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Kestrel Linder, now 34, and his friends got chatting about how successful they were as they reached their 30s and yet were still not giving back to their alma maters. “That seemed odd to us,” he said.
“We had high paying jobs few of us had debt and if we did have debt paying off the debt was not a particularly big challenge for us and we all loved school or schools that we went to,” he continued. So, he did some research and found that over the past 20 years, a declining percentage of people in virtually every demographic have been giving to educational institutions.
“That struck us as a pretty big problem,” he said, as he described his motivation for creating GiveCampus, a “digital fundraising” platform as he calls it; the users interviewed for this article all describe it as a crowdfunding platform. Semantics aside, he and his team wanted to increase giving to education.
Today, he describes GiveCampus as the leading social fundraising and engagement platform for nonprofit educational institutions. The platform boasts about 500 school clients in 45 states.
Kestrel Linder
Credit: GiveCampusBefore launching GiveCampus, Linder was a national security consultant in Washington. “If you’d asked me five years ago, ‘What the chance that you’ll be running a tech company that helps schools raise money?’ I would have laughed,” he says.
Schools largely use the platform to support giving days, short crowdfunding campaigns like #GivingTuesday that are intended to increase the number of people giving back to the school as much as to raise money.
The company, less than four years old, is already profitable with a staff of 22 that could grow to 35 by year end, Linder says.
John Templeman, the senior director of annual giving at Case Western Reserve University, says the school has been using GiveCampus since 2016. “GiveCampus helps schools increase donations because the platform is specifically designed for higher education crowdfunding. It incorporates a quick, simple giving form along with user-friendly features such as the ability to offer matching gifts, challenge gifts and create personal plea videos.”
Caitlin James, the director of annual giving at Davidson College says the college started using the platform in 2015 for a one-day giving challenge. “The first year we used GiveCampus we saw increases in dollars and donations on our giving day.”
She notes several reasons for this. First, she says, the platform allows volunteers to participate in ways apart from giving money. “The advocacy feature gives us a clear directive for our volunteers and they are able to track the impact of their outreach.”
She also notes that the platform is mobile friendly; the gift form is also easy to complete.
As a result, she says, their success continues to grow. “We've hosted four of our five #AllinforDavidson challenges on GiveCampus and continue to see increases in volunteer engagement, donors and dollars.
GiveCampus has provided valuable strategic guidance, she says.
For example, we reduced our giving day goal from 2,500 donors/24 hours in FY16 to 2,000 donors in FY17, and actually saw our donors increase from 2,727 to 3,698. This was in response to a GiveCampus recommendation that it’s important to reach your goal earlier in the day and an observation that donations do not slow down after a campaign reaches its goal. We saw this to be true in FY17 and maintained that 2,000 donor goal in FY18 and had our most successful giving day yet with 3,747 donors and record dollars.
One key, she notes, is the way the volunteers are empowered by the platform. “Davidson’s volunteers are the foundation of our annual giving program. Peer-to-peer solicitation remains one of our most successful tactics. GiveCampus has given our volunteers clear and easy ways to participate in our giving day and allows them (and us) to track their impact.”
Melanie Earl-Replogle, the director of annual giving and stewardship at Drury University, notes the school used the GiveCampus platform for its year-end giving challenge and broke the donor record for the challenge.
Like Davidson, Drury sees the power of the platform in engaging the alumni to engage as fundraisers not just as donors. She also notes that the platform allows the school to personalize communications with its community members. “Everyone in fundraising knows the best way to ask for a gift is in person, but that’s not always possible. GiveCampus leverages technology that allows you and your donors to connect on a personal level, in a way they are used to communicating. It allows you to meet your donors and potential donors where they are - on social media and makes it so easy to give.”
She confirms James’ argument that the technology makes giving easy. “People don’t want to spend time trying to muddle through a form. GiveCampus with google pay and Apple Pay is going to revolutionize the way people make donations.”
Today, Linder’s impact on education goes far beyond a donation to his alma mater; he’s helping 500 schools to reverse the trend of declining donations.
