Thoughts on Giving

What started out as an ordinary Friday morning turned out to be exactly what I needed…

Fridays typically start for me at NCS Winston Salem (New Canaan Society) at 7:00 AM bright and early. For the Winston Salem chapter, this means that 150-200 men get together on Friday mornings to have coffee and biscuits and share and to grow in Christ. For us its “Its not church, its not bible study, and if you don’t have fun don’t come back.” Simple as that…

This past Friday, we heard a story about ORGAN DONATION.

Specifically the story of how one man silently suffered with a degenerating kidney. Going through the process of dialysis and getting on the kidney transplant list. Then at a chance meeting this gentleman spoke to a counterpart who had a husband who had a kidney disease. She happened to be going to get tested the following Monday to see if she could donate one of her kidneys to her husband. Ok… I know that was a lot…

Then to the man’s surprise, when sharing his fear of the situation to his friend/coworker go the response “If I am not a match for my husband then you can have one of my kidneys.”

Wow.

What I learned on this past Friday was that there are many ways to give and none are more important than the gift of love.  For me, witnessing a living example of the love of a fellow man was truly an amazing experience.

Did you know that we only need one of our two kidneys?

Do you know how may people in your own community that need a kidney?

For more information about how you can help visit The National Kidney Foundation

 

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Start Up: The Journey Part III

There is quite a bit going on at Pass the Plate these days. In this post, we are going to update you a little on what is happening behind the scenes.

As with most businesses, there are two faces to the business. The side that faces the public (in our case the Pass the Plate phone application and website) and the side that is behind the scenes. For Pass the Plate, this is database maintenance, sales funnel management etc.

So today, we are going to talk about what is going on behind the scenes at Pass the Plate. Our foremost objective is to make giving easy, but we must not forget all of the work that goes into making that possible…

Early on in our discovery process, we determined that the donation process was one that had many different pain points and that in order for Pass the Plate to be successful, we had to fix or eliminate as many of these pain points as possible. When looking at the general online experience of donors that are looking to give online, we found the process to by clunky and outdated. We wanted the Pass the Plate user experience to be much better.

This experience starts the moment a customer downloads the Pass the Plate application. For Pass the Plate, a simple “search” function was an easy step in the right direction. Unlike other donation services who have a limited database, Pass the Plate allows the potential donor to make a donation to any of the 1.6 million non-profits in our database.

But what if a donor can not find the non-profit?

To answer this problem, in early January, with the release of our minimum viable product or MVP we included an add a charity button that returns in the event that a user is not able to find their desired non-profit. While admittedly, this function still needs some UI improvement (User Interface), we are happy with the results we have seen.

Immediately after implementation of the add a non-profit function, we started to receive requests to add non-profits to the database.

While this is a good, it creates a potential bottleneck in the Pass the Plate pipeline. What is meant by this is that there MUST be a process that is followed each and every time a non-profit is added to the Pass the Plate database. Not to get too complicated, but we are talking about IRS rules here, and we need to be sure we are following acceptable practices of verification.

I’ll address how we solved this problem in just a bit…

Another item that we had to address on the back end after the launch of the MVP was the process that each non-profit had to go through once a donation occurs. Let me explain…You download the Pass the Plate application and then make a donation to your favorite non-profit. Next what happens?

First, the merchant account charges your credit card, then the merchant deposits the funds into the bank account. While that is happening, we generate a record of the transaction that triggers a check getting cut, mail getting sent out, then verification that the check was cashed etc. Additionally, a call must be put into a que so that Pass the Plate can contact the non-profit.

Clearly, that is lots of stuff to manage…

Sure it is!  But we are so fortunate to have technology that can help us to do many of these items.

To managing the different pipelines i.e. add a non-profit, donation received etc. we use a system called Pipedrive. Pipedrive allows users to set up different pipelines and edit the phases of the pipelines etc. For us, this because a simple and intuitive tool that we could use in the early phases of Pass the Plate.

For the checks getting cut and mail going out…initially we have been handling this process in our office so that we could make sure we had a handle of the sequencing and timing of events. We have already contacted and interviewed several companies that can handle this part of the process quicker and more cost effectively than we could do ourselves.

In summary, we are still a start up and are finding creative and inexpensive ways to manage our business better and more efficiently. As we grow, we are sure to adopt technology that is more integrated. For now, this works. Things get done and our customers do not fall through the cracks.

In our next blog post about what is going on at Pass the Plate we will discuss the customer journey and what we are doing to improve it.

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Start Up: The Journey Part II

Start-up Weekend

Start-up Weekend

In the previous post, I mentioned “community”. In this post, I will summarize what I have done in the past 6 months.  What I hope that you get out of this summary is immersion. Immerse yourself in the community – work hard and learn.

Several mornings a week I get to the office earlier than most. This means that I get to make the coffee. I don’t mind making the coffee. Quite honestly, I like it. Its fresh ground and good.

So what does that have to do with community? Well, the first point is that you need to be there, meaning being present, to be a part of the community. Personally, I try to make it a daily habit to say hello to as many people as possible. The Pass the Plate office is at a place called Flywheel. It is a relatively small co-working space at 10,000 square feet.

Idea Pitch  is a monthly event where people pitch ideas. I have attended several since I have been located in the co-working space. At the idea pitches I have heard from companies that are at different stages in the start-up process. Some of the pitches have been ideas that were literally put together the weekend before, others have been from PhD students in the community that are working on a side project. Really cool stuff. Really smart people.

Note: As an audience member, the experience is positive because you get hear common questions from an audience. You get to ask questions too. Additionally there is time to network with other professionals in the area.

Having these personal conversations over and over again helps to hone your presentation skills. It has taken quite some time now, but for the most part, because of these opportunities, Pass the Plate has had the opportunity to develop a 15 second elevator pitch, 30 second pitch and 2 minute pitch and even hone in on common questions.

Other community opportunities have been thinks like.

Start-up weekend – Start-up weekend is an emersion weekend taking a new idea from start to Minimum Viable Product. 6-11 on Friday, 8AM -10PM or later on Saturday, and then 8AM- 4PM then a live pitch to VC and panel Sunday.

(You can read about my experience here or see if there is one in your area here)

Classes – First is How to Start a Start up. Sponsored by our co-working space and is a curriculum of classes put on at Stanford University and many other readings. It is a 12 week class and meets once a week for two hours.

Another was put on by Wake Forest Law School, and learned about the Securities and Exchange Law. I have recently registered Pass the Plate up for a class to be taught by Wake Forest Law beginning January 2016. The Wake Forest Community Law Clinic also announced regular office hours open to the public. Because of attending events like these, Pass the Plate now has the opportunity to submit projects for Law Students to work on during the next semester. This could amount in significant savings to the company on simple legal work like filling out state complaisance forms!

Internet Summit Raleigh 2015

Internet Summit Raleigh 2015

Long Distance – Pass the Plate has also participated in programs that involve a little traveling.  Our first incubator program was EntreDot out of Durham North Carolina (about an hour drive) and we have attended TechBreakfast in Raleigh (90 minute drive) for the past 6 months. We have also attended several other summits on the East Coast.

All of this to say, is that in the Pass the Plate journey, it has been very helpful to be active in the community. Talking, watching, learning, answering questions, asking questions, to the community have all given our team the insight, direction, correction, and wisdom we needed to get where we are today.

As we move into a full launch and then hopefully growing our brand in 2016, we will continue to be a part of the community and look forward to learning and contributing more.

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Start-up: The Journey

Moving into a co-working space was one of the best things we could have done for the Pass the Plate business. In Winston Salem there are a few options, and we choose to work out of Flywheel. There are several reasons why.

  1. Energy – Being around other start-up companies and other entrepreneurs makes for a good environment. Throw in a few people that work for larger companies but do so remotely, and what you have is a stew of interesting people with many different skills and backgrounds.
  2. Mentors – It is good to be abound people that have been around the block, we can use their experience to help solve a few of our problems.

    Flywheel Coffee bar with community wall in the background

    Flywheel Coffee bar with community wall in the background

  3. Coffee – In my office that means Krankies Coffee fresh brewed… all day…
  4. Community – There are more than 30 different companies that work out of my location. A few of them are larger and have 4-8 employees, some are start ups, others include several attorneys and an accountant or two, a few web developers… you get the picture.
  5. Conference Rooms – While some businesses do not require meetings, others do.  Just having the access to conference rooms that are equipped with white boards, projectors or screens etc. is a nice thing.

In the next post, we will talk about the many different ways that Pass the Plate has become more involved in the community.  If you are reading this and you are a start up, then it may give you a few ideas of how you can become involved in your local start up community. If you are reading this and are not a start up, and are just wanting to learn more about the folks over at Pass the Plate, then great!  These posts will hopefully let you know that we are people too. We are just a group of guys who decided to together to try to make the world a better place one donation at a time. This is our story.

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The Christmas Season with Pass the Plate

MVP product is almost here! Keep up the improvements!

MVP product is almost here! Keep up the improvements!

I must admit, traveling with Pass the Plate has been very interesting. First and foremost, I have had the opportunity to learn and hear from other tech entrepreneurs on the East Coast through the TechBreakfast forum’s.

Over the Christmas holiday was no different with the exception that I was able to take my family with me on this trip. As many of you are aware, school is out around the Christmas holiday, and my wife Julie took a week off of work so that we could travel. So off we went to the Maryland TechBreakfast.  Our first stop was in Charlottesville, Virginia to visit with family and have dinner. Then off to Maryland on a late night excursion to a wonderful hotel. The Christmas decorations were fantastic and the staff welcomed us with warm cookies when we checked in for the night.

It was nice to see where Dr. Ben Carson practiced medicine, as well as to see the wonderful architecture of the area. The TechBreakfast presentation itself marked a milestone for Pass the Plate. This was the first presentation/demo where we were able to go through the entire donation process without a hitch. Yes… this means it works!

From a founding team standpoint, this is a pretty large milestone. Why might you ask?  Well for starters, we thought that we were going to have a completely functional application delivered to us at the end of October. Then after several iterations of search enhancements, several “found” features that were in the original build but somehow disappeared when the MVP was released etc. we are now here…except a little button that has already been developed and is scheduled in the next release of Pass the Plate on December 29, 2015. Of course iOS will then take roughly 9 days to approve the new release…

Ok, so back to the tech breakfast presentation. With the presentation being a success, we were approached by several attendees with feedback and potential contacts in the non-profit space.

As normal practice, we exchanged business cards and spoke for a few minutes. Now, the next part is very important for anyone that is in business. What I then do with the Pass the Plate contacts that I make is to put them into a CRM system so that I can follow up with them at a later time and make the connection more meaningful.

There are two main reasons why getting feedback and referrals from early adopters is very important to the overall growth strategy of Pass the Plate.

First, we want to address concerns and the needs of our customer/end users. Our goal is that all solutions that we put forth in the Pass the Plate application will make the giving experience easier for the user. Our guiding principle is #GivingMadeEasy

Second is that we believe that through emersion in the tech community we can help to build a buzz around the Pass the Plate product. Again, this fits with the goal/theme of Pass the Plate – to make giving easy.

Here are two examples of what I just mentioned.

While in Washington DC, a customer mentioned that they were not able to find a particular non-profit using the search function.  This lead us to uncover that the add a non profit function had been somehow omitted from the last iteration.

This has been corrected and will be included in build 3.0.

While presenting at the Austin Forum, in December of 2015, we were approached by local influencers in the nonprofit community.   This spurred two follow-up conversations.

Austin Texas

Austin Texas

The first with a community organizer that will help Pass the Plate get in touch with several non-profits that would be willing to partner with Pass the Plate at the next SXSW event. The idea is that Pass the Plate would partner with 5 different non profits at the SXSW event and then help them raise money for their cause.

The second was with a gentleman who runs a company that helps cities connect with its residence in the digital world. In other words, you live in say my home town of Winston Salem North Carolina, and then Winston Salem would partner with this gentleman’s company to provide a web portal into the different services offered in and around Winston Salem.

So now, it is a few days prior to the New Year, and Pass the Plate is positioning itself to make giving easy and to work with wonderful strategic partners in 2016.

As a side note, yet NOT a note of insignificance. We at Pass the Plate are deeply touched by tragic events that happen on a regular basis. Most recently tornados touched down and left much devastation in their wake. We reach out to those effected in prayer and hope to in the near future be able to use our application to help fund worthy efforts to help restore the families and communities that have lost so much. Stay tuned in to see how the Pass the Plate Foundation can help your community.

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