Launch HN: Charityvest (YC S20) – Employee charitable funds and gift matching
Stephen, Jon, and Ashby here, the co-founders of Charityvest (https://charityvest.org). We created a modern, simple, and affordable way for companies to include charitable giving in their suite of employee benefits.

We give employees their own tax-deductible charitable giving fund, like an “HSA for Charity.” They can make contributions into their fund and, from their fund, support any of the 1.4M charities in the US, all on one tax receipt.

Using the funds, we enable companies to operate gift matching programs that run on autopilot. Each donation to a charity from an employee is matched automatically by the company in our system.

A company can set up a matching gift program and launch giving funds to employees in about 10 minutes of work.

Historically, corporate charitable giving matching programs have been administratively painful to operate. Making payments to charities, maintaining tax records, and doing due diligence on charitable compliance is taxing on HR / finance teams. The necessary software to help has historically been quite expensive and not very useful for employees beyond the matching features.

This is one example of an observation Stephen made after working for years as a philanthropic consultant. Consumer fintech products aren’t built to make great giving experiences for donors. Instead, they are built for buyers — e.g., nonprofits (fundraising) or corporations (gift matching) — without a ton of consideration for the everyday user experience.

A few years back, my wife and I made a commitment to give a portion of our income away every year, and we found it administratively painful to give regularly. The tech that nonprofits typically use hardly inspires generosity — e.g., high fees, poor user flows, and questionable information flow (like tax receipts). Giving platforms try to compensate for poor functionality with bright pictures of happy kids in developing countries, but when the technology is not a good financial experience it puts a damper on things.

Charityvest started when I noticed a particular opportunity with donor-advised funds, which are tax-deductible giving funds recognized by the IRS. They are growing quickly (20% CAGR), but mainly among the high-net worth demographic. We believe they are powerful tools. They enable donors to have a giving portfolio all from one place (on one tax receipt) and have full control over their payment information/frequency, etc. Most of all, they enable a donor to split the decisions of committing to give and supporting a specific organization. Excitement about each of these decisions often strikes at different times for donors—particularly those who desire to give on a budget.

We believe everyone should have their own charitable giving fund no matter their net worth. We’ve created technology that has democratized donor-advised funds.

We also believe good technology should be available for every company, big and small. Employers can offer Charityvest for $2.49 / employee / month subscription, and we charge no fees on any of the giving — charities receive 100% of the money given.

Lastly, we send the program administrator a fun report every month to let them know all the awesome giving their company and its employees did in one dashboard. This info can be leveraged for internal culture or external brand building.

We’re just launching our workplace giving product, but we’ve already built a good portfolio of trusted customers, including Eric Ries’ (author of The Lean Startup) company, LTSE. We’ve particularly seen a number of companies use us as a meaningful part of their corporate decision to join the fight for racial justice in substantive ways.

Our endgame is that the world becomes more generous, starting with the culture of every company. We believe giving is fundamentally good and we want to build technology that encourages more of it by making it more simple and accessible.

You can check out our workplace giving product at (https://charityvest.org/workplace-giving). If you’re interested, we can get your company up and running in 10 minutes. Or, please feel free to forward us on to your HR leadership at your company.

Our giving funds are also available for free for any individual on https://charityvest.org — without gift matching and reporting. We’d invite you to check out the experience. For individuals, we make gifts of cash and stock to any charity fee-free.

Happy to share this with you all, and we’d love to know what you think.