GiveForward

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.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve got two new team members, Chris McKeever, Director of IT and Cate Conroy, Director of Marketing.

Chris hails from New York and went to school in Massachusetts, but he’s been doing his thing in Chicago for quite some time now. Prior to GiveForward, Chris spent 10 years doing various forms of IT for the real estate industry. This chapter of his life really began with a stint as the Director of Technology for Prudential Real Estate – Chicago. From there, Chris moved on to eventually become the Managing Director for the Center for Real Estate Technology (CRT) before joining GiveForward.  When Chris saw that GiveForward was looking for a new team member he was excited by the possibility of joining a start-up and helping define GiveForward’s online presence; plus free burritos never hurt. Aside from burritos and computer code, Chris enjoys Einstein Bagels, “two-for-one movies on miserable weekend afternoons,” DOTS, and spending time with his dog, Karma.

A fifth generation Chicago-an, Cate is excited to join the GiveForward team and have a positive impact on the community she knows and loves. A news nerd at heart, Cate worked as a local news producer for ABC News for a few years before moving into marketing.  After spending a few years working for a Chicago-based tech company, Cate was introduced to GiveForward and jumped at the chance to join the team.  Now, when she’s not tweeting, blogging or marketing on behalf of GiveForward, she can be found training for her next marathon with her dog, Teddy, or attempting to bake a new gluten free treat (which she then forces everyone in the GF offices to taste-test).

For more information about BBB accreditation:  Click here.

Kairol Rosenthal is here today to share with us an easy-to-understand guide to the newest health insurance changes.  Kairol was diagnosed with cancer at 27 and discovered two days later she had been dropped by her insurance.  Since then, she has spent the last decade fighting for her own health insurance, advocating for other young adult cancer patients, and researching and writing Everything Changes: The Insider’s Guide to Cancer in Your 20s and 30s.  Take it away Kairol:

If you are confused by the new changes to health insurance that happened last week, you aren’t alone.  Yes, it takes some energy gnawing through this red tape lingo, but it is well worth the energy and I’ve tried to simplify it.  Why?  Because it might save you money and even save your life.

read more…

As members of a young startup ourselves, we here at GiveForward always love to see other new companies doing well. It’s especially cool when we find out about these companies through their use of our site, as is the case with Wishadoo!, an exciting free service that enables its users to connect with others to help people fulfill their wishes.

Despite its newness on the scene, Wishadoo! has already had one successful fundraiser on our site, with Teeth for Rocky bringing in nearly $1,800. The ongoing Dental Services for MagickMuffin fundraiser also appears to be headed for success, and the Wishadoo! group page has already raised more then $2,200.

Wishadoo! founder Dena Patrick likes to call her site “a CraigsList of Compassion,” and we love that because we are totally enamored with anything and everything CraigsList these days. So far, Dena seems to be pretty enamored with GiveForward too, so everybody wins.

“I searched for over a year, looking for a good symbiotic partner of sorts for Wishadoo! community members to use when fundraising is needed,” Dena says. “GiveForward met all the criteria I was searching for, and the platform has worked beautifully thus far. I also appreciate [GiveForward’s] mission, as it’s very much in alignment with that of Wishadoo!, which is also a social entrepreneurial venture. Indeed, both are about providing tools in order to create and empower communities in a variety of ways [and] with integrity.”

GiveForward is looking for bright, enthusiastic, highly-motivated rising juniors, seniors, new graduates and grad students who want to really sink their teeth into a project and run with it.  You must have excellent writing and communication skills, and a sense of humor is a REQUIREMENT. Additionally, the ability to finish a two pound burrito from Chipotle in one sitting is viewed favorably (see below).

If you are interested in applying, please send a resume and a short cover letter explaining why you want to work with us to jobs@giveforward.org.

Please include which position you are applying for in the subject line. We are currently hiring for the following positions:

This could be you...

Fundraising Coach Extraordinaire: Are you a fundraising king or queen? Do you enjoy helping people and coming up with creative ways to raise money for good causes? If so, you could be perfect for this position.

We need someone who is an excellent communicator both with emails and on the phone.

Responsibilities will include:

* Working closely with individuals and organizations to help them better understand the ins and outs of online fundraising  (don’t worry, if you don’t know the ins and outs, we’ll teach you)

* Reaching out to new users to help them do a better job of fundraising

* Serving as the “face” of GiveForward to the Giveforward community and the outside world

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As many of you faithful readers already know, the GiveForward interns are preparing to face off against the Imerman Angels interns in an epic burrito eating contest.

In an effort to strengthen the weakest member of the team (me), GiveForward brought in a world-class competitive eating coach. Watch what happened, show it to all your friends and family, and (if you’re in the Chicago area) come out to see if it paid off tomorrow!

Who: GiveForward interns vs. Imerman Angels interns
What: First Annual Burrito Battle Royale
When: 1:00 p.m. on July 28, 2010
Where: Chipotle (6 W Grand Ave, Chicago, IL)

Those in the Chicago area are strongly encouraged to come cheer us on. Those who just want to help a good cause, regardless of geographic location, can make a donation here and get one of our team jerseys (aka a Giveasaurus T-shirt) in return. All of the money raised will be donated to Imerman Angels, a non-profit cancer support organization that cannot beat us in an eating competition but has proven to be amazing at helping people beat cancer.

We’ve had a number of fundraisers on GiveForward for people with colon cancer. We’ve obviously enjoyed helping those people, and we’re now very excited to reach out to even more folks with this awful disease by partnering with the Colorectal Cancer Coalition, “a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy organization that fights colorectal cancer through research, empowerment and access.”

C3 is a great organization that helps a lot people, and we are very proud to have the opportunity to help them help others. Just today, they posted a blog about how the “uninsured with rectal cancer are more likely to die,” and we are really hoping we can change that by helping all those uninsured patients raise the money they need to get proper treatment. For more information on how you can help this cause, check out their website at http://www.fightcolorectalcancer.org.

At the ill-advised request of GiveForward Co-founders Desiree Vargas Wrigley and Ethan Austin, I will now be making a semi-regular post on this blog that has a little more to do with things that make me laugh, and a little less to do with things like online fundraising for medical costs (or any other reason you would come to this site). read more…

As the seasons change, so too do the faces atop the hard-working bodies around the GiveForward office. In other (much better) words, a new crop of interns has arrived for the summer, and we want to get electronically acquainted with the site’s users.

In order to make this happen, I conquered my fear of talking to women and chatted up each of the ladies surrounding me in the trenches. And when I say I chatted them up, I mean I e-mailed them all a questionnaire and then used/butchered their responses to shape the following bios.

Also, to liven things up a bit, we’ve decided to play a little game with you all that some of you may be familiar with: “Two Truths and a Lie.” Essentially, each of us will give three one-sentence-long statements about ourselves or our lives. Two of these statements will be completely true, and one will be at least partially false. The first person to correctly pick out the lie from each intern by July 12 will get a FREE Giveasaurus t-shirt! To compete, you may submit your guesses as a comment on this blog, via e-mail at dshar@giveforward.org, or on our Facebook page.
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