You're listening to nonprofit unplugged with your host the number one nonprofit lady Shakira irrelevant. This show teaches you how to start and grow your nonprofit with ease. Simply put, this is nonprofit Made Easy.
Welcome back. I told you guys a few episodes ago that I was gonna have some celebrities on the show and I kinda have one here. He is here. I'm so excited for this. Guest. I'm excited about all my guests. Y'all know that. But, man, y'all don't understand like the magic that happens right before we record and then right after record, we record and this is my brother from another mother just saying, I have with me today, Dominic calms. He is the CEO and the co founder of be generous is the first ever of its kind philanthropic credit product design for donating now and pay later. It's like a donation layaway or like a whole, less donate and pay it away later. Right. Dominic's company allows nonprofits to receive the full donations upfront, while donors pay interest free installments of their donation. Over time, there are going to be a couple of different conversations that we're gonna have today, we're gonna talk a lot, a lot more about what be generous is, and how it's going to be crucial, crucial for your organization. But a little bit more about Dominic. Literally, his personal philanthropy journey comes from being on the fundraising board. So this is certified right on the fundraising board, a Forest Whitaker and Val Kilmer so dope. And he's also been an ambassador for the Global Citizen Forum, which is a May zing. So without further ado, I want you all to give a beautiful round of applause wherever you are. For Mr. Dominic. How are you? Well, I'm great.
Thanks so much for having me. How are you?
i Oh, good. I'm excited, because I love being able to talk to everybody. Like when I have different guests on the show, because I learned so much more about the nonprofit space I'd maybe did not know before or have heard rumors, right. Good things, of course, and just hadn't really dived in, dive dive. Yeah. Like I haven't been able to, like dive in. And so this is something that I didn't even know existed. I knew that I had said this in the conversation jokingly, like, Man, I wish you could just donate and just be able to like, pay later, like, Oh, no firm or Klarna. Or you know what I mean? Like, or something like that. And that's actually something of its kind, but never in this space. So you are making history, my friend.
Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm trying, we're trying.
Alright, so I'll tell everybody who you are. Who is Dominic?
Yeah. So you know, it's kind of an interesting background. I was actually born in Asia. In Hong Kong. I'm not. Yeah, I'm not Asian. But I was born there and grew up there for a couple years, which is an interesting experience. And then I moved to London, England, I lived in the UK for about 10 years. Kind of a kind of a crazy story, actually. So my grandfather dropped out of high school and he was 16 years old. To, to sell cameras, actually at a small store in in London called edge where the town was called Agile. And he started this small little electronics store called Dixon's and when he was 16 years old, without even a high school degree, and he grew that into the largest consumer electronics company in Europe today, with 45,000 employees, 2000 stores, publicly traded company with over a $10 billion market cap. It's just an incredible story. Yeah, exactly. I don't know what I'm hoping some of it rubbed off on me. So I believe so. Yeah. So you know, I grew up in London, sort of under that environment. It was really interesting. And then I came to the United States, went to high school in LA. And then eventually, we made my way to New York City, went to university in grad school in New York, did a master's degree at Columbia University. And then, you know, when I graduated, I didn't know what I wanted to do much like, I'm sure a lot of young folks. And, you know, my basically like, my whole graduating class went to Wall Street. So I kind of thought, like, oh, I guess I'm supposed to go to Wall Street, right? Nobody tells you anything different. So you see your friends doing it, you kind of you know, you do it, they do. So I went to Wall Street. And I immediately was like, This is not for me. It was just nothing about it was interesting to me at all. I didn't. I didn't enjoy the work. I didn't understand the work. I wasn't, you know, I didn't love the folks I was working with. And so it became it dawned on me very quickly that I needed to, you know, to pivot to something I was passionate about. And I knew I wanted to try to make the world a better place right. I don't want to be overly self indulgent because I obviously cared somewhat about making money too, but it wasn't I wanted to do something that had a positive effect on the world. And so I was young and naive. And I thought, Okay, well government, that's going to be where I can have the most effect. And so I became a political aide to the Afghanistan ambassador, which was an incredibly interesting position during the war in Afghanistan. So that was very interesting. And
yeah, that was That was wild. And, you know, I was working at a clearance and everything, it was fascinating, and did that for a while. And then I got asked to join the Senate Finance Committee, the chairman's office of the Senate Finance Committee. And so I was in the chairman's office, I was working as an economics associate in the, in the chairman's office of the finance committee, working in national politics, which had always been a dream of mine. You know, I'm an immigrant to the United States. I'm now a dual US UK citizen. But I was just fascinated by politics when I came to America. And so I was working in politics. And I really only got into politics, because I wanted to kind of do the people's work and make the world a better place if I could. And I realized, you know, after after a while there, I realized, wow, there's a lot of politicking and politics, so to speak, right, a lot of the work that you do is not necessarily policy work if there's a lot of politics involved. And so I was kind of a little bit frustrated by the the lack of progress. So I decided, okay, I knew I didn't want to work in banking, I knew I didn't work, I knew I didn't want to work purely in politics, there have to be some happy medium between profit and purpose where I could really try to push things forward in a meaningful way. But at the same time, I wanted to make a private sector living. And so I moved back out to Los Angeles, and I linked up with a company called Global Philanthropy group, which at the time was one of the first private philanthropic consulting firms in the United States. And so we would run manage, advise and scale the philanthropic foundations for celebrities. high net worth individuals and corporations, everybody, you know, our clients ranged from Kobe Bryant and Madonna, to, you know, to the Buffett family to Facebook and everybody in between. I mean, it was an incredible, incredible roster of clients. And eventually, he was running business development for the firm, was there for several years, loved it and really managed at some of the world's leading philanthropic organizations for a lot of these celebrities, corporations and high net worth folks. Eventually, that company was sold in 2017 to Todd Wagner, who is a billionaire who is Mark Cuban's business partner. And right around right before that time, I went off to start my second company, which is a company called giving. And I don't know if you're familiar with Shopify, but Shopify, yeah, so you know, Shopify, so Shopify is the digital, one touch solution for instantly launching an e commerce Store. And there are 2.2 million ecommerce stores in the United States. I said to myself, well, why can't we do the same thing for nonprofits. And so, Forbes said that we're the Shopify for nonprofits. And what we did is we built basically a digital one touch solution for instantly launching a nonprofit project. Because there are 1.7 million nonprofits in the United States. It's the same size market. And yet as you know, I'm sure starting running an operating a nonprofit is very expensive, very time consuming, very labor intensive. So we built the company called giving, which is now you know, pretty well known company that allows someone to basically instantly start a nonprofit project the same way that Shopify allows you to instantly launch an e commerce Store. And I ran that for six years as CEO was a great experience and then at the beginning of 2021, I came to my board and said look, I'm ready to step out as CEO because I'm starting my next company called Be generous and my Board gave me their blessing and asked me to be the president of the company. So I'm now the president of giving and I'm on the board and I started this amazing amazing company called the generous because the opportunity was just too big to ignore and I'll I'll get into that stuff later. But that's a little bit about my background.
A little bit about your background. Um, I told you I had a celebrity on here guys. That was I am like everything you kept saying I was just like and then what and then what happened was Oh my goodness. So okay, let's get into being generous I'm on the website like shopping around guys like I'm on here like yes ugly and I literally just send it to like for nonprofit like emailed their boards like hey guys, check this
out. I'm very excited to share this with you very very excited.
All right, so walk us through what you walk us through with be generous is but more so um, what initially what really sparked like the I gotta get up and do it like I have to do this. Yeah,
it's a great question and I have you know, it's I have a very specific answer so are you I'm sure your listeners and I'm sure you're familiar with by now pay later companies. Have you ever heard of these companies are like affirm Klarna afterpay sezzle. These are companies that exist that are called Buy now pay later and what they do is they they allow you to do exactly what the product name sounds like. You can buy a product now. You'll receive the product, the merchant who sells you the product will receive the money and then you'll pay for it later. Right? So it's basically a credit product. And these Buy now pay later companies are very, very successful. They Doing billions and billions of dollars of loan transaction volumes every year. And these companies are now worth billions and billions of dollars. So the largest Buy now pay later company in the United States is a company called a firm, a FF IRM. And the the founding COO, Chief Operations Officer of a firm is a friend of mine. And so seven years ago, if you can believe this, I was sitting in her office in San Francisco. And she was telling me all about a firm and the company was very new at the time, maybe like a year or two old, and she started telling me, you know, this is what we're doing. And this is how it's going to change the E commerce space. And here's how Buy now pay later works. And I really didn't know much about Buy now pay later at the time. And I'm sitting there and I'm listening. And as I'm hearing her explain it, all of a sudden, I have this aha moment, where I say, Hmm, why couldn't we take this infrastructure and apply it to the largest underserved sector of finance in the world, which is the US nonprofit market, which as you know, processes about half a trillion dollars a year worth of donations, and 72% of those donations come from individuals like you and I. So I was running, you know, I just started that company giving and I was telling you about at the time, so I couldn't, I didn't want to do two things at the same time. So I said to myself, Okay, well, I think this is a good idea. But I'll also put this away in my head, and I'll come back to it later, if that makes any sense. And I basically didn't tell anybody about this for seven years, if you can believe me, I just kept it in my head for the most part. And, and so seven years later, at the beginning of 2021, I'm sitting at my desk, and I turn on the news, and I see the headline, affirm to IPO for $24 billion. My friend's company went public for $24 billion. And I was like, That is incredible. And what an amazing journey, you know, to see your friend build a company like that. So, you know, I essentially,
you know, long story short, I, you know, I congratulated her, and I called her up to Agile later. And as we were talking, I said, you know, you inspired an idea that I had that I've never really told anybody, but I would love to hear what you think of the idea. And I said, you know, you're the woman that built the largest Buy now pay later company in the world, I want to build the first ever philanthropic credit product, which instead of allowing somebody to buy now, pay later, allows somebody to donate now and pay later, in effect, allowing the donor to make a charitable contribution to a nonprofit, the nonprofit receives the donation upfront in a lump sum, the donor receives the full tax deduction, but the donor doesn't spend any money out of pocket today. And instead, they get to pay over time, over three, six or nine months completely for free. There's no interest payments, there's no fees, there's no late fees, there's no transaction costs, you're simply just taking the donation and spreading it out over a series of payments. And we send the money to the nonprofit upfront right away. And you also get your full tax deduction right away. And so for example, if you know, if you wanted to donate, let's just I'm making this up, if you wanted to donate $100, to the Red Cross, and you wanted to do it through donate, now pay later, the Red Cross would receive $100, right now, you would receive a tax deduction for $100. But no money would come out of your bank account. And in 30 days from now, your first payment of 10 bucks would be due, in fact, you would find instead over 10 months, and then every 30 days, only $10 is leaving your account. But of course, you've already got your tax deduction, and they've already received the money. So I sort of explained it to her that way. And she was like, Oh, this is you know, this is this is really smart. I you know, and I'd love to, you know, I'd love to invest. And so beautiful, long story short, that began this incredible journey that we had, where we've now you know, we've raised about a $10 million venture capital round to build the company. And we've been building this company over the last two years. It's been this incredible journey, we raised a huge credit lending facility from a couple of banks who basically gave us the capital to lend out. And what we've done is we've built the first ever philanthropic credit product, which allows somebody to donate now pay later. And what we've seen just found around this out here, what we've seen in our early studies, is that 82% 82% of donors who have had the opportunity to use our prototype indicated that they would double their donation, double their donation using Donate now pay later. And it makes a ton of sense because when you allow somebody to pay for something over time, in almost any industry, people pay more, right even just take monthly giving versus one time giving the one time average online gift in the United States is $177. That's the average one time online gift in the United States. The average monthly reoccurring gift in the United States is $54. So if you take $54 and you multiply it by 12, that's $648. So that means what that means is that the average American who donates gives $177 If they do at one time, but if they sign up to give monthly, they're donating $648 Right. And so what we do is we basically take that $648 Give it to the nonprofit now and allow you to and give you the donor the full tax did option for the full $640 But allow you to pay it over time for free. And you know what's
really cool too, because I just thought about this, this will this really would allow for a lot of donor retention, like donor retention for the nonprofit side to increase. Because here's the thing, when you have the option to and I use a firm a lot. So whatever I'm because I literally just download the app and I just shot off affirm itself. And I'm like, wow, you like Target, I need you to tell me what I need to buy. And just pay it off later. Right? And so when, once it's once I have that ease and the flexibility and the comfortability right to be able to just air quote, shop around and donate around, essentially, I'm going to do it again. And then I can give more like, and then from there after it's paid off. I want to keep doing I like I could keep donating to the same nonprofit or to different organizations, right. And I can easily spin that spin. But you know what I mean? Like donate a couple grand I mean, over time, but still, it's like, wow. And it looks good for taxes, listen to tax write off is real, like, this year was first year, actually wrote my donations off in taxes, because prior to I wasn't doing it. Oh, my God, I should have been now I understand the importance of that. But it allows for donors to not just give one and done. You know, it's not a booty call, right? It's simply you need the funds to continue to grow operations to continue to grow capacity. And you'll Yeah, good
meets, it meets donors where they're at. Right, so So fidelity, charitable, put out a report last year, called overcoming barriers to charitable giving. That's the name of the report. And in their report, they did a big survey with American donors. And what they found is that 66%, so two thirds of American donors said, I want to be able to give more to my favorite nonprofit, but I'm currently unable to do so. Right. And the reason that they're unable to do so is because of their liquidity problems or liquidity, right cash on hand. So what this product does, it says, you can now give what you want to give, not what you feel constrained to give. And you can do it by paying that bigger donation over time, at no cost to you. And of course, this is a huge benefit to the nonprofit because then they get the money up front. So like for example, you know, if you donate if you're normally a donor who gives 50 bucks every year to your favorite nonprofit. And if I said to you, Hey, listen, instead of giving $50 a year, why don't you give $10 a month, just $10 a month, for the next 10 months. And if you do that, what I'll do is I'll send this nonprofit $100 right now. So this nonprofit going to get double the amount of money. So obviously, they're going to be happy. And presumably, you'll be happy because you care about the organization. And they're going to give you a tax deduction for 100 tax deductible receipt for $100. And no money is going to leave your bank account today. And in 30 days, only $10 is coming out for the next 10 months. And then nine months after that, what we basically see is that 82% of donors are willing to accept that offer. They're saying, Yeah, you know what I want to give more to my favorite nonprofit, but I just maybe don't have the cash on hand, it's too much, I'm going to spread out my payments, whatever it might be. And so I'll pay for this over time. But it makes me feel great knowing that the nonprofits getting the money now with and of course, the nonprofits love it, because then they don't have to worry about things like monthly donor cancellations pledge defaults. And of course, they don't have to worry about the money dripping. And over the course of a year, they get the money up front, which you know, is a huge benefit for nonprofits. Because the problem in the nonprofit space is not a problem of donations, there's more than enough money going around in the nonprofit world. It's a problem with liquidity, because 40% of all donations in America come in the last three months of the year. So that means what that means is that the first three quarters of the year, for 75% of the Year, nonprofits are suffering a liquidity problem. They don't have the cash on hand to run the programs that they need when they need to do it. And And recently, CNN put out a report that said about half of all nonprofits in the United States have less than one month of cash on hand. So this product really fundamentally solves that problem by providing nonprofits with all that liquidity upfront that donation upfront, but it does so without stressing the donors bank account because the donor can pay it off over time, you know, when it's convenient for them in three, six or nine month increments.
I don't even know what else to say. But wow, like there are some pros and like no cons. There's no cons you leave no room for error here, like no room for an excuse. On either part, and I love it because donors love to feel engaged with their organizations of their choice, right? Like they love to feel like they're part of the family almost. And this is huge because now they can do that without the stress like you said. It Like It's not a donor problem. It's a liquidity problem. That's that's a tagline. That's a quote. Oh,
yeah, well, you know, I mean, you're right. And if you look at what the Buy Now pay later world, look, the Buy Now pay later world is under scrutiny right now because they're charging interest to consumers, right? So you have these like young kids who are who are saying like, Hey, cool, I can now buy this expensive television or this expensive pair of, you know, shoes or whatever. And they don't understand that actually, because of the you're getting charged 20% interest, and then that's going to cause problems. So we do not do that we this is this is free for donors. I just want to say that, again, this is free for donors, there is no cost to donors to use this right. So we've taken that element out. But if you look at the benefits of buy now pay later for merchants or for E commerce stores, what let's look at a firm, for example, a firm says we can increase the average order value on a transaction for a merchant by roughly 86%. Right? So basically, they're saying to they're saying to BestBuy, or Amazon or whoever, listen, we're going to increase your average order size by 86%. Simply by allowing people to pay it off over time? Well, we're seeing we're seeing similar numbers in the nonprofit space, we're telling nonprofits, we're gonna be able to increase your ADV your average donation value substantially, right, because we're seeing that people are 82% of the time, people are indicating that they're willing to double their contribution or more. And by the way, I should say one of the things secure that number 82% went up, went up that number went up to 89%. Amongst donors who give $1,000 or more. So you almost 90% of donors who give $1,000 or more who had a chance to use our prototype said, hey, if this was available on my nonprofits website, I would use it to increase my contributions by double or more, which is incredible statistic.
Yeah. Oh, man. Oh, I hope y'all are taking notes. That's all I could say. And the website and all the information will be in the show notes. However, man, this is. This is history. I'm telling you. This is just history right here. This is dope. Well, yeah. So let's shift gears a little bit, because I'm dying to know dying to know, do you feel like you're fulfilling your life's purpose?
I do. I jokingly tell people, there are a lot easier ways to make money than running a VC backed tech company in the nonprofit space. Probably, I humbly may say, there's probably one of the hardest ways to do it. So you know, for me, I didn't do this, you know, to make a quick buck. This is absolutely not what I'm interested in doing. I mean, I've devoted, really my whole professional adult life, to doing something at the intersection of profit and purpose and more on the purpose side, you know, I could have stayed in banking, obviously, I could have gone into consulting, I mean, there's a myriad of other things I could have done, I chose to do this, you know, this in giving, and global flippy group, because I love the idea that my work and have a positive effect on the world. And I'm using the tools that we have in the 21st century of technology, scale, unit economics, economies of scale, to create products that generate efficiencies in the philanthropic space, because the philanthropic space is massive, right there, you know, half a trillion dollars worth of donations, 1.7 million nonprofits, but $3.8 trillion worth of assets held by nonprofits, and one in 10 Americans 1/10 of the American workforce is, you know, one in 10 Americans work for a nonprofit. So you have this massive sector that's been largely ignored by the sole big Silicon Valley tech companies. And there has not been a lot of innovation in the nonprofit space. It really fundamentally, philanthropy is the same as it was 3040 years ago, with the exception of it's gone digital in some aspects. But there hasn't been a ton of innovation. And yet, if you look at the E commerce space, you look at the banking space, you look at finding the financial space, there's been huge innovation, and huge changes as a result of technology. So what I've always been fascinated with is taking the tools of the private sector and saying, Hey, let's adapt them to the philanthropic market is the largest underserved sector of finance in the world. And let's create efficiencies in this market that's highly fragmented, and in many cases inefficient, because I believe in the promise of philanthropy at the end of the day, that's what this comes down to, I believe, that philanthropy can have it can be a force for good. Philo means lover throw up as humanity in the world, the word literally means lover of humanity. And I believe, you know, in a country like the United States, in particular, where the government does not have a strong social safety net, that the philanthropic space can help a lot of people. And I think all the money is there to do it. And I think the resources are there. But there's, there's a misalignment between the liquidity needs of the nonprofits, and the ability for donors to give, and I think the Be generous can really solve that problem in a meaningful way. And if we do that, at scale secure, we will unlock billions and billions of dollars of additional liquidity at scale. And that's what I want to see happen because that money will trickle down into the programmatic work and help the people on the ground who need the help the most. And I think we can all agree you know, times are tough and Do people need help? So, yes, I think I'm fulfilling my mission. And it's, it's tough. But I enjoy the work and I'm happy to be doing it.
Yeah, you are, you have become, in a sense, the Messiah of giving right now in the most positive way. But I am, I am an all of this product. I'm going to scream this from the heavens tops. Like, build this in your system now. Great. Thank you so much for being here. I I'm speechless in I don't get speeches often. But man I am. I'm like, taking this all in. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So so much.
Thank you for having me.
So can where can we find you? Where can we find be generous? And learn more?
Yeah. So if you're interested in connecting with me personally, you can I'm on LinkedIn, Dominic, do M i NIC. Last name is comms K LMS. I'm very active on LinkedIn. So please, reach out to me connect with me, message me and I'm happy to chat. If you want to learn about be generous, or talk about donate, now pay later, you can go to our website, which is the letter B and the word generous. So it's not it's not the E it's just the letter B than the word generous, normal spelling bee generous.com. And we have we have product videos on there. We have demos on there, we have an FAQ section on there. So for anyone who's interested in learning more, it's all on there. And we would love love, love to talk with you. And we'd love to work with you. So please do reach out.
Awesome. Thanks, Tom.
Thank you. This is wonderful. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you in the audience. And it's really fun. I do I do a lot of interviews. I did. I did. Recently, we did a ton of press. And this was definitely one of the more enjoyable and fun one. So I appreciate you having me on.
Yes, that's the mission. Let's talk about this space unplugged. let our hair down. But definitely be entertained, double right, like additional and entertaining. So I appreciate the feedback so much. You guys know where you can find myself and the nonprofits Twitter page, nonprofits Twitter page is nonprofit, capital U and Plu. So nonprofit unqiue with the number one and then I'm also on LinkedIn and Facebook at my name, you can follow me on Facebook now if you want to know more, you can reach out to dominate you know where to find him now all the information will be in the show notes. And if you can't get to him, let me know and I can get to him for you. So absolutely. Yes. So all right. Thank you Take care everybody Y'all know what to do take action Share, share, share, share, share this episode with somebody you know if you didn't think it was informative for you. It's definitely informative for someone you know, so share it. I got some workshops coming up. We'll talk about that here. Listen for some commercials about that soon, but we've got some workshops coming up in October so stay tuned for that. I think I've covered all of the the juiciness so. Alrighty, well, y'all continue to be blessed and we can't wait to see you on top. Thank you, Dominic. Thank you so much, guys.
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