GIVING BACK
Christopher Durso
BREAKOUT
Who Uses Evite?
“We touch professional and personal events,” said Evite’s Victor
Cho. “Within personal events,
the big categories are birthdays,
weddings, and in the summer
we get a ton of summer parties.
Holiday parties are huge.
“The majority [of events using
Evite], I would say, are personal,
but we do have a large chunk
that is professional — nonprofits,
corporate events, corporate parties. The business runs the gamut,
because it’s been around for so
long and we have so many different template designs, it can pretty
much be used for anything.”
ON THE WEB
Learn more about Evite Donations at convn.org/evite-donate.
When Victor Cho and his wife threw a birthday party for their 8-year-old daughter
last August, they forgot to include their
no-gifts policy in the invitation, and she
ended up with “a mountain of presents”
she didn’t want or need, Cho said.
That personal experience clicked
with something Cho was seeing in
his professional life as CEO of Evite,
whose customers were regularly ask-
ing the online-invitation platform to
add a one-click donation function. “It
just struck me,” Cho said, “that when
you’re bringing people together for
a birthday or for an important busi-
ness event that has this commercial
component to it, there really should
be alternatives.”
A month or so after Cho’s daughter’s
birthday party, Evite partnered with
Pledgling, a nonprofit donation plat-
form, to introduce a built-in donation
capability. Through Evite Donations,
Evite users have the option of ask-
ing their invitees to make a donation
to one of thousands of charities on a
drop-down list, from big, well-known
organizations like St. Jude’s Children’s
Research Hospital to local elementary
schools. “If the nonprofit that you want
to donate to is not there,” Cho said,
“there’s actually a workflow where you
can request that it gets added.”
The cost of Evite Donations for users:
nothing. Nor does Evite take any of the
money as a processing or administrative
fee. “My take was, if you’re doing this for
social good, you really shouldn’t benefit
from it,” Cho said. “Why are you taking
a cut? The infrastructure stuff is pretty
simple, and we were blessed that Pledg-
ling had this capability.”
When Cho spoke to Convene last
month, about 7,000 events had used
Evite Donations to raise nearly $200,000
— 40 percent from birthday parties. The
average donation has been $52; the
highest single donation has been around
$2,500. All of that has been with little to
no marketing, Cho said, “because we fol-
low a lean startup [model] for everything.”
That was Phase One for Evite Dona-
tions. As part of Phase Two, right before
the holidays, Evite launched the #Give-
MeFive Challenge, which asked people
to encourage friends to donate $5 to the
charity of their choice. As Evite contin-
ues to ramp up marketing on the new
program, Cho expects to easily raise
more than $1 million, and thinks tens of
millions isn’t out of the question.
“We’re testing, are there particular
marketing angles that are resonating?”
Cho said. “Are there particular category
segments where people are going to be
a little bit more excited? Birthdays is a
big category. Corporate events would be
another one. Professional events where
people are coming together to raise
money for a cause is a huge one from
our perspective.”
Cho is convinced Evite Donations is
tapping a resource that has been largely
unexplored. “There are of course a large
number of nonprofits that use events;
it’s probably one of the biggest ways that
they raise money outside of the crazy
direct-response [mail] that they still
send,” Cho said. “If you’re [organizing]
one of those events, you’re probably
going to be sending an Evite or some-
thing like an Evite anyway.” .
Christopher Durso is executive editor
of Convene.
R$VP
Evite has introduced a free, one-click donation function to
its popular online-invitation platform — and wants to use it
to raise millions of dollars for charity.
Cause for Concern The
partnership between Evite and
Pledgeling, which enables a
one-click donation function on
the online-invitation platform,
was announced at the Internet
Marketing Association’s
IMPACT15 conference.
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