Transcript:
This podcast was transcribed through a third-party application. Please disregard any misrepresentations.
Intro:
Welcome to Civic Warriors brought to you by Withum. On this podcast, we bring the conversation to you. Sharing, engaging stories that motivate and build consensus in the nonprofit community. This podcast is about the innovators, the leaders on the front line of adversity, guiding lights in the nonprofit industry affecting change and through their stories, we can all join forces to become civic warriors.
Brad Caruso:
Hey warriors. Welcome to today’s episode of Withum’s Civic Warriors. Today, we have a very special guest Adam Nash. Adam is the co-founder and CEO of Daffy, the donor advised fund for you. Adam served as an executive angel investor and advisor to some of the most successful technology companies that come out of Silicon valley. He has his bachelor degree in computer science from Stanford, MBA from Harvard, and is currently on the board of directors of acorns, one of the fastest growing financial wellness systems and shift technologies. We’re gonna be talking a little bit about Daffy today, which is the donor advised fund for you, which is a not-for-profit community built around a new modern platform for giving one built around the commitment to give, not the amount you give. It empowers people to make giving a habit through a seamless mobile experience that helps members set money aside for charity. Watch it grow tax free, a modern investment portfolio, and donate to the more than 1.5 million charities that sit in the United States today. So we’re gonna go through a couple things about charitable giving the mindset about charitable giving and Adam certainly, being the CEO has created a platform which really encourages and creates a better, a different model for giving than many of us are used to. So, Adam, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.
Adam Nash:
Oh, Brad, thank you for having me glad to be here.
Brad Caruso:
Love it. So, you know, one of the things that intrigued me the most, just kind of hearing about the model itself, maybe, Adam, tell a little bit about your backstory and why, you know, giving itself is important to you or why you feel it was important to create this platform.
Adam Nash:
Yeah. I’m happy to, and I would tell a story a little bit about Daffy as well, but in terms of me personally, I mean, you mentioned I’m an engineer by training. I came out of school and I love computers. I love software. And mainly what I love about computers and software is just the fact that I can take things that are either difficult or consistent or slow and make them effectively abundant and free. And so most of my career has been about bringing technology to new areas. Actually, my first job was at apple, which wasn’t the go-go days. This was the nineties when everyone was counting the minutes until apple went out of business. But I had joined this company called next, which got acquired by apple and, ended up working on the new operating system Rhapsody, which ended up becoming the basis of Mac west 10 and iOS and all these things we use today.
Adam Nash:
But after that, I went from one company to other, you know, eBay was very passionate for me, this idea that anyone anywhere could start a small business, make a little bit of extra money every month for their family. I went to LinkedIn, which was very much about the empowerment, like in the modern economy that you could own your own reputation, right? Who, you know, and, and what you know, and this belief that companies weren’t gonna take care of you, that you had to own your own professional career and reputation. And then of course I was a CEO of Wealthfront for four years. This idea that maybe it’s not only rich people, millionaires who deserve sophisticated financial advice that maybe software could help with that. And so I, that’s kind of the repeated theme is I try to stay on the edge of what can computers do now to make our lives better, make things more fair, bring expensive things to more people.
Adam Nash:
But you know, it led me here because I feel the same way about giving giving is an incredibly important part of people’s lives. We teach it to our children. We’re raised to believe that part of being a good person is remembering to get out of yourself that there are other people who are less fortunate that yourself and that you should put something aside for them. And I was thinking we’ve done so much in technology to help people shop, to help people date, to help people save, to help people spend. Why don’t we have the same level of effort around giving, right? Why can’t we use all this great technology to help people give? And so I think that ended up leading me to Daffy, even though the origin story is a little bit different than that,
Brad Caruso:
But it’s all relevant, right? I think, you know, you’re trying to create an efficient platform. You know, you certainly have the mindset that there’s all these elements out there, but no one’s really, or people have, but there hasn’t really been a significant amount of focus on giving itself. You know, certain people of religious background have certain things in their principles, but not everybody, not everybody kind of their first thought is how much am I gonna give this year? You know, am I gonna set a target? Am I gonna set a goal? And I think it’s certainly relevant to create a platform that facilitates that or, or creates an efficient way to facilitate that. So definitely an interesting part of the platform itself that, at least I gravitated towards.
Adam Nash:
Oh yeah, for sure. And, and that’s not an accident, right. You know, I, for the last five years I’ve taught a class at Stanford University. I’m teaching it again this year, it’s called personal finance for engineers and go through money problems. And it turns out there’s a lot of commonality in money problems, right? And so, you know, when Alejandro and I were looking at different ideas of what we could build in 2020, remember this is during the pandemic. Obviously giving was very top of mind partially because of the pandemic and, and the fact that a lot of people were, were suffering and struggling in a number of ways. But partially because Alejandro and I are both parents, you know, my kids go to this school has a wonderful tradition. Every Friday, the kids bring in spare change. They put in a little piggy bank and then once a quarter, the whole class votes on which nonprofit, which charity to send that money to, it’s a really a beautiful thing.
Adam Nash:
And it got me thinking, why do we teach our children to do this? But we don’t do it ourselves. And then I said, actually, there’s an asterisk on that. It turns out there is a group of people who does do that regularly, but they have access to advisors and accountants, you know, wealthy people have these donor advised funds. They put money aside all the time for nonprofits, largely for tax reasons. And so we got to thinking maybe there’s some value in actually expanding that to everyone. And of course it turns out that most people do give, I think in the US, it’s like 60 to 70 million households, but they give transactionally, right. They tend to give when asked, it’s not as proactive and you’re a hundred percent correct. The research is overwhelming. If you set a goal for something financially, you tend to do it better.
Adam Nash:
You can imagine none of us would save for our retirement that, well, if you had to write a check periodically into your retirement, right, no, you want it hooked up to your paycheck. You want that money to go to a 401k or an IRA every paycheck every month. So why not do that for giving? As I mentioned, the research shows that if we set a goal for giving people who do that give about 32% more, and that’s a really big number because the US is very generous already, right? That those 60 to 70 million households give about 330 billion to charity every year. And as big as that number is, what if it was 32% bigger? What if we gave an extra hundred billion dollars to charity every year, it’d be more than a trillion dollars over a decade. And so Alejandro and I were so excited about that idea that we just kind of dove in and tried to build something new. And that’s how Daffy was born.
Brad Caruso:
No doubt. And certainly those kind of numbers when you put them in context are obviously very, very big numbers, but certainly could be bigger. Do you know, just offhand, like the average percentage that a person in the US gives or how much the average individual personally may give?
Adam Nash:
Yeah. There’s a couple ways of looking at it, right? Like if you look at the macro economist would look at the overall economy and say, look overall giving, if you include corporations and foundations alike is over 470 billion a year in the US. Like that’s more than 2.3% of GDP. Just, just for context, like all of agriculture is smaller than that. Right, right. <laugh> and so, you know, macro economist say like, well, what percent of income does the US give to charity? It looks like about 2.3%. That’s the high level answer. But I will tell you, I I’m a very design centric person. You mentioned in my introduction, my graduate degree, my master’s in computer sciences, in human computer interactions. So first thing you learn is you always talk to real people. You don’t wanna just be in a room with a bunch of engineers.
Adam Nash:
You actually wanna talk to human beings to really use a product. And so actually the first thing I did at Daffy is I actually spent a few weeks talking to as many people as I could about how they think about giving. And so I have bad news and good news for you. Sorry. I’m gonna give you the bad news first bad news news first is no one agrees. No one agrees. I talk to 25 people. You will get at least 20 different opinions about how much people should give to charity. But the good news is, is that when I asked people how much they gave to charity every year uniformly to a T, they wanted to give more than they actually did. Right. I would ask them how much they think they should give to charity every year. They’d give me a number. They’d give me a percentage.
Adam Nash:
And then I’d ask, how much did you actually give last year? And almost to a T everyone was feeling a little bit guilty. I think disappointed in themselves. This was not an embarrassment for me. They didn’t care telling me, but it was more personally. Giving is very personal. Most people, I learned have someone in their lives, a parent, a teacher, a priest, a rabbi, someone they looked up to who taught them that giving is part of living a good life. And so when they realize that despite having this notion that they should give that they didn’t meet their own standard for being good. It it’s a hurtful thing. You, you think something’s gone wrong. And actually that’s a big piece of why the research comes out the way it is. Right? A lot of Daffy is based on the idea that if we just helped people be the good people, they want to be, to give the amount that they actually want to give. It would be a phenomenally larger number than what people give today.
Brad Caruso:
Without a doubt, I ran a survey here, a couple years ago at Withum. We were a little bit smaller. We had about a thousand employees at the time. And I asked that simple question. Why do you give, I just, I was just curious. And I think we got something like 250 answers. And the, the number one reason why people give was personal connection, whether someone had a disease that a charity supports, someone grew up in a certain environment and that organization provides the public benefit. And just very, very plainly was kind of what I expected, but also it’s what their brain, I think, associates with who they want to give to because they were personally affected by it. So it’s an easy association, but if they don’t know the specific charity to your point of, sometimes people just don’t know who to give to, or they don’t have that direct, you know, even with all the marketing out there and all the flyers and all the TV commercials and everything that charities do, you know, it doesn’t necessarily click into, okay, well, how does that translate into a dollar?
Brad Caruso:
So then the second thing there is you have to make it easy for them, right? I think the second reason why a lot of people don’t give is it’s, it’s just not easy for them, for whatever reason. And I, I don’t think that it’s not, you know, charities have made it very easy for people to give on a variety of levels, but if it’s not front and center, you don’t get an email pinging you to do something. You don’t get the mailer every day to ping you to do it. Certainly there’s a lot of room for a technology or, or for, you know, a different mindset towards it or different ability to use the technology to make that happen. And we also found out that out of all the 250 people, nobody read the 990. So one of the common go, oh, do people look at my 990? And I hate to break it to everyone, but not everybody looks at the 990, except for like foundations foundations always look at the 990’s but individuals, unless there’s some major public issue, don’t usually go to GuideStar and pull up the 990. Sorry.
Adam Nash:
Yeah, no, I mean, I think, it is a hard problem. There’s no doubt. Unfortunately, I think it’s even harder than you’re letting on because you know, as a product person, it seemed to me that giving is two hard problems combined into one, right. You know, one is, most people don’t have really detailed budgets. They don’t have a clear idea of how much money they have. I, I was always impressed at well from, we had a feature, it was a financial advisor. You could link your bank accounts and summarize your income and how much do you wanna save and route to other areas? And it’s all automated fantastic. But we discovered even back then that, that people didn’t even have a good beat on how much income they made, let alone, you know, how much they were paying out. And so I think that giving has this problem of how much can I afford to give is not an easy problem, right?
Adam Nash:
So when people are asked, they have to on the spot, figure out, do I have the money for this? And the second thing, of course, you, you brought up, which is an incredibly difficult problem is, well, who do I give the money to? What organization do I support? And one of the exciting things about donor advised funds, from my perspective, one of the reasons I think the product itself is such a great product, is it separates those two problems. It basically separates out the putting money aside how much you can afford to give and makes it intentional. So no matter what your number is, you know, whether it’s a few hundred dollars, a few percentage of your salary, even like you mentioned, biblically 10% of, of your income, whatever number you pick Daffy, doesn’t have a strong opinion about that. We just ask people to pick a number and then we try to automate it to make it as easy as possible to put that money aside, tax free.
Adam Nash:
And then of course, now whenever you want to give, whether it’s someone who you’re close to or an organization you’ve supported for a long time, you don’t have to worry about that first problem. Like, can you afford to give, right? Like I opened my phone now you see Daffy. I met someone the other day who was raising for an organization, sounded phenomenal. The fact that I could pull my phone out of my pocket, see how much money I had in my account and just say, oh, I’ll give a hundred dollars. And then tap, tap, tap it was done. Is phenomenally empowering. It’s hard to describe the experience until you have it just because there’s so much friction in giving today.
Brad Caruso:
Certainly. And I think to that point of getting a notification or, or having some, some prompt, I, I think we get too much information nowadays. And so unless something is front and center, it tends to go to the back of the room, especially when it comes to something that, you know, giving isn’t, you know, we have mandatory bills. We have to pay every day. We’ve gotta pay our rent. We’ve gotta pay for food. So if it’s not front and center, a lot of times it, it doesn’t necessarily take that presence when it comes to how you wanna use those money.
Adam Nash:
Yeah, for sure. And, and like I said, people support for organizations varies, right? For most people, they have two types of organizations. Two types of giving, they do one is they have organizations that they’ve belonged to for a long time that they’ve volunteered for that they care about it might be their church or their synagogue. It might be a community center. It might be, the local zoo and those organizations need consistent support. So setting up a recurring donation with them is exactly what they want to see. And it’s what people want. They don’t want to accidentally forget to support their organization. But then there’s also things that happen in the moment, right. We saw this year, war broke out in the Ukraine. We saw a lot of increase in giving at Daffy due to that. Right. And so there are definitely events that trigger people to want to give and to help. But it’s a hard problem if you haven’t put money aside, like you said, right? Like when you’re worried about how much milk costs, it’s hard to figure out how much you can afford to give right now. And the great thing about having a separate account is that you don’t have to worry about that anymore. The money’s there, you made the decision, you just have to decide who to give it to. And when.
Brad Caruso:
No doubt, maybe we could take a pause too. And I always like to provide a little bit of education on donor advised funds themselves. So, you know, maybe you could share a little bit about how your platform kind of compares contrasts maybe to some existing models or just in general education to the, audience here about donor advised funds themselves. Why does that model make sense? And it’s, it’s clearly just from my, you know, knowledge, it’s one of the most common ways of giving today.
Adam Nash:
Yeah, sure. I’m happy to. And first of all, I would just say that even though there’s a lot of money in donor advised funds because the existing industry has mostly focused on the wealthy. It’s not as many people as you might think. So if anyone feels guilty about not knowing what a donor advised fund is, please don’t, it’s an artifact of the way the existing industry has focused. But you know, the short version is a donor advised fund is just a type of tax advantaged account. You might have heard of an IRA or a 401k for retirement or a 529 plan for college, a donor advised fund. These accounts have been around for decades almost 80 years. And it’s a very simple account where you can put money into this account. You get a tax deductible, right? A tax deduction for a charitable donation right away, which is very useful and you can donate cash or stock or even crypto these days.
Adam Nash:
And then it goes into an account that’s invested in a portfolio that you choose. And then anytime you want to give you make a recommendation to move that money to another charity and it happens, right? So it’s just a, a way of having a separate account and there’s tax advantages to it. And this is a big advantage in the US, of course, because in our US system, right, there’s a calendar year to taxes, right? Like if you get a big bonus in November, December, and you’re facing a big tax bill, it might be too quick for you to figure out exactly what organization to give it to. If you put the money in a donor advised fund, it gives you time. And most people want to take time to make sure their dollars go the farthest. Now there are accounts everywhere. There are community funds that offer these that are local, but most people are familiar with the national brands, Fidelity, Schwab, and Vanguard.
Adam Nash:
But the problem with these institutions is, is really just two things. One is the technology tends to be a little bit dated, right? I was very surprised when we launched Daffy that we were the first fully functional donor advised fund in the app store, right? The only app where you could download it, open an account, fund it, invest the money and make donations to almost any legal charity in the US. And that was in 2021, right? The app store isn’t exactly new, right? So the, these big banks and brokerages moved so slowly, it’s not totally surprising to me, but that was one of the issues that technology. But the second one is actually how they make their money. Unfortunately, all these firms are investment firms, whether it’s Fidelity or Schwab or Vanguard, these are all great firms. Vanguard is a wonderful company, right? I recommend their product and services all the time, but even their donor advised fund works the way the others do, which is that they charge you a percentage of assets under management.
Adam Nash:
So Vanguard has a minimum of $25,000. So you can’t even open an account for less than 25,000. And they charge you 0.6%, which means for a hundred thousand dollars account, that would actually be $600 a year. And this causes two problems. One is it’s definitely more expensive than we are. We’re a basic membership fee. We cost $3 a month, no matter how much money you have in there. But the bigger issue is that with that business model, they’re really incentivized to go after the largest accounts. So it turns out for them a million dollar account really does make them 10 times as much revenue as a hundred thousand dollar account and a hundred times more than a $10,000 account if they even allow it. And so they end up spending most of their time looking for wealthy people who can afford to put millions of dollars aside for charity.
Adam Nash:
And what’s even worse from my perspective for the entire industry around philanthropy is they actually lose revenue. Actually, every time you give money to charity, right? If you have a hundred thousand dollars account with fidelity and you give $10,000 to your church, well, then their revenue just went down 10%. And I don’t think they work actively against it, but you can tell that their incentives are not to help you push that money out so quickly. And so these were a lot of the ideas we put into Daffy. When we thought about redesigning, the donor advised fund is how could we make it easy to open? We use technology, of course, how can we make it inexpensive? We used a membership model, like most nonprofits do, right. Just $3 a month. And of course we set our minimums very low. So you can open up a Daffy account with a simple decision to just put aside $10 a week, $25 a month. You can just put a hundred dollars in the account to get started. We try to do everything we can to make it easy for people to open the account and even easier for them to give the money to charities. And we have all these features in the app that help people discover charities both nationally and then in their local area.
Brad Caruso:
Yeah. And you bring up a couple super interesting points that I definitely wasn’t thinking about a lot, you know, a lot of the existing DAFs that are out there, you know, certainly financially they benefit more from the larger dollar values, but even marketing wise, you don’t see a lot of marketing or, or effort put towards lower dollar value donations, but it’s an interesting model because certainly it affords the ability for more donation. And it stands behind your philosophy of getting more people to give, which I think is the most important concept here is you’ve created a, you know, a niche market for something that, that now more people are able to give, you know, they don’t have to deal with all the compliance, getting tax receipts. And we will get into that in a second when you’re giving to a lot of charities and you’re trying to track down all the information. Sometimes it’s a bit challenging, but certainly just what I’ve learned today and something that I wasn’t really thinking about, but I think is certainly relevant about your platform. Is this concept of increasing the volume of giving?
Adam Nash:
Yeah. Well, that’s what we call here. The generosity gap. I, I kind of wrote a paper walking through this, and that’s the name that we gave for this gap between what people want to give and what they actually give. And you hit the nail in the head earlier, right? The reason most people don’t give as much as they want to is they just get busy. Life is busy, you have work, you have family, you have a social life. And we just went through a couple years of a pandemic. There’s plenty on everyone’s plate. That gets in the way, and it’s not that people don’t prioritize or want to give it just, isn’t the most urgent thing to get done in any given day. And so it gets put off. And so this is why automation and technology can help so much. My Daffy account is set up with about eight organizations that I support every year with the amounts.
Adam Nash:
And I’ve even set the dates that I, I give because I like to give on certain dates maybe to honor family member or an anniversary, or just to match the school year, right. For my kid’s school. And so by setting that all up in Daffy, I no longer have to worry about that. We spend a lot of time with the technology, trying to figure out how we can make this easier. One of the things that we do make very easy is to donate anything you wanna donate. You want to donate cash, you can use a debit card, a credit card, link your bank account. We even take apple pay. You wanna donate stock or ETFs. You can do that from almost any brokerage out there. We even accept over 120 different types of crypto for people who are into that. Oh wow. And to your point, the tax piece is another big piece of friction.
Adam Nash:
Anyone in Daffy can get a tax report any day. It’s not something that we mail out every year. You know, in February, you can open the app anytime and see a complete list of everything that you’ve donated and what’s potentially tax deductible. So you can either give to your accountant or handle it yourself. And yes, we handle the forms. If you donate stock or you donate crypto, and there’s special things you need to do at tax time, we take care of that too. So we really try to do as many things as possible to make it easy to give it. It’s our whole reason for existence. Our mission as a company is to help more people give more often. And so that’s what we do.
Brad Caruso:
Love it. One of the concepts, just to drill into a little bit further that this concept of creating a budget and how to go about creating a budget for your year to give, like, you know, how do you view that? What is your own personal philosophy on creating that? How do you base yours? Is it just, you know, I know I’m gonna make X next year, so I wanna give Y or, or what’s your philosophy on that?
Adam Nash:
Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And actually I wrote a post about this. About the first time I created my own giving goal. It was back more than 10 years ago. It actually led to me opening my first donor advised fund, which despite the fact that it wasn’t as fan or nice as Daffy <laugh> really changed my giving for the better. But I got asked this question by my accountant. I was in a good situation, LinkedIn, which is one of these companies that I helped build was going public. And so my accountant said, well, it’s gonna be a big tax year. Have you thought about giving more to charity this year? And I said, well, I don’t know which organizations I wanna support. And he said, well, there’s this thing called the donor advise fund. And he tells me about it. And I say, this is amazing.
Adam Nash:
Sounds perfect, but how do I decide how much to put it? And he said, well, one thing you can do is take the amount that you give to charity every year, and then maybe multiply it by five or 10. And just put aside the amount you’re gonna give to charity over the next 10 years and make sure you have it put aside and your donor advised fund do it now. Right? It’s a good year. And it had this question, which is a budgeting question. Well, how much do I want to give to charity every year? My experience, and in my class, I talk about this with budgeting cause one of the, the class sessions is on budgets is, you know, there’s two ways that people come to budgets. One is kind of top down and theoretical, right? Like how much do you think is appropriate to spend on this?
Adam Nash:
And usually that’s a limit, right? Usually we all want to spend more than we actually can afford to. And so usually you’re putting limits in place and some people I see with philanthropy coming it that way, they have a percentage in mind right. Of what a good person should give or what they want to give. And so they basically take their income multiplied by a percentage and do that. And by the way, Daffy has a calculator to help people do this if they want to do it, the other way that people tend to do it is more bottoms up. They look at their actual behavior, right? Maybe they have a financial applications. Maybe they just did their taxes last year. But some people will say, well, how much have I already been giving to charity? And so they’ll do that and add that up and say, well, I wanna do at least that much every year or maybe I wanna do a little bit more than that next year, etc.
Adam Nash:
With either technique, you end up landing on a number. Is that number perfect? No, it’s definitely not. And we all know from, you know, in personal finance that budgets are rarely, rarely adhered to perfectly. But the evidence really is overwhelming that people who do make budgets do tend to get closer to the mark than people who don’t. And just the intentionality of thinking about the problem affects the way you spend overall. And so what I found in my own behavior is the intentionality of picking a goal for my giving of saying, this is how much I’m gonna give to charity every year. Not only greatly increased the amount I actually gave to charity, but also it gave me a baseline that when I wanted to be more generous, I would go even above and beyond that number, which is kind of a better version than going above and beyond what you’re supposed to spend on, you know, rent or food or, other things in our lives or, you know, maybe things, those things you have to entertainment, right?
Adam Nash:
There’s some things that, you know, don’t quite generate as much value as maybe food or rent, clothing, et cetera. But, with giving it’s a wonderful feeling when you beat your goal. I mean, one of the things we actually designed in the Daffy app is kind of like apple watch, like your health meter, you set this goal and you track through the year how you’re doing against your goal. And when you hit that goal, one of my favorite features is like the, the bar turns gold, you get confetti, right? And every time you open the app, you kind of get this reminder that you’ve exceeded this goal. And then of course, next year you can always set the goal higher and help more people.
Brad Caruso:
Yeah. And psychologically, it certainly lends to it, but your concepts on, you know, budgeting. I mean, when I look at some of the businesses that we work with, a lot of the nonprofits, you know, I either see people do zero based budgeting, right? You start at zero and I pick a number with what I think I can or should give, or I do it based on a percentage. Or I start out with the, you know, the old Sally concept of same as last year. I started as last year as the benchmark and say, okay, maybe this year I’m gonna increase if by 3%, you know, cost of living or 8%, depending on what inflationary year you’re in, but certainly some good concepts just for those out there, thinking about how do I pick a target? How do I create a budget? You know, may not be first nature.
Adam Nash:
Yeah I agree. And, and, and both those methods make a lot of sense. The reason for giving, I tend to like the latter one a little bit more it’s like I said, as intellectually pure as zero based budgeting is, and as important it is for financial planning. Because just because you spent a lot of money on clothing last year, well maybe last year was a different year, right? Maybe you, you don’t need that same expense. So you don’t want that to just accrue as a habit, lifestyle creep, etc. When it comes to giving to charity, most organizations really do depend on getting their budget every year. And so if you gave money last year, in some ways, the organization really wants that money this year too. And I think that’s the right thing to do. There is a third method though, that I forgot to mention that we put into our app a really interesting feature, lot of very interesting reactions to it is for the first time we licensed data, right?
Adam Nash:
We paid money for data to actually show people when they set their goal. How much in your zip code, the average household gives to charity? Oh, not to be prescriptive, but benchmarking is a third way to do a budget. Of course. And it’s not perfect, but it is one of these pieces of data that makes you realize we don’t talk about giving enough. Most people have no idea what their neighbors give to charity or the other parents at the school, even when you’re part of the same organization, we don’t really know what other people are doing. Like a lot of things about money. We don’t talk about it enough in this country. It’s not socially acceptable in a lot of situations, but with giving there’s a real problem there because a lot of people just want to do the right thing and not knowing what other people give is a problem.
Adam Nash:
And so yeah, if you go through the flow, to open up a Daffy account and you go to pick your giving goal, yes, you can use the calculator, a percentage of your salary. You can just type in a number. But the other thing we do give you is kind of what the average household in your area gives to charity every year. Cause we wanna do anything we can for people just to pick a number. And then of course, then we can do all the mechanics to help people stick to that number. Like I said, if, if we can give you confetti for buying a stock, we can give you confetti for making a donation. That’s that’s fine.
Brad Caruso:
Think you should get more confetti.
Adam Nash:
I know. I love it. Yeah, no. I love these little behavioral things. We act like they’re silly and they are a little silly, but we all know that like, you know, when the sandwich shop gives you a little bonus star and I’m the 10th star, you get a free sandwich. Like these are motivating things, right? When you set a goal and you hit that goal, we feel good about it. That’s how we’re wired. And the industry knows that they do it for shopping. They do it for buying stocks and investing, etc. A lot of Daffy is based on the idea of using those same behavioral techniques. We’re trying to use to help people get in shape and eat better and spend less. Why not use those same techniques to help people give.
Brad Caruso:
And if I were an individual, I wanna put a hundred dollars in today. How would someone go about setting this up? I know you mentioned it before, but just to, kind of reiterate a little bit, how would one go about setting up a donor advised fund with you?
Adam Nash:
We try to make it as easy as possible. The easiest way to do of course is just to go to the apple app store type Daffy, download the app and get started. It’ll walk you through the whole thing. And like I said, whether you wanna fund your account with a credit card, a debit card, linking your bank account, apple pay, everything works. You can also go to daffy.org and open the account on the web, right on desktop mobile. We’ve tried to support literally every device we can we’ve even optimized the web experience for Android to make sure that everyone can open an account. And actually, you know, for your listeners, if they want everyone who joins Daffy gets their own invitation code, because we think, think giving is social and it’s better when you’re invited by someone. And so, very happy by the way for you to have your own invite code. But if people want to use mine, if you go to daffy.org/AdamNash/invite, you’ll get $25 when you register and fund your account to donate to the charity of your choice. So really we try to make it as painless as possible to sign up and even a little perk, right? If there’s some organization that matters to you, you want an extra $25 to give to them. We’re happy to get you started because we believe that once you give with this system, you’ll like it so much. You’ll stick with it for years.
Brad Caruso:
Awesome. And that’s easy. And as Adam said, one of the first and only ones that’s physically in the app store. So, and most of my counterparts here that are a little younger than I am. They live and breathe those applications, you know, I’m still a little bit older or I’m going to websites and things, but.
Adam Nash:
We have the website for you too. It’s good. But, it’s, it’s short URL, daffy.org. But no, like I said, like this philosophy that we have of making it easy to get started, easy to give, really permeates everything we do. And so whether it’s taxes, whether it’s funding, the account, making donations, we really try to make everything as easy as possible, as transparent as possible. And like I said, what we’ve seen in the behavior, I mean, we’ve been out less than a year, but what we see from our members is that they download the app, they put some money into it, they try it, they make a donation or two, and then they discover that they can make a recurring donation and support their organization. Oh, they can link their account and put in money every month. The level of engagement we’re seeing is validating to us because it represents that basic idea that maybe one of the reasons we don’t give as much as we should or that we want to is because it’s a little too much friction still. It’s still a little too hard. There’s a little bit too much. I’ll go home and write the check a little bit too much, like I have to remember. A little bit too much of charities chasing you down with direct mail and emails and fundraising, which by the way, is tiring in your inbox. Even if you love the organization, it’s always a little bit tiring. And so, having a better system that you control is just the right answer. We’re very convinced
Brad Caruso:
And listen. Yeah. For everyone out there that wants to maximize giving too. I mean, there’s a cost to all of those things. And so it’s either, you know, a charity spending money on their marketing and fundraising and other costs, or it’s the cost of paying a, you know, donor advised fund to facilitate that giving easy, but then a hundred percent of those dollars that charity doesn’t necessarily have to spend the money to do that. So if you look at how you maximize your giving as well, and thinking about this concept of maximizing giving, you know, you may think, oh, well there’s a cost cause I’m going spending dollars on a platform. But at the same token, those dollars get spent in other ways at charities they get spent, if you are an not-for-profit there, you know, that you’re spending money on fundraising professionals and on all different things. And so certainly there’s a lot to be said about, you know, there’s always a cost of giving, but in certain cases it can definitely be less. And the less that the cost of giving the more money that actually goes to the actual mission or cause of the organization. So I look at it that way as well.
Adam Nash:
Yeah. It makes perfect sense.
Brad Caruso:
So we’re winding down the time here, Adam, but anything else you wanna share that, maybe I didn’t ask or anything that you wanna share to the audience that you think would be relevant before we wrap up?
Adam Nash:
Well, I think the only last thing I’ll nudge people too is, you know, the markets have been up and down this year. Some people have experimented with crypto, some people haven’t, I would just remind everyone that there’s an amazing benefit when you actually donate stock or crypto to charity, it’s a phenomenal benefit cuz you win both ways. One, you never pay taxes on the capital gains. And two of course you get that charitable deduction, which is so valuable, comes off income up to 30% of your AGI if it’s assets 50%, if it’s cash. The only problem is of course, is that most nonprofits aren’t set up to take stock or crypto, right? And, and actually our, our second donation ever was from a guy who wanted to donate crypto to his synagogue, but obviously a synagogue didn’t take crypto. And he figured out if you download Daffy, you can just donate stock or crypto to Daffy.
Adam Nash:
And then we get the money to the nonprofit. So even though this has been an up and down year, I would just say that if, if you happen to be fortunate enough at the end of this year to be looking at a tax bill, that’s maybe slightly larger than you wanted and you have some stock or ETFs or, or even crypto that you’ve had that is up and you’ve held more than a year, seriously consider donating that instead of donating cash, we wrote a blog post about it, but it’s not only more money in your pocket from a tax perspective. It actually ends up with more money for the charity as well because they don’t have to pay the taxes either. And so it’s a phenomenal way to put some leverage into your giving that most people, if they don’t have a professional accountant or financial advisor don’t consider.
Brad Caruso:
Yeah. And, and certainly it’s another good point of to increase giving sometimes donating appreciated property like stocks and crypto and other things, you know, you get a much bigger benefit than just donating the cash that you already paid the tax on. So there’s also advantages to doing that. And I think it’s great that, that, you know, you have a kind of a one stop place that can facilitate that, trying to just continue to get more money into the hands of charitable organizations and, and go on with that original philosophy that we talked about in the beginning. So I appreciate bringing that up, Adam. Yeah,
Adam Nash:
Of course.
Brad Caruso:
Yeah. So great conversation. I, I really appreciated your background. I appreciate you sharing a lot of the insight into your own giving model, as well as, your platform Daffy,
certainly a new model, a new, a new way of giving an easy way of giving for everyone out there and all my civic warrior fans really appreciate you listening to this. And we appreciate Adam, you spending the time and sharing with us some more insight for our fans to, give more money to charity. So thanks so much.
Adam Nash:
Yeah, absolutely. My dream is just to have millions of people, you know, together inspiring each other to give more to charity and we’re hoping that Daffy will do that.
Brad Caruso:
It sounds like you’re well on your way. So definitely appreciate you sharing this and spending your time with us today.
