Daniel Kaufman

Daniel Kaufman is the co-founder of the One Percent Foundation, an organization building a broad-based movement of next generation philanthropists by making giving accessible, engaging, meaningful, and fun.It’s March again, so you know what that means. Buzzer beaters. Office pools. Bracketology. Non-stop college basketball.

 

I’m a basketball junkie, so March Madness is one of my favorite times of the year. The intense drama created by Cinderella stories and the tradition of the Tournament is riveting. I am captivated by the unpredictability of the event.

While the Tournament itself is endlessly entertaining, it’s all of the other stuff surrounding March Madness that has transformed it into a truly sticky cultural event. The office pools, sports bars, television/online production, and of course, the non-stop reporting, discussion, and trash talking through social media channels captures the public’s attention and doesn’t stop for three weeks. March Madness has become one of the ultimate social events of the year.

For the third year in a row, the One Percent Foundation is running Grant Madness, a March Madness pool for good. It works just like a normal office pool ($10 donation entry fee), except participants are competing for the right to give their favorite nonprofit a grant funded by the pooled donations. Once again, our generous sponsor, MerchSource, has generously agreed to match the entry fees, super-sizing the grant making pool available to the Grant Madness winners.

Whether you have an opinion on Wichita State’s defensive scheme or if you’ve never heard of Coach K (let alone know the how to spell “Krzyzewski”--I had to look it up), we want you to play. Worst case: you get to have fun while you compete with and talk trash to a great, socially minded community. Best case: you get to surprise your favorite organization with a grant they never expected.

The Tournament starts first thing Thursday morning, so join Grant Madness today and spread the word. The more the merrier.

Welcome to our special guest blog post series -"Millennial Perspectives: Voices of a Giving Generation." We hope you will join us each week until the Millennial Donor Summit on June 22, 2011, as we explore Millennial engagement with a variety of leading experts and practitioners.

This week, we've invited Daniel Kaufman, Co-Founder of the One Percent Foundation as well as Co-Founder of Third Plateau Social Impact Strategies, a consulting firm that helps nonprofits develop and implement Millennial engagement strategies, to provide his take on how to tackle engagement barriers when it comes to fundraising, engagement and advocacy.

If you are reading this, you likely fall into one of two categories: either you work at a nonprofit or you are a Millennial (I’m hoping a large percentage of you are both!). As such, I’m guessing one of the following two scenarios sounds familiar:

If you are a nonprofit: You are sitting around a conference room table trying to figure out how to make your budget for the year. You and your dedicated, underpaid coworkers are trying to figure out the quickest, most effective fundraising strategy so that your organization can focus on changing the world. Inevitably you realize that you can get the most bang for your buck by focusing on major donors and large foundations. It certainly doesn’t make sense to invest time cultivating Millennials who might write a $50 check.

If you are a Millennial: You care about giving back, but you either don’t think you can afford to make a donation, don’t know which organizations are effective, and/or you don’t think you can achieve impact with your small donation. Most importantly, organizations that you might care about aren’t asking you to engage in a meaningful way. As a result, much of your giving tends to be in response to friends asking you to sponsor them in a race or support them at a fundraiser.

If we were on Craigslist, both sides would be posting under the category of Nonprofit-Millennial Missed Connections. Most nonprofits need operating funds now and can’t justify investing in Millennial donor cultivation that pays off over the long-term. Most Millennials take this lack of communication as meaning that nonprofits don’t value their engagement. The two parties seek each other but don’t actually talk to one another.

The findings in the Millennial Donors Report underscore the opportunity if we can change this reality. Millennials are eager to engage, so long as they have a trustworthy partner—whether that trust comes from the endorsement of their social networks, organizational transparency, or access to organizational leadership. This begs the question: How do Millennials and nonprofits work together to build and leverage trust?

Enter the One Percent Foundation (OPF), a Millennial-driven solution to the Missed Connection problem, one that seeks to empower Millennials to give in a sustained, generous, and strategic manner. OPF runs a network of online giving circles that engage Millennials earning an income for the first time. We seek to train, educate and engage our participants to use their limited resources to fund the ideas, organizations, and innovation that they are passionate about. Ultimately, OPF is building a broad-based movement of Millennial philanthropists that challenges the status quo by democratizing giving.

OPF’s giving circle model is relatively straightforward. Participants register online, commit to give at least one percent of their annual income to philanthropic causes, and establish monthly recurring donations through our website. We aggregate participants’ giving and facilitate a crowd-sourced, participatory grantmaking program whereby participants identify, assess, and ultimately select grant recipients. The One Percent Foundation program tackles the three key barriers to meaningful Millennial participation (affordability, knowledge, and impact). 

Embedded in OPF’s grantmaking process is the notion that our process breeds trust and thereby reinforces engagement. The first step of an OPF grant cycle is a nomination period whereby anyone in the OPF community (Millennials giving 1%) can recommend an organization to the circle. During the second phase, a small group of volunteers from the OPF community are trained to conduct due diligence on the nominated organizations. This “working group” speaks to staff members of the nominated nonprofits, examines theories of change, vets the organizations’ financials, and conducts independent research. OPF facilitates a conversation with the working group to narrow all of the nominees to five finalists. During the final phase, OPF educates the entire community about the finalists and asks them to vote online. The two organizations that receive the most votes receive a grant from OPF.

OPF’s grantmaking process tackles the three fundamental trust concerns of Millennials: organizations are only considered after they are endorsed by someone in the social network, nominees are vetted by the community, and participants get access to organizational leaders.

Ultimately, OPF is nothing more than a design solution to the Nonprofit-Millennial Missed Connection problem. We have created the conditions for Millennials to be able to easily access information and interact with nonprofits so they feel comfortable giving proactively.

I invite you to join me for my session at the Millennial Donor Summit on June 22 to learn more about the One Percent Foundation and how OPF and other creative solutions can enable nonprofits to better engage Millennials.

This interview is part of our "Social Citizen Sightings" series, in which we highlight how people are using their creativity, idealism, and digital fluency to support their causes every day.

Name: Daniel Kaufman

Organization where you spend a lot of your time: One Percent Foundation

Describe yourself in one tweet…or at least give it your best shot:  I am building a broad-based movement around next gen philanthropy by engaging Millennials+ in collective giving. #kindofcrazybutitworks

What’s currently uploaded to your kindle or on your nightstand?

Better by Atul Gawande and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. Really enjoying both of them.

What was your inspiration for creating the One Percent Foundation, and what are you hoping to achieve?

I created the One Percent Foundation with a good friend after we realized that despite being socially conscious and engaged, we had never really thought about what we wanted to achieve with our own philanthropy. We started talking to our friends and heard the same three responses over and over:

• I don't give because I can't afford it.
• I don't know which organizations to support. There are so many out there--how am I supposed to distinguish between them?
• Whatever I give will be so small that it will be meaningless for the organization I give to.

We created the One Percent Foundation to solve these problems.

First, we ask people to make a baseline commitment of giving at least 1% of their annual income to philanthropic causes each year, half of which we ask to be given through OPF. We encourage monthly recurring donations to ease any financial burden and make it easier to budget. Giving $30/month is a lot easier than writing a $360 check in December for someone making $36,000 year that is paying rent and has student and credit card debt.

All money given through OPF is placed in a grant pool that is given out to nonprofits selected through a participatory grantmaking process. Everyone that makes the 1% Commitment (joins OPF) is invited to nominate, assess, and help select grant recipients. The process is entirely bottom up so grant recipients reflect the will of the community.

Finally, because we give out a limited number of large grants, participants are able to be part of making large grants to organizations. This means that they are making a substantial impact on the grant recipients. Ultimately, OPF is trying to create the infrastructure to support and engage Millennials in meaningful giving. This is a $16 billion market, an amount that dwarfs even the largest foundations. To put that in perspective, the Gates Foundation gave $3 billion last year. We believe that by democratizing philanthropy, we can empower our generation to be a powerful funding source, supporting innovative, creative, and exciting ideas, people, and organizations.

Is the Millennial Generation responding to this new form of collective philanthropy? How can people participate?

Definitely. Millennials, more than any other generation, seem to emphasize integrating good into everything they do and are comfortable with collective action, especially through leveraging their social networks. There is always a moment when I speak to Millennials when it clicks: "Wait a second, you mean I can give that little and have that big of an impact?" Becoming part of the One Percent Community is easy. You can check out the OPF website here and you can join here. We would love to have the Social Citizens community join us.

What do you see as the role of social media in enhancing opportunities for people to give back? Is it making it easier, or are people overwhelmed with choices?

From the perspective of the One Percent Foundation, social media makes possible large scale implementation. Collective giving requires a sense of community and social media enables bridging the gap created through online organizing. It is critical that our participants realize that they are part of a larger movement and we have found social media to be an important tool in making that happen.

From a broader perspective, I do think that there is a bit of information overload created by social media, making it hard for organizations to really stand out. However, the ease of communicating and giving more than makes up for any overload. With one click, one text, one tweet, or one status update, you can spread the word to thousands of networks and leverage the power of small donors.

You just launched a new campaign in time for March Madness. Tell us a bit about it and how can our readers get involved?

OPF just launched Grant Madness, a March Madness pool with a philanthropic twist. Run just like an NCAA office pool, OPF is hosting a pool where participants can make a $10 donation (the entry fee) and enter a bracket into the tournament. Instead of playing for money, the Grant Madness winner will win the right to select a nonprofit organization to receive a grant funded by the entry fees.

Grant Madness is a fun take on March Madness and gives people an opportunity to direct their pool money to good (instead of a new flat screen TV for the IT guy who sits down the hall). We'd love for the Social Citizens community to get involved.

To learn more about the One Percent Foundation, you can follow them on Twitter, check out their blog or find them on Facebook.