached his goal of $11,000, and he intends to continue raising money through February. In the spring, Mr. Curtin will volunteer with the Peace Corps in South America.