Soros Heir Is Offering Nonprofits Free Online-Giving Tools Through Give Lively. Michael Towner, Iconic Legacy

​Jonathan Soros, an investment manager who is one of George Soros’s five children, wants nonprofits to raise money online without spending on pricey software.
So, in a move that’s raised some eyebrows, he and his wife, Jennifer, founded Give Lively, a company that started offering free digital-fundraising software to charities a year ago.
The company provides the basics: a way to generate donation forms for websites and emails. But it also gives charities the ability to raise money through text messages, the means to have supporters create their own fundraising pages, and, soon, a tool to sell event tickets. Nonprofits pay only a relatively small, but standard, payment-processing fee.
The couple wants to save nonprofits money and deliver online-fundraising services that are just as strong as what’s on the market today — if not stronger, says Jonathan Soros, 48.
Jonathan says he and Jennifer are not out to make money. Because the company offers free services, the couple — mostly known for backing liberal causes — sees it as a philanthropic project, despite Give Lively’s status as a limited-liability company rather than a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Jonathan Soros likened the couple’s funding of Give Lively to an "impact investment," albeit one where no profit will be made. Effectively what we’re doing is subsidizing the entire field of nonprofits that use this product," he says.
Most of the nonprofits that have used Give Lively so far are small. Still, some have recognizable names, like the Malala Fund, StoryCorps, and the Women’s March L.A. Foundation.
The company might be one to watch if it catches on with lots more nonprofits, experts say. But many nonprofit tech consultants and people who work at competing companies are skeptical of its offerings.
Civic Nation, which launched in 2015 and houses an array of advocacy and awareness campaigns, started using Give Lively’s donation pages starting in mid-2017, says Jenn Brown, the group’s executive director. The products are simple to use, she says, and "by far the best deal for our nonprofit."
Today, the charity, which projects that it will raise about $10 million this year, uses the company’s text-appeal services and its tool to allow donors to create fundraising pages for campaigns.
"As a nonprofit, my number one priority is to ensure as much money as possible is going toward the causes that people are donating in support of," she says. "So my priority is to work with online processors who charge us the lowest fees possible."
To generate a profit, other companies that offer similar products to Give Lively's tack on fees — sometimes up to 5 percent, depending on the service being used and how large the nonprofit is, experts say. Most providers also ask charities to pay for a monthly or annual subscription, with the price based on how large the transaction fees are.
By not asking for any payments beyond transaction fees charged by Stripe, a payment processor, Give Lively is a veritable unicorn. Its promise of free software is virtually unheard of in the nonprofit-tech space.
And that’s made some observers skeptical. How can a software company continue to grow, improve its tools, and compete with the likes of Classy, Network for Good, and Blackbaud with only one source of funding and no revenue?
"Seems unsustainable," says Sarah Sebastian, director of brand communications at Qgiv, a company that also offers digital-fundraising tools.
Some have questioned whether there’s another agenda. For instance, is the company looking to hook a lot of nonprofits by giving away services, only to sell its company to another vendor?
The answer to that is "no," DeParolesa says. "Our ethos is such that the idea of selling to a for-profit entity is sort of the antithesis of how we began," he says.
In late August, the Soroses approved a company statement drafted by DeParolesa called the "Forever Free Pledge." The pledge promises that all Give Lively’s current services — and some items still in the works, like the event-ticketing tool — will be free in perpetuity to all users, with no commitments. "We will never charge any annual fees, setup fees, hidden fees, or platform fees for our Forever Free Services," says the statement, which went online in August. "We pledge to offer each of our Forever Free Services for so long as we run each service."
A footnote at the bottom of the pledge says: "Stop trying to find a catch. There’s no catch."
Give Lively has some limitations.
The company can integrate its fundraising tools only with Salesforce. That means charities using other donor databases — like Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge — won’t get supporter data sent directly to their systems. They’ll have to download it and then manually import it into their databases — creating an administrative task that many charities don’t like.
Give Lively will be investigating ways to work with other fundraising software this year, but DeParolesa is unsure how long it’ll take to offer such services.
Today, nonprofits also need to use the payment processor Stripe as part of their Give Lively account. That service typically takes two days to verify credit-card payments for nonprofits. It takes seven days for contributions made by donors directly from their bank accounts. Among other reasons, the company uses Stripe because it offers good rates for processing nonprofit donations, DeParolesa says.
Give Lively, however, will start allowing nonprofits to use PayPal as its payment processor later this year, which charges fees similar to Stripe’s, but can send money to nonprofits faster in most cases.
Jonathan Soros acknowledges that it might be hard to get nonprofits that are used to doing business with other companies to join Give Lively.
"The transaction cost of shifting is not zero," Soros says.
Still, he thinks all nonprofits — no matter their size — care about saving money: "It really feels difficult to hand over a percentage of your revenue to anybody, whether you’re small or large."
​Michael Towner