Executives Raise Funds for their Charities

Executives and board members can donate their time and industry advice to companies while raising money for their charity of choice through a new online platform.

Founder and CEO of meetmagic, Carl Gough, said he came up with the idea of “a marketplace of corporate connections” to help charities overcome their fundraising challenges.

Gough has personal experience in this area as a board member of Feel the Magic, a Not for Profit organisation that helps children cope with grief.

“I’m the fundraising guy for my charity, and I discovered how hard it was to keep doing all these events. It’s a constant drain and you’re constantly competing with every other charity for the dollar and I thought there’s got to be a better way than this,” Gough said.

He said meetmagic acts in place of an expensive “lead generation” or introductory service which connects companies and executives. Instead the platform charges a $1,000 flat fee with $500 of that donated to charity.

“I know for a fact that a lot of companies are spending a lot of money on lead generation,” he said.

“That’s one side of the market place, and the other side of the market place are the executives that do these meetings, so I’m bringing the two together. It’s providing companies with an introduction service.

“All these executives today are having meetings every day, so what we’re saying is donate an hour of your time to meet with people that are prepared to pay and you have that meeting and the executives actually get to build a legacy for themselves.”

Gough said that charities could encourage their executives to become involved as a way to fundraise “without having to work too hard to raise the money”.

He also said that the platform lends itself well to companies looking to grow their corporate social responsibility initiatives.

“Often executives are involved with charities in some way, most executives are trying to do some good using their time in their position for good use. So this whole effective altruism now is becoming something quite popular,” he said.

“Most companies at the moment are looking for ways to contribute to society, most millennials going into to work, they’re not attracted by salaries, they’re attracted by the impact you’re having as a business, so it all falls into line with that.”  

The platform was launched three months ago and Gough said that meetmagic was a world first.

Currently he has 10 high-profile companies signed up and is making connections manually. Eventually he will shift to technology similar to sharing economy giant, Airbnb.

“What we’re building at the moment what is called a market network. If you consider social networks, for the past 10 years [they’ve been] the flavour of the month, market networks are going to be the next 10 years,” he said.

“Look at market networks today, like Uber and Airbnb, where there’s a latent demand and there’s a supply.

“The market network platform that we’re building, [is] going to be a bit like Airbnb – you log onto the platform, you register your company, you pay your money to go and meet with somebody and then the money gets released once you’ve taken that meeting.”