How Giv Is Transforming Sales and Marketing with Charitable Giving

In this episode of Curve Ahead, host Brian Wiles interviews Dan Locke, co-founder of Give, about the innovative platform that integrates philanthropy into sales and marketing. Dan shares how Give helps businesses build authentic connections through purpose-driven outreach, turning every interaction into an opportunity to make an impact.

Key Takeaways:
✅ The power of emotional connection in sales and marketing
✅ Leveraging charitable giving for lead generation and relationship-building
✅ Insights into multi-sided marketplaces and their challenges
✅ Why philanthropic companies recruit and retain employees more effectively

Tune in for practical advice and inspiring ideas on using purpose to drive business success.

Transcript

0:00

Hey, Dan, welcome to the podcast. Do you mind introducing yourself? Sure. My name is Dan Locke. I'm the co founder and CEO of give, a platform that integrates charity into sales and marketing tactics in a new way. Do you mind getting into your background a little bit and what led you to think about the idea for give? Sure. I have a pretty diversified business background. After going to undergrad at Brandeis University, I was a psych major. I went to business school, got an MBA and Master of Science of Information Systems at Boston University, and then went to work for a consulting company called Pyramid Research, where I was an industry analyst in telecom and media and pretty quickly was getting interviewed in the press and got to speak at conferences around the world about mobile broadband technologies and the Internet of things. This is in like 2006. After. After that, I worked in corporate finance for Constant Contact, which at the time was one of the first SaaS companies to go public. And I became an expert in retention and retention strategy. And I moved over into an operational role before I was recruited to work for BigCommerce in Austin, Texas, which at the time was a startup. I was probably around the 75th employee. They're a public company today. But I was there to lead their retention strategy. And I got recruited by a boss from Constant Contact, and he actually died suddenly three months into me being there. And it's pretty sad. From there, I got to report to pretty much every C level at certain point in the company, or a lot of them. So I went from customer success to marketing, sales, and I got to really understand all aspects of a SaaS business and also got a little bit into product research and user experience research as well. While I was there, invested in a concept pizza concept that my friend from Brandeis was starting in Santa Barbara, California, and I wound up moving to Santa Barbara, where we started a franchising business out of the original restaurant concept. And we grew it to seven units in California, Texas, Chicago, and we basically started running out of cash. And we wound up merging with another brand that was doing the same thing that was doing it on the East Coast. And together we opened about 35 franchises all around the country. And however, most of the locations went out of business during COVID There's still a few left, but learned a ton just about after coming from SaaS. Franchising is actually not that dissimilar. Even though it's brick and mortar, it's a recurring revenue model. But I was in charge of all of our technology. So at first I was a cfo and I was raising money from our investors and led us through the merger. But after that I was also the most technical in the company. So I was in charge of all of the point of sale implementations with Toast and we used a couple other ones as well and was also in charge of all the third party integrations with like Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, EasyCater, our website online ordering and oversaw the product development of our mobile app and integration with loyalty programs. So a lot of my expertise in implementing those came from my SaaS background. But I wound up moving back to Boston from Santa Barbara right shortly before the pandemic. And I got a job with EasyCater, which I just mentioned as their as a director of marketing strategy, but got laid off about, I don't know, right after Covid started. So I wound up traveling to Mexico and working from there during a lot of COVID and then started a consulting business as a fractional CFO for startups. And then I started give about two years ago with my best friend of 25 years. So I also met at Brandeis and it was really, I'd say, his idea. He's someone that's been in relationship driven sales in oil and gas. And were at a Red Sox game just talking about life and what we wanted to do with our careers. And we talked about times at companies where we got to volunteer and how that led to us making good friendships at those companies. And then Jeremy Funk, my co founder, he somehow we got into a discussion about marketplace business models because I had just learned a lot about marketplaces from EasyCader. And marketplace business models are tough. It's like you're running two businesses at once. You've got supply and you have demand and you need a marketing strategy and sales team sometimes for both. And we had recently heard about a concept called Intro Co, which had raised about $10 million I think. And Intro is a platform where business leaders and experts create a profile and they just make themselves available for a certain rate to meet with anybody. There's a lot of tech founders on there. And we thought, well, why can't we just do the same thing for a charitable marketplace where instead of paying an expert, the expert would just pick a charity and they would be essentially volunteering their time. And oh, I looked at one detail. He had seen somebody that he was friends with oil and gas, donate like $1,000 to get a meeting with like a high level executive at so Exxon or some big oil company. And you know, I was fresh off of EasyCater in the marketplace model and had seen intro and I'm like, let's just, let's go for it. So I had wanted to start a tech company of my own. I didn't have any great ideas and I had learned a lot from being a fractional CFO about different mistakes that startups make. And we made a ton of mistakes in the pizza franchising business. Saw a lot of mistakes, made it big commerce and constant contact and easy cater and just thought, you know, I kind of understand all sides of a startup. And so we decided to go for it. We hired a team india to build it out and it turned out to be a disaster. So we had to. 50,000 later, we had to throw the tech in the trash and start over. But so we hire. Well, first we hired a developer to lead the MVP and then we hired another outsourced team and things are going really well now. That is a great story. Very thorough background. No, it's awesome. I definitely pulled some things out of there. The first being, I was actually just having the conversation, a conversation yesterday about how challenging marketplaces were originally one of the ideas that I wanted to pursue as a marketplace until I realized that I was having to sell to two different groups. And I was just like, this is not going to be successful at all. There, there's the barrier entry. To focus on selling to two different groups means that you need to pick one or the other and hope that if you're successful in one place that you can get the resources on the other side to kind of match up with what it is that you're trying to achieve. And so I just had the realization earlier on. I was like, this just isn't, is not going to work for me to be successful in the business that I want to run. Chicken in the egg. And it's like the formula for infinity. Right. And for infinity is one divided by zero. And you need some sort of big bang to almost spark it and create adoption on both sides in the marketplace. And you know, some marketplaces are even more complicated. If you take a restaurant marketplace, for example, there's three sides because there's also delivery drivers. Yeah. And what we've built with give actually is, I think that it's, I don't think there's a term for what it is. It's actually like a quadruple sided marketplace, if that makes sense. Because there's two ways that you can use it and there's a fundraising side and then there's a donation offer side. So on the donation offer side, a salesperson or a marketer is trying to get either contact information or schedule a meeting with a prospect. The charity receives a donation, but. So they're on the third side of that side of the marketplace. But the sales and marketing person is the one on the side that wants something. So they're essentially the buyer, but the seller is the person who's giving up their time and their information. But they're not actually selling anything. They're choosing a charity to receive the payment. So that's one side of give. The other side, on the fundraising side is somebody that is in demand who creates a page to fundraise and then they send their page to people that want their attention. So it's, it works in the opposite direction as the donation offer side in terms of who the user is. But in general, it's always whoever wants the meeting makes a donation, whether or not, regardless of who the user of a Give landing page is. So let me make sure that I'm following along on kind of the business premise here. And I'm just going to kind of regurgitate this as If I'm an 8 year old. So regardless of who I'm wanting to meet with. So say I, in this hypothetical wanted to meet with you, I would donate funds to be able to facilitate that meeting. Correct? Right. So you would send me a link to your scheduling page. Right. Just like you would send a calendly link. Sure. And on it would be a few choices of charities that you think I would care for and a personal note that says why you chose those. But I can still pick any charity. We have a database, about 30,000 charities. I can still pick anyone I want, but it's like you're offering me a gift or a gift card to get my time. And instead of me receiving an Amazon gift card, the same amount just goes to the charity that I choose. So the gift is just really my choice. And it's a way to target socially conscious business people, but it's also a way for you to connect with me on an emotional level. So, like, what's missing in sales and marketing outreach, especially today with AI and automation, is emotional connection. It's harder and harder to build real, authentic relationships. And frankly, every time I get pitched by a junior salesperson, they just go right into the pitch like there's no, you know, getting to know me at all. And give facilitates that. Because when you send me your give link, you have a charity on it that you're showing that you care for, and you're suggesting that could be one that I choose out of. Right. So let's say that you saw that I, I'm from Boston, so you might say, dan, I thought you might care for the Boston Children's Hospital. Right. So. And on your page, you're able to show that you also care for Boston Children's Hospital and what that does, especially if I have demonstrated volunteer experience on my LinkedIn or somewhere. Now you're like pulling up my heartstrings. And now imagine if I was somebody who's on the board of a nonprofit, too, and a business leader. Then people that are on the boards of nonprofits are actually responsible for raising money. So that's where it's really effective is, hey, I'd like to meet with you to pitch. You know, I'm selling widgets, but I also noticed you volunteer for Make a Wish. And let me tell you why that's important to me. I'd like to hear why it's important to you on our call before I break into business. So it gives kind of that immediate availability of being able to make a more personalized connection with the other person on the call. Exactly. So that's how salespeople use it. Marketers could use it on a website where it's just a. An additional call to action instead of everywhere on your website saying, book a demo, contact us, download a white paper. There's only so many calls to action and not 97% of B2B site visitors don't click a call to action and leave their information. Companies are missing out on so much web traffic of people that are maybe early on in their buying experience and they're not. The marketers are not collecting their information. You can put a button or you can integrate the give nonprofit directory into a website and you can simply say, you know, we're, you know, you can demonstrate we're a philanthropic company. We're into social impact. Click this to choose a charity and drop your, you know, drop your email and you'll get to choose a charity. We'll donate five bucks, you know, just as an extra incentive for leaving that contact information. Or another way would be in a marketing automation sequence. Right. There's only so many calls to action you can put in a marketing automation sequence. You don't always know. You might be able to analyze that someone opened your email, but it's not really that accurate. Like a lot of the times, it could be a filter that's showing that you opened it and you really didn't. So how do you prove that someone actually read the content of your email and it's really engaging with your brand? Right. They have to click something. So you could also just say, hey, you already picked the American Cancer Society from our website. That's how we got your information. We'd like to donate to them again, but click here and just let us know that you read all the content in the email. Right. It's always like exchange for something. That's how that side of the platform works. The other side of the platform is meant to be used by business leaders who just want to promote that they're fundraising to their business audiences. So many business leaders run the marathon or do like the Alzheimer's walk and raise money for different charities. Right. But it's not. You don't see GoFundMe pages very often on LinkedIn. So what give is meant to do is the fundraising platform for business people to post on LinkedIn, to put in their email signatures, to put on in their book an appointment link, and where you can either ask for optional donations from your page or you can require a donation from a page, meaning someone won't be able to meet with you or schedule a meeting unless they donate on your page. But in that case, your charity's already chosen. Right. It's just your Make a Wish page. And had a really interesting case study we're developing where a business leader used it. And to his surprise, he realized it's a recruiting tool because he did a post on LinkedIn and the woman that donated, he was like, I want to hire this woman. And it made him realize that, you know, the first five, ten minutes of the call that talked about Make a Wish. And then, you know, she asked him about his background as a sales leader, but he also was looking for information about the healthcare industry because his company's thinking of going into a certain vertical. The. The woman seemed like a really great candidate for a potential salesperson because she was a cultural fit and she showed a lot of interest because she paid essentially to meet with him. Right. But she also was donating and demonstrated that she. They had shared values. So it's always a way to foster a relationship, get to know somebody on a more personal level while doing business. I love that concept. Yeah. I think that most people find one charitable organization or another close to them for one reason or another. And it's a really novel idea. I like that. So were talking earlier, and you're starting to see you've recently launched Correct. And you're starting to see some early success. Tell me about some of those early success stories. First of all, I'll say we're not the first company in the world to use donations in this way. There are leading gift giving platforms like Sendoso that have raised tens of millions of dollars. I think they've raised 50 or $150 million. I mean they're huge. But they're primarily focused on gift, physical gift giving and you know, sending cupcakes to a prospect or some company swag or like a gift basket or a restaurant gift card. But you can also send a donation gift card through those platforms. We just uncovered that it's not highly utilized when by a salesperson. When given the option on those platforms, they tend to gravitate towards offering physical gifts and digital gift cards because they don't know how to incorporate the charitable giving the way we've uncovered. Let me ask you, what do you think the difference between a fundraiser and a salesperson is? There's no difference, honestly. It's whether or not it depends what you're selling. You're. You just ruined my joke. But you answered it too correctly. So usually people give like a long winded answer and then I say there's no difference. They both want your money. The tactics they use are very similar. But a fundraiser can be a lot more personalized in the approach. They can use urgency in a different way. Right, like or doubling the donation this week only. Or for breast cancer awareness month, it's ending next week for a limited time. These are actually, for me coming from the restaurant space too are parallels to coupon expiration dates. You can't always. In enterprise sales, you're not really offering discounts that end next week all the time. You can use that kind of language. Nonprofit fundraising campaigns get higher open rates than sales campaigns and they get more engagement. So we train salespeople how to write content that is ultra personalized and get someone to click the link right. Because it's not just about that open, it's about clicking the link, getting them to reply, getting them to schedule a meeting. And there's a number of tactics that we're using that our customers and users are really enjoying because they can build those better relationships and they're getting higher response rates. So the industry benchmarks are that response rates from any type of gift incentive is 2 to 6x and there's a huge ROI on using any type of incentive. Where give works really well is if you've identified a prospect who's clearly socially conscious. Like somebody that has a lot of volunteer experience on their LinkedIn. And it's not for everybody. Right. It's just, it's another tool in the sales and marketing toolkit. If you've tried to connect with somebody other ways and doesn't work. You should try give when they have demonstrated volunteer experience publicly or, you know, there's different ways that you can research your prospect to find that information. And it's, you know, it's more of an ABM strategy. Right. You're, you're, it's really the most ultra personalized way because you're doing altruistic business. Yeah. I just kind of thinking about it going back to me ruining your joke. I think the reason that I kind of knew where you were going with it is that I think last month, the month before I finished reading Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss and one of the things started just someone. Told me to read actually one of my customers because I Knew. 100 read the book. It's a game changer. There's a case study in there where he talks about how one of his students uses his tactics to raise funds for his charity versus like because if anybody hasn't read the book, Never Split the difference. Definitely worth checking out. It talks about negotiation. Chris Voss was someone who was actually helped train FBI field agents on the art of negotiation, typically in hostage situations. Like here's a guy who's at the pinnacle of any sort of negotiation and he started a group to talk about how you would apply this to business and how this works in sales applications. And that's what the whole book is about. It's fantastic. Can't recommend it enough. I've read it once. It's definitely one of those can be one of those books that I, I, I go back to pick up more and more information over time. But yeah, it's a game changer. So let me, you'll have to let me know what you think of it when you're done with it. Yeah, I, my takeaways so far are the techniques he teaches around mirroring whoever you're talking to. Talking in a late night DJ voice to make that person feel calm. Ask. I've been doing a lot of talking on this podcast, but you're supposed to be asking questions and just really like not say anything about yourself if you're trying to sell somebody. I guess. Right. I guess. Who's selling who on this one, huh? No, in all seriousness though, like this podcast Episode is truly about you and give as an organization. What else can you tell me about some of the success you've seen? Some of like the clients that you're servicing? Who, what charities are you giving to most right now? Like who are those top like five that you're seeing donations go to? So Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Alzheimer's association and Make a Wish are a few that come to mind that are popular. But it's really critical to have a lot of local charities in our database to personalize that experience. We actually have an algorithm that in an integration with a product that scrapes LinkedIn profiles for keywords. It, you know, if so if I see you live in Miami, it might help you suggest a charity that's Miami based or if you've got on your LinkedIn that you're a mom or a dad, it might suggest charity related to helping kids. But it's been pretty eye opening for me not coming from the nonprofit world, researching so many different types. There's literally almost 2 million charities worldwide, but 50% of all global philanthropy comes from the U.S. About a trillion dollars a year is donated and about 500 million comes from Americans. But a starling stat is that of that 500 billion, just around 25 billion comes from businesses today. And you know, businesses are not in the business of donating, right? But businesses that donate publicly recruit employees easier, retain employees easier, engage them easier. But so there's a lot of strong correlations to that. With give, you actually can get a direct ROI on those donations. It's more of a correlation when you compare it to employee engagement, retention, recruiting. But with give, just like you would measure customer acquisition costs off of an ad, a donation can be used just like an ad. A really interesting perspective on corporate giving. Not something that I would have ever thought about for myself, my organization, or any of the other organizations that I've historically worked with. Because I mean especially like large corporations, they encourage you to like get out and do versus like them actually making a donation themselves. So they'll pay for you to do like charity days. But you're the one who's responsible for giving up your time to go out and like actually volunteer somewhere. So I've got an interesting stat about that. Just 33% of employees actually participate in volunteer programs when they're offered. And the biggest reason why is because they don't just don't even know that the employer offers them. Like they may get pitched that when they're going through the hiring process, but then they don't really. It just. I don't know if HR just doesn't do a good job getting it in front of employees. Another reason is the selection. Like, the employer may only let you go volunteer at like one or two places, and the activity may not be that fun. In my experience, I've volunteered for companies at the Boys and Girls Club that was really fun. I got to play basketball with kids and teach them about their homework. And the next one I did was for a different company. Was that the Boston Food Bank. And it was really boring and I was in a cold room. It was hard to get to. I was really busy that day. Give actually gives employees a way to fundraise. People don't really typically think of a fundraiser as a volunteer, but when you're running the marathon, you're training, you're volunteering your time, and the average volunteer actually only produces about $30 an hour of value. So with give, especially if you're a business leader or if you're not a business leader, as long as you're sharing your link, you can raise a lot more of value than you could actually produce by sorting food at the food bank, for example. Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. My, my problem that I always faced on the days where we had scheduled to go out and do activities is that typically I was on some sort of client engagement and I had meetings that I couldn't get out of or move or whatever because of being on a client engagement. So, like, I was never really able to participate because I was tied up doing something else, actually making the company money. Yeah, I. So I have in the signature line of my give email, it says schedule with me and let's donate to Dana Farber. And on my, that, on that page, I'm not trying to get a meeting with somebody. That's just my book a meeting with me link. But there's a personal note on there about my mom having breast cancer. Luckily, she was treated there and she's cancer free. And then I'm offering to donate $10 if someone else donates from the page so they can click through the workflow and not donate and just schedule with me, just like with Calendly. But if they do, I'll donate 10 bucks depending on whatever they donate. And that's just meant to encourage in kind of do it together. But some profound things have happened when people have seen that page. They've opened up to me, like really opened up to me about their mothers dying of cancer or family members having other forms of cancer. And almost every single time I've had multiple calls with that person because we bonded without even knowing each other first. Sometimes. Yeah, I mean, that's. It's kind of the world we live in when you find, you know, a similarity in someone else that. Especially over a tragedy like that where you can't necessarily control it. People like to share their stories, I think, and just, you know, make each other know that they're connected with one another that way. So, yeah, I totally understand how that can help as like allowing for a deeper conversation and allowing for more and more follow ups to build a rapport with an individual over a short period of time. Dan, I think that we've had a great conversation so far. We've gotten through a lot of questions. Typically at the end of my podcast, I give my guests 90 seconds to, you know, plug anything that they're passionate about. That can be give, that can be a charity, that can be anything under the sun. So the next 90 seconds, my friend, yours. First of all, thank you for bringing me on the podcast. It's been great conversation. So with Give, Our vision is social impact that generates business results through the opportunity or donation to a nonprofit to happen. Anytime an email is exchanged, anytime a meeting is scheduled, anytime a site visitor comes to a website, just try to picture a world where people are donating more frequently. Much like the way CVS prompts you to donate at the point of sale. We're turning scheduling pages into a point of sale, lead capture forms into a point of sale, but it's just meant for donating, so hopefully we can do a lot of good with this company. I can't wait to see what you do. Thanks, man. Thanks for your time today.