Why we're building CharityStack

One of my first jobs was at a nonprofit in Dallas that ran local education programs. I was a program manager, mostly writing curriculum. The work was real, and everyone around me believed in it.

It didn't survive two years.

What killed it wasn't the mission. Kids showed up. The curriculum worked. It closed because the same small group of us was trying to run the programs and raise the money at the same time, and there are only so many hours in a week. Every week turned into the same quiet negotiation: do the work, or fund the work. Eventually one side loses. Ours was the funding, and when the funding goes, everything else goes with it.

I've never forgotten how fragile a young nonprofit is. It's a catch-22 built into the job. You exist to do the work, but you only get to keep existing if you stop doing the work long enough to go ask for money.

So why is fundraising the clunkiest, most draining part of running one?

A lot of the answer is the software. At some point the technology made for nonprofits stopped being made to help them and started being made to make money off them. The clearest example is the tip screen — the prompt at checkout that nudges a donor to "add a little extra," except the extra doesn't go to the cause. It goes to the platform. The donor thinks they're being generous to a charity. They're being generous to a software company.

The rest is quieter but adds up to the same thing. An organization pays for one tool to take donations, another for events, another to email donors, another to keep the records straight, and none of them talk to each other. So the people who should be running programs spend their days stitching tools together and fixing spreadsheets. Value gets pulled out at every step, and almost none of it gets put back in.

That's backwards.

We started CharityStack to flip it around. What we believe is simple: fundraising should be effortless, and the platform should never make money at the mission's expense. In practice that means no monthly fee, no platform fee, and no processing fee paid by the nonprofit. Donors can choose to cover the processing cost, and when they don't, we cover it — so your organization keeps the full gift. There's no tip screen, and there won't be one. If a donor gives a little extra, it goes to your work, not to us. And instead of five disconnected tools, your forms, events, checkout, donor records, and dashboard are one system that actually fits together.

I want fundraising to be effortless so nonprofits can spend everything they have on the hard part: the problem they exist to solve. I want every small organization out there to never face the choice we faced — the work, or the money. I don't want anyone else to sit in the room where a good nonprofit decides to close its doors, not because it failed its mission, but because it couldn't fund it.

That's why we're building CharityStack.