Dallas—iDonate, which makes software designed to help nonprofits better connect with donors, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding.
The round is led by PerformanceEdge Partners, a venture capital firm focused on software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses based in Scottsdale, AZ, and includes additional funding from existing and new investors such as the Fort Worth, TX-based Miles Foundation. Ray Gary, iDonate’s CEO, declined to say how much the company has raised in total.
American foundations, corporations, and individuals hit a record $410 billion in charitable donations in 2017, up from $389.64 billion the year before, according to Giving USA. Less than 10 percent of that money is given online, and that’s a missed opportunity, Gary says.
“Today’s donor is really an empowered consumer, using Netflix and Amazon,” he adds. “And, on the other side, you have nonprofits that really don’t have the resources and capacity to address that.”
Enter, iDonate, Gary says, which enables those charitable organizations to “unleash generosity” from donors through software that integrates the many different ways people can make donations online: at events, through texts, on a website, and from peer-to-peer solicitations.
The Dallas-based company was founded in 2011 and counts among its customers higher education institutions, faith-based organizations, health organizations, and others. Gary says that iDonate’s customers see “double-digit lifts” in online donations.
For example, David Ritchie, senior director of business intelligence, analytics, and data services at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Heath, said in a press release that using the software had resulted in a 41 percent increase in both average gift size and and total giving, and a 90 percent increase in recurring gifts.
iDonate will use about a third of the new funding to augment artificial intelligence capabilities in order to target potential donors based on their own interests and charitable giving histories. The company will also further develop its software’s peer-to-peer capabilities, in which a nonprofit can benefit from one person setting up a donation page to encourage their friends to contribute.
“When a friend asks another friend, there’s a much higher conversion rate and much higher level of giving,” Gary says.
To be sure, software like that made by iDonate mostly shifts the act of writing a check to the click of a mouse. Still, Gary says, as online contributions become easier to do and are more personalized, “you make the pile bigger, too.”
“When you make it easier to buy music at the click of a button, sometimes you buy more music,” he says.
