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at the general online experience of donors that are looking to give online, we found the process to by clunky and outdated.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.