If you want to buy almost anything, you know where to begin. If you want to reserve a table, there is OpenTable or Resy. If a person needs help, there is GoFundMe. But if you simply want to give to charity - not to one organization you have already selected, but to make charitable giving a meaningful part of your life - there is no obvious place to go. The donor must discover organizations, evaluate them, determine how much to give, manage each relationship separately, and somehow understand what his contributions accomplish. Amplify begins with a simple ambition: to become the place where people go to participate in the nonprofit world, starting with one platform through which they can discover, organize, and manage all of their charitable giving.
But a single destination is only useful if it relieves the donor of the work that makes giving so difficult in the first place. Most platforms treat this as a “nonprofits search” problem; effectively just a large database tied to basic search in which the user/donor must already know the specific charities to which he wishes to donate. Amplify instead begins with the donor - the problems he cares about, the changes he wants to produce, the kinds of intervention he believes in, and the money, time, or expertise he can contribute. That understanding becomes an evolving Impact Graph, which Amplify uses to help him construct and manage a giving portfolio, allocating a finite charitable budget across causes and organizations in a way that reflects how he actually wants to change the world. As his interests develop and new evidence emerges, the portfolio can evolve with him.
This “demand-side” approach to charitable giving is the initial focus for Amplify, but I’m very mindful of the fact that aggregating demand enables - and eventually requires - substantial changes to the “supply side” of the marketplace as well; in this case, to the nonprofit sector itself. The extreme fragmentation of the sector (1.5 million 501(c)(3)s and counting in the US alone) fragments the work of donor management across its long tail. I cover this further in The Business of Charity. Each organization is expected to independently acquire, understand, engage, and retain its own donors, even though all but the largest rarely possess the staff, resources, or expertise to do this particularly well.
But donors do not experience their giving one charity at a time; they support portfolios of organizations, often across related problems and causes. The same donor is therefore acquired and managed repeatedly across nonprofits using largely interchangeable tools.
Nonprofits are forced to manage giving one organization at a time. Donors experience it as a portfolio.
Amplify moves that work to the level where the relationship actually exists: the donor and his complete giving portfolio. A donor can be brought into the platform once, understood over time, and connected with organizations according to the problems he cares about and the forms of impact he values. Nonprofits may no longer need to win the same donor independently before any relationship can begin; they can be discovered by people already inclined to support their work. At scale, Amplify could assume an increasing share of donor acquisition, engagement, and retention across the sector - not by separating nonprofits from their supporters, but by managing the cross-charity relationship that no individual nonprofit is positioned to see. This could be, if executed correctly, a far more efficient and effective way to route and allocate the $150B+ in annualized individual charitable giving.