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How did CauseVox get started? (Legacy)
How did CauseVox get started? (Legacy)
Rob Wu avatar
Written by Rob Wu
Updated over a week ago

Before we started CauseVox, we found ourselves volunteering at nonprofits to scale their impact. We worked on everything from systems implementations to marketing projects for NGOs in South Africa, Uganda, and India.

One of the puzzling things that came up was why people, who were making such a profound change in communities, struggled with scaling their social impact. Why did they have to fight in order to make this world a better place for all of us to live?

Back in the States, we dug around for the answer. We talked to hundreds of people — people that volunteered, people that worked at nonprofits, and founders of nonprofits. We joined an incubator for social good and a community group for social entrepreneurs. We even moved from Washington DC to NYC to be closer to the nonprofits that we knew. We really wanted to figure out why there was a struggle.

The one thing we kept on hearing was that raising funds was always a challenge and using technology was always hard; these people were struggling for funding and wrangling with software every day. They always were trying to find new ways to find new donors. Major donors and grants were drying up because of the recession. Galas and events were too costly to organize.

That’s where CauseVox comes in to fix this broken system.

After testing the crowdfunding concept on our own volunteer projects — we built our own crowdfunding platform to raise funds for our volunteer projects — we launched CauseVox for all nonprofits and individuals to use.

We wanted to find a way for nonprofits and social good projects to raise funds online that is affordable, easy to use, yet powerful enough for professionals.

That first few months, we helped a nonprofit raise over $75,000 in 40 days. We launched a crowdfunding campaign with SXSW that raised $125,000 in 10 days. One of our advisors was stabbed seven times in a mugging and we helped raise $43,000 for his medical bills.

Since then, we’ve helped tens-of-thousands of people fundraise online, serving thousands of nonprofits every year. Our mantra today is to help good things flourish.

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