Bootstrapping and Scaling a Social Impact Tech Company - Rachel Klausner // Founder of Millie

Disruptors for GOOD | Social Entrepreneurs and Social Enterprises

In episode 132 of the Disruptors for GOOD podcast I speak with Rachel Klausner, founder of Millie, on bootstrapping and scaling a social impact tech company aimed at growing modern giving.

Rachel is the Founder and CEO of Millie, a charitable giving platform that makes giving back easy and impactful. Rachel’s passion for fundraising started when she spent a year after high school living and volunteering on a youth village where she took on a fundraising role during the day and ran programming for kids in the evenings. Rachel is a product designer by trade and spent 8 years designing software at startups. Her expertise is in personalization technology + product design and is excited to leverage those to transform the way people give.

Millie’s mission is to build a home for giving by connecting companies, their teams, and nonprofits. Millie is a Public Benefit Corporation, with impact at the heart of everything we build. We are so inspired by the people we get to work with on a daily basis: both the nonprofit professionals working to make this world better, and the changemakers at companies inspiring their teams to help them. We build tools to help these groups come together and orchestrate social impact programs. From workplace giving to grantmaking, from volunteering to gifting: our team loves to build products people love.

Match employee donations on a budget

No matter the amount, match programs are an impactful way to build a community and increase retention across your employees. Millie helps companies create sustainable match programs that actually fit their budget. With the freedom to customize employee and company caps, approved and off-limit nonprofits, and a comprehensive database of nonprofits to choose from, your team is sure to find the perfect match.

Build campaigns & build community

Use campaigns to engage with employees around an event or cause area. With a flexible design, you can build campaigns around nonprofit partners, launch new initiatives focused on a CSR goal or support your employee resource groups.

Gift charitable dollars to employees & customers

Recognize and celebrate employees by gifting charitable dollars to donate. Or develop deeper relationships with prospects and customers by sending them charitable gift cards. The charitable dollars you gift can be used to donate to one of 1.7+ million nonprofits and can even go to multiple organizations. Nervous some gifts will go unused? Set custom expiration dates and any unused gifts will return the charitable dollars into your company wallet.

Millie also recently launched Giving Madness. Giving Madness is a bracket-style giving tournament. Structured like the most famous college basketball tournament, your company starts with 16 nonprofits in the giving bracket. Companies contribute to a donation pool and employees vote to advance their favorite nonprofits through four rounds of “games" over the course of one week or month. After the championship game, the pool gets divided up and donated proportionately.