Recording of the Wake Up Your Fundraising Breakfast: Maximizing Your Return on Big Data hosted by Joe Boland from FundraisingSuccessMag.com.

An interesting panel discussion about using data inside nonprofits to boost fundraising with:

Workplace giving enables companies to setup reoccurring donation systems for their employees and support a culture of corporate giving and purpose. Steve Delfin, the CEO of America’s Charities discusses the importance of unrestricted funds for nonprofits and how a change to an all online system will harm giving in the federal campaigns.

Episode 22

Speaker 1: This is Using the Whole Whale, a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the nonprofit world. This is George Weiner, your host and the Chief Whaler of wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us.

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Speaker 1: Most of us are familiar with the 401k’s that get setup through our workplaces but what about giving? How familiar do you feel most people are with workplace giving and the idea that we should be setting aside money each month to go toward causes we care about? Welcome to Episode 21 where we ‘re talking with Steve Delfin, the CEO of America’s Charities. And America’s Charities does exactly that. They help companies set these really fantastic plans up where employees can choose the charity that they want a portion of their money going to every month. And they also work with the federal government employees through the combined federal campaign allowing millions of dollars to go to not-for-profits in an unrestricted way that allows them to do their amazing work. Today we‘re gonna hear a bit about how technology is impacting America’s Charities and the field at large.

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Speaker 1: And I ‘m here with Steve Delfin, the CEO of America’s Charities. Steve how’re you doing?

Speaker 2: I’m doing well George. How’re you doing today?

Speaker 1: I ‘m doing OK. How, how are things in Virginia?

Speaker 2: Things are great in Virginia. We’re trying to raise more money for some great charities that we represent trying to get people to think a little differently about how they engage with philanthropy, so all is good and, you know, we’re doing great things trying to change the world.

Speaker 1: Brilliant. Let get a little more specific, specifics on What is America’s Charities? It ‘s a broad name. What the heck do you guys do?

Speaker 2: Yes. And you know it ‘s funny. It used to be very easy to describe what we do. We used to be primarily a membership organization representing a group of really top quality charities and helping them get access into various forms of employee workplace giving programs, both in the federal government as well as in the private sector. But in the last five years, in addition to doing that, we’re finding that we have to be more to all those parties. We have to help the companies better understand how to leverage their resources to help those charities. We have to help charities better understand the needs of employers and companies as it relates to philanthropy and CSR. And then as donors have more options in ways to give and engage, we have to take that into consideration as we look at, how does workplace giving relate to the more contemporary, and the current donor who has more ways to engage with nonprofits.

Speaker 1: That’s great. So, you’re getting solid nonprofits in the door of workplace giving. Can you give me an idea top line like how much are you helping to raise in unrestricted funds every year for your, you know, aggregate charities?

Speaker 2: Sure. So, the total amount that we raise each year is in the neighborhood of $35 to 40 million dollars. That is a relatively small amount of the total that’s given to workplace giving which is estimated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of four billion dollars. But we represent a group of national charitie

The Kiva.org platform has to deal with many challenges. One of them is how to support the platform over time as it collects ‘barnacles’ or bugs that come from time and the other is how they avoid playing favorites on the platform. We talk with Sam Mankiewicz, the CTO of Kiva.org about he navigates these challenges.

Episode 21

Speaker 1: This is, “Using the Whole Whale”, a podcast that brings you stories of data and technology in the non-profit world.

This is George Weiner, your host and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thank you for joining us.

I want you to imagine that your website, your technology for your organization is kind of like a ship, you know, cruising through the ocean and, the captain of that ship is your Chief Technology Officer.

Now what happens is, you grow the ship with features, is that each new part of the boat that touches the water has the ability to gather what are called barnacles. These are these those little things that just sort of attach themselves to the side of the boat. Now, no matter how good your boat is, if you’re in the water, you’re getting barnacles.

Welcome to episode 21, where we are continuing our conversation with Sam Mankiewicz, the C.T.O. and captain of the good ship – kiva.org. And, I talk about barnacles because it is the perfect analogy for keeping in mind the true cost of a legacy platform. Now, each new feature that they add will inevitably need bug-fixes, updates, upgrades even as the platform moves forward. So, while we all love creating new features, this is what goes through the mind of the Captain when you’re brainstorming. We’re going to continue our conversation now and, hear how Sam approaches these features and, how they also they also measure success of some of their initiatives against their digital goals.

Speaker 1: So, we’re beginning to talk about your work as the leader of the prioritized features and, I’m, I, you know, I know you’re on a Sprint system or, “agile-ish” system, you know, two weak releases, curious, you have a platform that’s been around for awhile and, you know, I think what’s on CTO’s mind, more often than not, is, like, the thing that keeps you up on that is, if these things crash, if that data base falls out of sync, how do you balance then the existing dev. work versus the new shiny shit the team may want.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That’s a great question. If anyone knows the answer to that one, I would love to hear it as well. I think, let’s see, at the end of the day, it comes down to trade-offs, you know. Kiva’s at sufficiently large size, sufficiently large scale, sufficient level of complexity, that there, there’s never, you know, there’s no free lunch anymore. There’s no one change that will be positive with no costs or, no negatives. And so, it’s about trying to look at the places that are holding you back the most, look at the thing’s, the biggest problems and, you know, seeing what you’re willing to trade off against those.

We talk with the CTO of Kiva.org, Sam Mankiewicz about how digital goals are measured and used in the development process. Kiva.org, a leader in the micro finance world, has loaned over $60 million to date and they are still growing. With this growth come many challenges that must be balanced by the tech team to manage an aging platform with increasing demand for innovation and measurement.

Episode 20

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Speaker 1: Well, I’m incredibly excited today because I get to talk about metrics. And any day I can talk about metrics, that day is a happy day. Welcome to Episode 20. We are talking with Kiva actually and their CTO, Sam Minkwich (SP), I’ve known him for a while. I’ve loved Kiva for even longer. If you don’t know Kiva, please be sure after listening to this to go check them out. They’re offering an incredible platform that provides microloans to underdeveloped countries and people that are, you know, entrepreneurs there as well as small grants expanding into the U.S. and other regions. Alright, let’s go jump into this interview. And by the way, I had to fly to California for this one. So please enjoy it.

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Speaker 1: I’m here today at the Kiva offices, and I’m here with their brilliant CTO, Sam. Actually, can you just tell us what you do here?

Speaker 2: Sure. My name is Sam Minkwich (SP), I’m the CTO of Kiva.org. I’ve been with Kiva for over seven years now. And I’m responsible for the overall technology plan, lead the engineering and product development team here at Kiva. And sort of being one of the original technology member of the team, I’m also the institutional memory of how everything works and why did we exactly decide to build it this way five years ago now that it’s broken.

Speaker 1: So, “I’m here something breaks, let’s go to the internal repository which is, Sam.” But that is incredible to me because I understand it about Kiva. But could you actually tell us what does Kiva do in a nutshell and, you know, how does that relate to technology?

Speaker 2: Sure. So, Kiva is an online marketplace where anyone with as little as $25 can come online, find an entrepreneur or a borrower in the developing world that they wanna help support in their business, contribute online, and help see that business get the funding that it needs and might not otherwise have access to. And also, not only do you get your $25 back, most of the time, but you also get hear from the borrower and hear updates about the progress of their business.

Speaker 1: Pretty incredible stuff. And, you know, you’re coming up on 10 years of being around. You were in the game before it was cool, as it was the most cool, and now as people are, you know, taking more of a critical eye on it–I’m curious, what are the metrics overall that Kiva is looking at as, you know, as indicators of success?

Speaker 2: Yep. So, you know, Kiva first and foremost sees itself as a social enterprise. What we’re trying to do is give access to capital to people that don’t have it normally. And the best way to measure that is just, how many borrowers? How many people are getting access to that capital? And how much money are we able to put in their hands on any given basis. So, we just recently crossed the lifetime threshold of $600,000,000 in loans in our 10 year history. And we’re on pace for about $115,000,000 of loans to be made in 2014. And so that is millions of lenders that have helped fund loans for millions of borrowers all around t