The following is a conversation between Michael Wasserman, Co-Founder and CEO of Tiltify, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.
Denver: Tiltify is a full service fundraising platform that was made for the socially conscious generation. They work with charities to turn their stream into live fundraising through sites such as Twitch, YouTube, Mixer, Facebook live, and Twitter.
And here to tell us about that and the other services they provide is Michael Wasserman, the CEO of Tiltify.
Welcome to The Business of Giving, Michael.
Michael Wasserman, Co-Founder and CEO of Tiltify
Michael: Yeah. Thank you so much, Denver. I appreciate you having me.
Denver: So Michael, you were in the entertainment industry, and you were producing films. How in the world did you move over to the philanthropic world?
Michael: It was a very strange transition. Ultimately, what happened was I was in, as you said, I was actually first in music and then I got into films and started to produce those. And while I was on my downtime between a movie that I shot in 2006, waiting for it to be edited and all that other stuff, we started to creep into the recession of 2008. And a lot of things started changing, and a lot of people got laid off from studios that I knew. And things just changed very rapidly with what was available.
And as random happenstance, someone that I knew at a local children’s hospital reached out to me because they knew I had some celebrity contacts and asked if I could help bring some celebrities to their holiday fundraiser. It was coming up in December. I said, sure. And I connected with some people that I knew at the time; actually happened to be when Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel started dating, actually back in the day. So I had them come and host this thing. And Kevin James got involved with a bunch of other people, and it became a really successful fundraiser.
And at the same time, I got to spend time with all the kids at the hospital because there was an adult fundraiser for kids. And then spending all that time with the kids at the hospital that day really was a life-changing moment for me. It just really affected me. And then I guess, serendipitously, people heard through the grapevine that I helped with this charity event and started calling me about another charity event. And then eventually, I ended up starting my own company that helped charities who work with celebrities and throwing like those black tie galas, poker tournaments, and all that other stuff that goes on in LA.
Denver: Cool. Having entered this world of philanthropy and nonprofit organizations, what was the biggest surprise for you in terms of the way they operated, the way they got stuff done?
Michael: So I’d say at the time, everything was what we call very traditional; so a lot of it was built around emailing people and sending out mail, and getting people to come to your events. And that was the world of fundraising as I was involved in it. And about that time,a lot of new fundraising sites started to be created like CrowdRise, which was then sort of swallowed up by GoFundMe a couple of years back, and others that started moving the needle a little bit, I’ll say, in how the industry works.
But I found that generally as the world grew and social media has connected people more deeply, there wasn’t much movement in the charitable space from a technology standpoint. And that the number one thing that every client or charity I’d worked with asked me over and over again would be, “How do I get younger donors, younger fundraisers? How do I get younger people involved?” And that was just a constant question all the time.
Denver: Yeah. I think when you go to places like the Philharmonic, they say, “Every time we lose a blue-haired lady, we lose a donor, and we don’t know how to replace her.” And it’s that kind of mindset.
Well, you have said, Michael, that one of the things that differentiates Tiltify is that you started with the premise of: What do fundraisers want? So what do they want, and how does your platform reflect those wishes?
Michael: So you’re absolutely right. So when we started, we decided to look at it from the completely other side. It felt like prior to that, everything was catered toward: What does the charity want?. So with everything happening, we asked that question: What does the fundraiser want? We literally spoke with hundreds of people online, social media, content creators, and tried to find out what would entice them to get involved or what were the reasons that they were not involved.
Overwhelmingly, the response was that the platforms and technology that was available did not bridge to the digital community that they have. So somebody would be, let’s say on Twitch, which is where we started focusing on initially, where people would live stream on Twitch, and Twitch became really popular in 2012 and ’13, and obviously then got bought by Amazon in 2014; they were looking for interaction.
So most of the fundraising pages that had existed up until that point or what I’d call static fundraising pages, they had a donate button, some texts to picture, and you’d essentially drop off money like a mailbox. And maybe someone would write some stories or put up some information, but that was pretty much, in my opinion, all it was.
And overwhelmingly, we felt that there was a lack of engagement that a lot of these content creators online and on Twitch at the time were doing, where they were actually interacting with people. And it was that sort of donor-to-fundraiser interaction that we really wanted to create for them to make it a more engaging process.
Denver: Okay. So I’m new to this, let’s say. Why don’t you walk me through how exactly Tiltify works, starting with if I’m an organization, and I call you guys up. What are you going to tell me? How are we going to move forward?
Michael: Sure. So any organization can just go on our website and sign up for Tiltify. There is a short verification process. We will verify that the organization is legal and registered with the IRS and the appropriate governments, and a couple other things that we check internally. And if all those boxes are checked, usually within 48 hours, you’ll get an email saying, “Congratulations! You can now access your Tiltify account.” So it’s that easy to sign up initially.
And what happens from there is obviously a lot up to the charity, but generally we give over to you access to a number of tools that we think are different than the tools that have been previously used. So now with our platform, you can do a lot of the things that you’re used to as a charity, like creating a peer-to-peer fundraising event… we call those fundraising pages on our platform, and people can create their own personal campaign pages. Underneath that, we have that hierarchy and leaderboards and all that’s fine and fun.
But the difference is we actually… so one of the initial things that we did that got a lot of resistance was… we actually asked for less information than any other platform does to make a donation or to get involved. So as a charity, you would come to us, and especially back in our early days, like 2015, 2016, charities would say, “Hey, when they do this, I want to get the full address, the phone number, their date of birth, first name, last name, kids’ names, Social Security number, the ATM pin…
Denver: Yeah, favorite color.
Michael: Yeah, favorite color. And we simplified all that. On Tiltify, we decided that people should be able to donate with just putting in their email address and your credit card. And you shouldn’t have to give any other information than that. And we found that when we did that from the charities, we got a lot of resistance, but we seem to make fundraisers very happy and donors very happy.
Denver: Yeah. Everything in this world, Michael, seems to be friction or the lack thereof. And there isn’t any reluctance– this is my own theory on this– there isn’t any reluctance of people to give you that information. They’re just not going to take the time. And they’re going to go to another page. It’s a pain to do that, so you just move on. So I think that was exactly right; you remove the friction; you made it easy, and lo and behold, you get the results.
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. And at the same time too, about five, six years ago… and there continues to be, now… it’s crummy before, there continues to be a lot of new privacy laws and discussion of privacy. Every bank company website has been broken into in some fashion, and people are really much more conscious of what they give out on the internet. And we address that by asking for less data.
Denver: Great. Let’s talk about engagement a little bit because again, that is what fundraisers want. You want to engage me, the audience. So tell me a little bit about rewards, and polls, and targets, and milestones, and all that stuff and how it works.
Michael: Sure. So that’s certainly, in my opinion, the biggest difference between Tiltify and other platforms and where our innovation really comes into play. So those grew out of our discussions with people who were online. And honestly, the idea in the back of my head came from those old Jerry Lewis telethons where…
Denver: Oh, yeah. Labor Day.
Michael: Yeah. Labor Day. You want to get involved. I remember asking my mom if I could call in and donate $10. You know, when you wait to see if your name would pop up on that ticker on the bottom, which it never would because it’s not really how it works. But we realized that with technology, the way it is now, and all these people that are streaming online and now on YouTube, with Tiktok, and all these other platforms, that you can give much more instantaneous feedback.
So all of the features that you talked about– so rewards, for example, is the ability for any fundraiser to create their own suggested donation amounts with whatever benefit or incentive they would like to give. So if they happen to be good at baking cookies and want to send a cookie to everyone that donates $20, they can set that up. If they just want to give somebody a digital thank you for a certain amount of money or, for all I know, they have some artwork that they’re drawing they want to give away, they can do that, too. So they can create this interaction where you’re now sort of exchanging money for some entertainment value or some other kind of value.
And we feel like that really changed the game a little bit with giving the power to the fundraisers to say, “Here’s what I think are the amounts that my audience would like to give, and based on my digital community, these are the things that I think would be fun for them or reasons that they would donate,” which is, to me, is something new to say as a fundraise– your friends, family, fans, community, why don’t you decide to tell us what would get them into donating.
Denver: Yeah, customize it, test, see what works, have fun. You’re co-creating, it makes a big difference.
You mentioned a few moments ago about Twitch, and gaming, and fundraising. And I may be wrong about this, but I think the first one you did, Michael, was back in 2011 with the Madden game where Michael Strahan played against Zac Efron. But for people who don’t know how this whole gaming, video, livestream fundraising works, tell us how it does.
Michael: Sure. So yeah, that was the first ideation, like free Tiltify back with Michael Strahan, Zac Efron, and a couple dozen other celebrities involved playing video games for charity. This was when I was just throwing events and had the idea of throwing an event that did that. But really where it grew from is there are now just an enormous amount of people on social platforms that can go live or create video content, which is what everybody’s doing. And the idea is that when you’re playing, whatever you’re playing, let’s say in this case it’s a video game, you have a certain audience that is watching you. If you have a captive audience that’s watching you, how do we get them to do something for social good?
So really all it would be, the equivalent example I always give is that if Coldplay, the band, wants to raise money, what’s their best method of gathering a group of people if they’re going to throw a concert? So they could gather everyone to the concert room, then what they do is in between songs, they turn down the music and would say, “Hey, let me tell you about the cause. Can everyone please donate?” Well, raising money through streaming or playing video games while streaming is much of the same thing.
So what people would do is say, you’re coming to watch me do this activity, which is entertaining for you to watch. Much like people watch basketball or football, people also like to watch other people play games, which is the same thing, but a lot of people don’t think of it that way. Watching someone play basketball is watching someone play a game that you’re not playing. So…
Denver: And actually, it would seem to me that if I was watching a video game, I might be able to improve my game plan. When you are watching Steph Curry or LeBron, I’m never going to go out and play basketball. So there’s actually some utility to try to get better when you’re playing with your buddies, as opposed to sitting in and watching a baseball game.
Michael: Yeah. It’s very true. And people would watch, and that’s where you get the gathering of the group. And we would just layer on to that these interactions like you had mentioned, for example, before– polls. So the idea that someone could say, “Hey, I’m playing this game. When I get to the end of it, I will color my hair. Do you want me to color it blue or red?”
We even have a partnership with a company called Warp World where we do something called Crowd Control, where people can actually donate to affect the video game in real time. So maybe someone’s playing Mario Brothers and if you donate $5, their screen will fill with water. And it’s fun for people to essentially mess with other people in a nice way and that would get them excited about making a donation.
Denver: Yeah. Mess with people in a nice way for a good cause, you can’t beat that.
You talked about people creating videos to fundraise, and along those lines, TikTok has launched donation stickers, which are enabled by you guys. Tell us about that, Michael.
Michael: Yeah. So the TikTok partnership is something that we’re super excited about when we rambled to figure that out about a year ago. And the idea was that TikTok is the fastest growing app, and it just has this massive audience of hundreds of millions of people. So our thought process… and fortunately was also TikTok’s… was: “Wow. How do we bring this social awareness, social fundraising power, social change power to this platform?”
So what we did, which was sort of like version one… and additional upgrades are coming soon, was creating the ability for anybody that creates a video or a live stream on TikTok… or on their actual profile itself, can put a donation sticker right there to any of the charities that are currently approved to be used through TikTok, which is currently about a hundred different charities..
Denver: I have the privilege of talking to a lot of nonprofit CEOs on this program, and three of them would be charity: water, Red Nose Day, and New Story. And those three happen to be the fortunate beneficiaries of Thankmas. Tell us about that.
Michael: Thankmas is definitely one of my favorite events of the year.
Denver: I bet it is.
Michael: Yeah. So Thankmas initially was created by JackSepticEye, who’s a big YouTuber who has 29 million subscribers. And a couple of years ago, he decided that he wanted to get involved in charity. I don’t think he’d really done anything before, but we’d come along and sort of made it more available to people online, and Jack got involved in creating smaller fundraisers throughout the year. And then at the end of the year, obviously around between Thanksgiving and Christmas, he created Thankmas where he would do his own live stream, sometimes invite on guests, and people would get involved.
How that evolved is two years ago… so in 2020, we came up with the idea in collaboration with Jack to allow the community to also fundraise and participate, turning it into a peer-to-peer program. So he would go out and launch video, put out the call and say, “Hey, we’re going to do Thankmas.” For example, as you said, in 2020, it was for Red Nose Day; in 2021, it was for New Story. And he would reach out to his fans, friends, and say, “Hey, this day, let’s all jump on, create videos, live stream, create your own fundraisers. I’m going to do mine too, and let’s all fundraise together.” And in 2020, the first year that we did that particular format with Red Nose Day, we were blown away by the results.
Thankmas, prior to that, I think the biggest year was around $400,000. And then all of a sudden in 2020, not only Sean’s stream itself raised about $1.3 million, but then the whole community together raised $4.7 million. It just blew our minds. And then last year, we did $7.6 million with New Story and just this new style of peer-to-peer campaign that is fundraiser and influencer- created versus charity-created, I think it was a very interesting indication of future possibilities with the power of social media.
Denver: Yeah, just awesome. Now I know you can’t say anything about this, but have you selected, or has the charity for this year been selected yet?
Michael: I can tell you we have started discussions because this year we want to make it even bigger, but we have not yet selected a charity.
Denver: All right.
Okay, Michael, I’m sure there are listeners out there from nonprofit organizations who are listening in, and they’re saying: “Okay, a live stream event on Twitch with some influencers and people tuned in making contributions to our cause as they follow along” and then they’ll say,” Not in my lifetime will this ever happen!” So for the smaller, less well-known nonprofit, how should they get started, and what advice would you have for them?
Michael: For the smaller nonprofit, I urge them, number one, to make themselves available. We get a lot of what I refer to as drive-by traffic, people that just come to Tiltify and maybe it’s breast cancer awareness month, maybe it’s like this month, Black history month, and people are looking for causes that they might feel or say something happens in their life, and they jump on and look for a particular cause. People will pick all sorts of charities. Back in the day, people chose charities, and kids chose what their parents chose. And there was this legacy concept, too. I think a lot of that has gone away, and we see a lot of people jumping to charities. So that really benefits a lot of these small charities, which there are charities on our platform that 90% of their revenue, of their budget, now comes from fundraising on Tiltify.
Denver: Wow.
Michael: And a lot of that budget has grown considerably because first of all, you just have the opportunity to be found, and that should never just be overlooked. It’s free to be on Tiltify. You should sign up and just be available and put a really good description of what you do because that’s important, and be available to be out there.
Second thing you should do is make sure that you are on social media and have a presence there, so that people can encounter people. You know, no one can choose you if they don’t know who you are. But the key to that too is telling good stories. Just like any other person in any other scenario, people online are attracted to stories and attracted to things that move them in some way. So the charities that tell really good stories, like the ones you mentioned before, for example, charity: water, Red Nose Day, New Story, those who are able to really articulate well, give that good story, no matter the size of the charity, can have people involved with them.
And we have scenarios where on a random day, creators will find a charity and do a fundraiser. And that charity will raise… one example, I remember, there’s a streamer named Markiplier, a couple of years ago jumped online and raised money for a small youth homeless shelter charity in Los Angeles. I think it was called… I want to say Best Friends, but I may be getting it wrong. Anyway, he did I think a 24-hour fundraiser and raised half a million dollars, which was, I believe at the time, a quarter of their entire annual budget in one day. And I don’t know why he chose that charity or what his reasoning was, but the fact of the matter was that he could and he did, and that can happen. And that just gets more people involved in you and spreads the word, that it’s not just the money that was raised, but now it’s the awareness, you know?
“But nowadays, we find that people are looking for the ability to connect with their communities, whether that’s on Twitch or YouTube or TikTok, or even Facebook or Twitter; whatever else you’re doing, people want to be able to connect with that.”
Denver: Yeah, right. No question about it. Yeah, and I do think you’re right. Sometimes I think people are looking for charities that are in communities that are serving the people in that community. They have a better understanding of what the situations and the challenges are. So there seems to be people looking for those kinds of organizations, as opposed to perhaps the big national or international brands. So I could see how you could be a real beneficiary there if you’re doing something that’s important, it really touches… And as you say, sometimes it only has to touch one individual who has a network, and then they go out and they make things happen.
I work with a lot of charities, and they have their own online capabilities and they’re pretty happy with them, and maybe a little too happy, if I might say. When you look at these charity pages and look at the ones that are lacking, where do you find that they most often come up short?
Michael: That’s a question I could talk about for a long time.
Denver: Give us the Cliff notes.
Michael: But I’ll try to give you the condensed version. So one of the things that I think is one of the big downsides of, first of all, that whole concept of having your own platform and wanting your own bespoke world is that you’ve now created a new place that people have to follow.
So for example, the benefit of being on Tiltify is that people come here and willl do all their fundraising on Tiltify, even if they fundraise for 20 different charities, because they can be able to track that. If you are in another world, someone has to find your world and get involved with it and want to go on your sites. And I find that 99% of those sites are not user-friendly to the online digital communities that exist. Especially to Millennials and Gen Z, they’re not designed to do that. One of the reasons they’re not designed to do that is because they ask for way too much of your personal data, which is… we talked about before is a deterrent. People just decide, “No, I don’t feel like doing this anymore. Let me just pick another charity.” So that’s number one.
Number two is the pages that they have, have no engagement function. So it’s a page where a fundraiser can go on and sign up and ask for money from somebody. But nowadays, we find that people are looking for the ability to connect with their communities, whether that’s on Twitch or YouTube or TikTok, or even Facebook or Twitter; whatever else you’re doing, people want to be able to connect with that.
And the technologies that I see, especially on the charities’ own pages because they don’t really have budgets to build them, does not help. There are charities that are incredibly innovative, like charity: water, who have really cool features on their sites and dig into a lot of really amazing things, but they’re the exception. And charities like that are the exception. The majority, I’d say 99% of charities that build their own platforms, are working harder, not smarter.
Denver: Yeah. It seems like even back in 2019, we were yearning for community, and now probably more so than even then after these past two years. And you’re correct. When you go to one of these charity sites and make a contribution, it’s a pretty solitary act. There’s nobody else there. Your name’s not going up. You’re not looking at other people. It’s just a very solitary way of being in terms of helping a charity, and I don’t think people want that. I think they want to be a part of a community. It’s like the old telethons as you were alluding to before, they want to be part of something larger than just their own particular gift.
Michael: Yeah. I think in the industry, there’s a big shift from asynchronous fundraising to synchronous fundraising. The typical websites are very asynchronous. Different people show up at different times. They don’t interact. They drop off their money; they walk away. The idea of gathering everybody together and having donate and fundraise in a synchronized fashion where they see each other and go, “Oh, that guy donated $10. I want to get involved and have the person on the screen call out my name, or have my name pop up in some cool animation, I want to get that, too. So I’m going to jump in and we all want to see this total go up together.” I think there’s a massive power to that.
Denver: Yeah. Talk to us about virtual events. I know you have a suite of services that you can deploy for these kinds of events, but why don’t you share with us how an organization, a nonprofit, can maximize a virtual event, and where you think that’s going when we all return, so to speak, what the future of these events are gonna look like when we’re back live.
Michael: So there’s certainly a lot of different types of events where you could use a virtual aspect. Typically on Tiltify, the most popular type of event would obviously be a live stream virtual event. They’re relatively easy to create. You could do streaming with a simple laptop, and you could buy a $90 camera webcam that would be perfectly fine in HD and you’re ready to go. So it’s very cost-effective and easy to do. For charities that want to get into it, there’s I think two camps. There’s :We want to create our own event, or We want to augment an event that we have.
So let’s say you have a gala usually, but now it’s gone virtual. So you’re the charity, you have your guest list of people. You could go live on a platform that your constituents are familiar with, could be Facebook, could be YouTube, could be Twitch. Interact with them and talk to them from their homes. You could still do Asks, and using our rewards system, for example, you could still say, “Hey, if you donate $50, you fund one second of cancer research,” or “If you donate $200, you fund this vital package for someone in emergency.” You could put all those cool things in, you could track what people still donate, and you could still have that community feeling just talking to them digitally. And you could even bring people in via Zoom or other digital platforms and talk to them.
So it’s relatively simple to do. A lot of the tools that we have on the platform are very self-explanatory. And the other camp of that is getting someone else to do an event for you using their channel. I find the latter is usually bigger bang for your buck, so to speak, because if you use your channel as a charity, you may not really have a lot of people that watch your channel on YouTube. But if you team up with somebody who has a lot of fans, maybe they were already going to come to your galas, the guest speaker. I mean, in the best case scenario, let’s say you were going to have The Rock commit and say something to your gala. But now you say, “Hey, can we just do this live on your Instagram or YouTube?” Obviously, you’re gaining a lot of fans in that example. So finding creators who have fans that support you and potentially doing it from their channels is a cool way of being able to increase your visibility and your audience very easily.
“You can’t be afraid to throw out any ideas. You’ve got to throw everything out there so that you can figure out what the real value is because at the end of the day, in order to create something innovative that works, you have to create value.
So really once we’ve ideated and honed in on that idea that is actually a value-add creation, then obviously you have to implement it, build it, and make sure it’s there. But really, that’s the key to doing it, is having that collaboration and then creating that value.”
Denver: Yeah. Partnerships, that’s really the key. And then also, you know, acquisition. You don’t want to be speaking to the choir here, you’ve got to be able to get some people who may not be as familiar with your cause, and being on somebody else’s channel is a good way to do that.
You’re in a very fast-moving field where things are always changing, so I would imagine, Michael, there’s a premium on innovation. How do you go about innovation at Tiltify? What’s the process? How do you spot opportunities?
Michael: Obviously, everything that we want to do, we want to do in an updated and innovative way. And we think about that across everything. For example, when we launched what we call “triggered messages” this past year, which is an in-platform messaging system, it was in response to a lot of requests from charities on our platform for us to create the sort of classic drip email system.
And when we looked at that, we said, that’s been around for a long time. People very easily now unsubscribe or block emails; they don’t like getting a lot of them. There’s some benefits to getting them sometimes, but sometimes charities send them a little too much. How do we make sure that it’s something that the fundraiser won’t just block out?
So we collaborate a lot internally. We’re always looking for ideas of all the people that not only work at Tiltify, but people that use Tiltify. We’ll put out a lot of surveys, information on social, or privately chat with fundraisers and bounce ideas around. We’ll also privately talk to a lot of our charity clients and say, What do you think about this and that? So I think collaboration is key.
And then from there, we would ideate. And you can’t be afraid to throw out any ideas. You’ve got to throw everything out there so that you can figure out what the real value is because at the end of the day, in order to create something innovative that works, you have to create value.
So really once we’ve ideated and hone in on that idea that is actually a value-add creation, then obviously you have to implement it, build it, and make sure it’s there. But really, that’s the key to doing it, is having that collaboration and then creating that value.
Denver: This has not been an easy time to be in charge over the last few years. How do you think the nature of leading an organization like Tiltify is changing, and what have been some of the ways you’ve adapted your leadership style to this new world we’re living in, Michael?
Michael: Leadership has definitely been altered in the way that people are used to dealing with it. For years, even though we’ve been a relatively remote company, I would still go to a lot of meetings, and we would travel to a lot of clients, and we would travel to see each other a lot. When the pandemic happened, you couldn’t even do that. So you really had to manage and lead your teams completely virtually, knowing that you’re not getting together; you’re not having that relatively valuable facetime.
And like you had alluded to earlier, people are also realizing that working from home is possible, and for many people, it’s preferred or at least a hybrid model. And they’re realizing that they could do a lot of things differently. So in a way, it’s making things more competitive and it’s putting a little bit more power in the hands of the workforce to say, “You know what? We have more choices than we thought we did.” And in order to combat that, you have to come up with good options. I mean,at Tiltify, we expanded a lot of our benefits, adding in things like 401(k)s, and expanded benefit plans, and matching donations, and things of that nature to make things work.
But it was also about getting services for our employees, whether it’s mental health services or programs where they get discounts on things… but really just thinking of them. And then we created a number of online events. We actually did this really cool online magic show as a company, just to create that really fun, yeah, this really amazing guy who…
Denver: Who was it? Tell me a little bit about the magic show. I don’t get to hear about magic shows. Just give me a flavor.
Michael: Yeah, no, absolutely. So it was, I definitely highly recommend checking it out with, it’s called, The Magician Online, which I think is the website.
The show is fantastic. It’s basically this, I think it’s like an hour-long show that goes on, and this magician has really mastered the ability to do a Zoom magic show and really draw you in and do tricks.
Michael: So the cool thing that they do is they send everyone a box to their house. And you can actually open this box, and then you have things that you can participate with. So you have, like he would do tricks and name the card that you have from the deck of cards he gave you in the box. And it was really cool. His name is Dan White. And it’s very cool and very interactive because he would send these things to your house, you would feel like you’re part of the show. He would pull people out via Zoom and bring them into the show. It was really cool. And it was a really good morale boost.
“I see a continued expansion of the digital world completely, continued expansion into the big platforms that exist, whether that be YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, other things that come into play. I feel that expanding into every facet. People are now jumping on their Pelotons or different programs to connect and do fitness. That’s going to continue to grow as a digital option. Cryptocurrency is going to continue to grow and NFTs, and different people have different opinions of it, and different people have different levels of understanding. The thing that I believe, regardless of any of that, is that it’s not going away, it’s going to grow.”
Denver: Yeah, that’s a great idea. Let me close with this, Michael, and I want to ask you a question about the philanthropic sector and nonprofit organizations. And I think we’re all trying to wonder where it’s all headed, and you obviously have a very unique perspective. Many people are within organizations, or on boards, but here you are working in the online community and the event community and things of that nature. So your lens is going to be different from others.
What do you see around the corner for the sector?
Michael: I see a continued expansion of the digital world completely, continued expansion into the big platforms that exist, whether that be YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, other things that come into play. I feel that expanding into every facet. People are now jumping on their Pelotons or different programs to connect and do fitness. That’s going to continue to grow as a digital option. Cryptocurrency is going to continue to grow and NFTs, and different people have different opinions of it, and different people have different levels of understanding. The thing that I believe, regardless of any of that, is that it’s not going away, it’s going to grow.
Cryptocurrency is going to grow and morph and continue to grow. And the things that go along with that, whether that’s NFTs or new things that are being created with Web3 and all those technologies, are going to continue to grow– which all leads to more digital interaction. And that’s just going to continue and grow, and grow, and grow, and charities really need to think about what their digital interactions are.
Denver: Be prepared. For listeners who want to learn more about Tiltify, tell us about your website and what they can expect to find.
Michael: Sure. So anybody who wants to learn more, can go to tiltify.com. If you want to look around, right away when you get to the page, you’ll see a couple of fundraisers that are going on. If you want to see an example, you could search for charities right there. Or if you are a charity, you’ll see a portal at the top that you can click that gives you a bunch of other information about how to sign up and start your own account.
Denver: Fantastic. Thanks, Michael, for being here today. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show.
Michael: Thank you, Denver. It was my pleasure.
Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving serves as a Strategic Advisor and Executive Coach to NGO and Nonprofit CEOs and Board Chairs. His Book, The Business of Giving: The Non-Profit Leaders Guide to Transform Leadership, Philanthropy, and Organizational Success in a Changed World, will be released in the spring of 2022.
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