 Hello and welcome. Hey, thanks for joining us here. It's another episode of the nonprofit show. We are thrilled to have you joining us today and I'm thrilled to have Dominic Calms with us. Dom is the founder and CEO of Be Generous and he's here to talk to you about how your NPO can achieve a totally different style of giving and it's the whole donate now pay later model. So stay with us before we jump into this conversation with Dom and I promise it's going to be a good one. In fact, he might bet you on something later because I hear that he's a betting man. But Julia Patrick, hello to you. Julia is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. I'm Jared Ransom, your nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group and we are honored. So very honored and grateful to have the ongoing investment and support from our presenting sponsors. Those of you watching, you can see their logos. Those of you listening, I'm going to give a shout out and say thank you very much to Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Be Generous, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader, and Nonprofit Nerd. These companies keep us going, the evolution of the conversations going and continuing. And if you missed any of the episodes, as we said, this is not a two week show, although we started it as a two week show. We're now a 600 plus episodes strong and you could find all of our episodes on many platforms, which include Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo. We're working on Netflix because I hear that oftentimes people do binge on our shows, Julia. So we need to become that true like Netflix and binge show. Would we be a rom-com? Would we be a rom-com? Because I always feel like I always feel like that's what's on Netflix. I mean, it's better than a horror show, I think. But also, those of you that are podcast listeners, like I am, I start every day with a podcast, you can listen to us there too. So queue up the non-profit show wherever you stream your entertainment. Dom, you've been sitting so patient and I know you're just chomping at the bits to jump in because I've had the great opportunity to meet with you, learn more about yourself, your passion in the sector, but I want to officially welcome Dominic Combs to the show today, founder, CEO of Be Generous. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what Be Generous stands for. Yeah, absolutely. So I have kind of an interesting background. I was actually born in Asia. I grew up in Hong Kong for the first couple years of my life and then moved to the United Kingdom, to London, where I lived for almost 10 years. My whole family is British, which is interesting. Actually, my grandfather's in the House of Lords today and was knighted by the Queen of England, which was an interesting experience. We've grown up seeing the fascinating world of the British monarchy and just everything, the pageantry and everything like that. And my grandfather is an entrepreneur. So when he was 16 years old, he dropped out of high school. He grew up in a very poor family. He dropped out of high school at 16 years old to sell cameras to try to make money for the family. Started a small store in a town in the UK called Edgeware. And he grew that into the largest consumer electronics company in Europe today called Dixons, which has 45,000 employees and 3,000 stores across Western Europe. So it's this incredible story of how this high school dropout, you know, little kid basically built this electronics empire. And I grew up in a way sort of seeing him do that. Obviously, I was very young, but now he's 91 and he's united by the Queen and he's in the House of Lords now and really is my mentor in a lot of ways. And so I like to think maybe being an entrepreneur is somewhere in my blood. I've chosen to use my skills to try to make the world a better place, not necessarily just to make money, but it's, you know, same kind of deal in terms of being an innovator. So I ended up coming to the United States and went to high school in Los Angeles, university and graduate school in New York City. Ended up on Wall Street and I was just unhappy. There's no other way to put it. I didn't know what I wanted to do when I finished graduate school and everyone I knew went to Wall Street. So I thought, okay, this is what you're supposed to do. I guess, you know, I was young and I was naive and I didn't understand it. I went to Wall Street and I'm sitting there and, you know, under the halogen lighting and then I'm just like working on my Bloomberg terminal. I'm like, what am I doing? None of this makes any sense. And so I, you know, I was making more money than I'd ever made before. I was literally a broke graduate student and then I was making all this money and I quit. And my family were very upset with me and I quit to write articles for $300 of pop and a think tank in Washington DC. I mean, literally was making, at a good month, I was making, you know, $1,200 on a really good month by writing articles about the world. And I was so happy. I was so much happier than I'd ever been before. And I realized that what I was really passionate about was actually trying to do something positive in the world that would make the world a better place than I am necessarily trying just to make money. That wasn't overtly my driver in the world. And so, you know, and then I was really looking to go more to the virtuous path. And I thought, how can I affect the greatest amount of change in the shortest amount of time? I'll go to government, which is hilarious now because that's ridiculous. But as a younger person, you think like, oh, where can you affect mass change at the government level? So I became a political, well, first of all, I became an advisor to the Afghanistan ambassador. That was incredibly interesting during the war in Afghanistan. That was a great experience. Dr. Zayir Tanin is who I was working for when he was the ambassador of Afghanistan. And then I got my dream job. I got asked to join the chairman's office in the Senate Finance Committee. I was the youngest Senate staffer or Senate associate staffer there. I moved to Washington, D.C. and I was working on Capitol Hill in the chairman's office of the Finance Committee. Unbelievable opportunity. Did it for a while. And then I was like, I'm not helping anybody. Very quickly dawned on me that all I was doing is politicking all day long, even though I was on the policy side of things. And in fact, I was working on human rights policy. So like my work was really core and essential to what I thought was helping people. And I was all I was doing was just backroom deals and politics and trade deals. It was just it's not what I necessarily envisioned my life being. So I left that and I decided, okay, I'm going to look for something at the intersection of profit and purpose. Because I really was I was enamored and fascinated by the dynamism of the private sector and the resources that the private sector could marshal and the talent that was in the private sector. But I was I was I still was on this virtuous path. It's like maybe there's something that I can take these technology skills and systems and put them to use to make the world a better place. And so that's when I moved out to Los Angeles, and I came across a company called Global Philanthropy Group. And Global Philanthropy Group was one of the first private sector philanthropic consulting firms in the United States. And so if you think of them like McKinsey, essentially, but for nonprofits, right? And so what we would do is run, advise, structure and manage the philanthropic work for our clients, all of whom were corporations, celebrities and high net worth individuals. So I joined there. I was running business development. I have my own portfolio of clients whose organizations I manage. And I'm talking like Madonna and Kobe Bryant's nonprofits, I mean, like, you know, these were the types of people whose organizations we were running. It was really incredible. We worked at Facebook, Gucci, I mean, like all the big companies. And I woke up every day and got to think, okay, how can we take the resources and brands of these people and extrapolate all the good we can do in the world that they can offer? It was an incredible, incredibly fun job. And that company was acquired in 2017. And so that sort of part of seeing the first acquisition that was very, very cool. And that led me on this whole path of wanting to be at the intersection of profit and purpose, which is this idea of using the tools of the private sector to create positive effects in the world, if you will. And so now I'm really focused specifically on using technology to do that. And that's led me to Be Generous, which we can chat about today. And that's just this incredibly cool fintech company that I've started, which has created the first ever philanthropic credit product, which allows a donor to donate now, pay later to their nonprofit. And I'll explain that as we go along. So let's talk about that. First of all, let's start with the word fintech, because that's a word that you're hearing a lot, but I don't think that gets bandied about enough in the nonprofit sector. And what does that mean? And I love that you use that word intersection. How does this intersect to the nonprofit sector? Yeah. So fintech stands for financial technology. I actually jokingly say, so to the outside world, my companies look like fintech companies, but really they're filtech companies, philanthropy technology companies, right? And I call myself a filtech entrepreneur. This is a door filtech, and this is pure filtech as you can get. But essentially what fintech has historically been is using technology to create inefficiencies or new products in the financial world. So if you can think of everything from Robin Hood, obviously the trading platform, you can think of all the efficiencies that you've seen in the e-commerce world, think of like a firm, Klarna, afterpay, the big explosion of buy and I'll pay later companies. That's another form of fintech. So fintech is it's incredibly promising technology. It's been extraordinarily successful and it's used by hundreds of millions of people around the world either to make money, to save money, right? All the different various ways of savings to invest in the market, investor assets. What I have sort of been obsessed by doing is taking the promise and the use and the technology behind fintech and applying it to what I consider to be the largest underserved sector of finance in the world today, the U.S. nonprofit market, right? And so if you look at the total number of donations last year to U.S. based nonprofits, it's almost half a trillion dollars. And what I always tell people and everyone's shocked to hear this, particularly when I talk to investors is the nonprofit market is basically the same size as the e-commerce market today. So if you look at the investor community, the VC community, they're pumping in billions of dollars into fintech with a specific focus on e-commerce, right? So the whole buy now pay later revolution started in the e-commerce world. So let's look at the e-commerce world. You have pre-COVID, roughly $538 billion a year is the total amount of transaction volume in the e-commerce world. There are 2.2 million e-commerce stores in the United States and roughly 210 million Americans purchase goods and services online every year in the United States. So it's a big industry, right? But now let's look at the nonprofit world, which everybody ignores. Everyone's like, what is there a half a trillion dollar part of our economy that one tenth of the American workforce is in that holds $4 trillion worth of assets? Yeah, let's just ignore those guys. It makes no sense. So it makes no sense, right? So if you look at the nonprofit world, you're talking about a $484 billion donated to nonprofits last year, slightly smaller than $538 billion transacted in e-commerce, but not a lot. There are 1.7 million nonprofits in America, slightly smaller than 2.2 million e-commerce stores, but not by much. Not by much. And 240 million Americans donated to nonprofits last year, which is more than the number of people who bought goods and services online. And the average one time donation in the United States is larger than the average e-commerce transaction. So these industries are very similar in size and scope. One of them is saturated credit products, lending products, payment processors, all these innovative systems and technologies. And the other one is basically that ignored. And it doesn't make any sense. It's like the redheaded stepchild. And that's that's one thing we've talked about, Dom. I know even with you here, it's like, you know, we can absolutely leverage the private sector for good. Going to those consumer behaviors, you know, we're purchasing more and more and more, maybe starting with toilet paper, right? People clearly were hoarding that at some point. And so looking at the consumer behaviors, leveraging that now for the redheaded stepchild, right? And it's I love that you're doing this. And so can you talk to us about that kind of buy now, pay later mentality? Because I know I understand it from the consumerism side, right? I shared with you whether I'm buying makeup, whether I'm buying shoes, whether I'm buying anything, right? It says, would you like to pay this in so many different payment or different installments? And I'm like, no, I just I want I want to pay this all now, because for me, I didn't want to worry about it, like specifically for these items. But I love this concept when it comes to the philanthropic side. So talk to us about Be Generous and this true model of donate now, pay later. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm sure you guys have heard of buy now, pay later, you just referenced it a moment ago, buy now, pay later has been really, really, really successful in the United States. There's over $100 billion of buy now, pay later love outstanding. And today in the United States, one out of every five online purchases are done using a buy now, pay later loan, one out of five, you're talking about 20% of all e-commerce traffic is done using buy now, pay later, and the CFPB, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just put out a report that said over 50% of all Americans have used a buy now, pay later loan. Now, bear in mind, this is an industry that's only about 10 years old. You're talking about more than half the United States has already used these products. So it's incredible. And they're very popular with folks that are my age, I'm a millennial and people who are younger than me, Gen Z's, right? So let's just start there. Now, you've also probably heard all these negatives about the buy now, pay later space. They've gotten in trouble recently for really two things. One, really approving people for credit that probably shouldn't have been approved, right? Very low FICO scores can't really repay it back. And two, charging exorbitant interest rates and exorbitant late fees. You miss a payment, your payment gets jacked up or you miss a payment, your interest rate goes higher. Now these are traditional things that we've all seen in the credit card industry. And let's face it, they are predatory and they're not good and they have hurt a lot of people. What we did is we said, okay, this type of infrastructure, this buy now infrastructure makes a ton of sense to apply it to the philanthropic space, but let's remove all the bad parts of it. Let's remove the interest rate. Let's remove the late fees. Let's remove the transactional fees. So that's exactly what we did. So what we've now built is really, I mean, surely the first ever philanthropic credit product, which allows a donor to donate now pay later. And what it means is very simple. You can go to a nonprofit. I encourage you to think of a nonprofit that you've donated to in the past. Just take a second to think about it. Now imagine if I said to you, have you ever wanted to give that more, a little bit more money to that nonprofit? But in that moment, you, you felt like that's not financially responsible. I couldn't, I shouldn't, whatever it might be. I'm sure we've all had, we've all had that realization. I haven't like on a daily basis because I do like to donate a lot of money to as much as I can, but I have bills and I have a life I can't just give all my money away, right? So imagine if you go to that website and you see the normal donate button that you normally see, and now you see another button that says donate now pay later. So a lot of people click on the button because they're curious to like, what's, I know what buying out pay later is. Let's donate now pay later. So let's say you click the button donate now pay later. We basically say to you, okay, how much money do you want to give today? Let's just take an example. Let's say you want to give 50 bucks. Let's say you normally give 50 bucks. Let's take a better example. So every year you come to this organization and again, think of the one you like and you give them $50 every year. So you say, I'm here to give $50 and we, $50 is probably not exactly the amount of money you want to give. You might want to give maybe $100, $75, but you give $50 because you feel like, hey, that's what I always give. What we basically say to you is we, you can give what you want to give, not what you're constrained to give by a, and what we do is we allow you to spread out your payments over time for free. There is no cost to do this. We'll send the entire aggregate donation to the nonprofit upfront. You'll get your full tax deduction right now and you'll simply pay that donation over time in, in, in just principal payments over the course of three months, six months or nine months. And so what ends up happening is about 82% of donors who use our product double or more of their donation from their previous donation because they'd say to themselves, look, if I usually give the Red Cross $50 a year and that $50 comes out of my bank account right away, I can now give let's say $10 a month over a 10 month period, but the generous is going to send the Red Cross $100 right now. So the Red Cross now gets $100. You as the donor get a tax deduction for $100. No money comes out of your account today. And in 30 days, your first payment is due, and it's 10 bucks. And for most Americans, $10 is something that is affordable to give and for 10 months. And then it stops. So you never have to worry about like paying forever. You never have to worry about late fees, interest fees. And if a donor decide at some point, you know what, I just can't make this payment this month or whatever it is, it has no effect on the nonprofit. The nonprofit keeps all of the money. And so it, you know, things like monthly cancellations, pledge defaults, these things go away. I was literally, literally on the phone yesterday with the head of the executive development officer of I think probably like the seventh largest nonprofit in the United States. And they said to me, so using your system, nobody should ever default on a pledge again or a monthly cancellation because we're getting all the money up front. And they just get to pay over time. And even if they don't pay, we keep all the money. I'm like, yeah, they're like, why wouldn't everybody do this? Isn't this going to be on every nonprofit's website at some point? And I said, I think at some point it will be. We need to get the word out there, obviously, but this is a real value to nonprofits because it solves a core problem of liquidity because it gives them all this money up front and they don't have to worry about chasing pledges, chasing monthly cancellations. And from the donor standpoint, it's completely free. And they walk away with a full tax deduction. So while it doesn't really make a lot of sense, it doesn't matter at like smaller dollar donations, imagine if you're giving $10,000 away, you get a $10,000 tax deduction and pay it over, of course, a year free. I can see that even for capital campaigns. Yeah, so many different things. And I love that you're calling out, truly, how fundraising in our sector has been a little inefficient. Let's just call that out there because we know that anytime I work with my clients, Dom, I always look at their pledges, the default on their pledges, looking at the inefficiencies of that, because I know we're all so very moved, albeit altruistically, albeit tax credit wise, like whatever reason. And I'm sure now even looking at, okay, how can we make this more efficient? We all know about Hurricane Ian, how that has made an impact for our friends in the Florida kind of East Coast region. I can only imagine, and I'm like you, where I'm like, if I could give all my money out, I certainly would. I would also need to receive some services because I would then be experiencing homelessness. But let's talk about that. So can you, let's share what would something like Hurricane Ian do for this donate now, pay later, because we're all so intrinsically moved, right? Like we all have this feeling of belonging, feeling of home, if that's taken away from us, we can't imagine. So how does something like that come into play with Be Generous? So I'll tell you a brief, a very brief story that just happened recently. So Hurricane Ian hit, I have a lot of friends in Florida, in the Florida region, and my girlfriend actually called me up and said, I have a friend who was in the hurricane's path who lost everything. And she set up a GoFundMe campaign, right, as people do in order to try to try to get some money to survive essentially. And my girlfriend's friend called my girlfriend up and said, can you please donate anything we need, you know, donate anything again, I'm trying to rebuild. And my girlfriend said to me, well, how much money do you think I should donate? And I said, well, it's a very, very good friend of yours, she lost everything. You got to donate a couple hundred bucks. Like I know it's not easy to do, but I mean, this is a really close friend of yours, she has nothing. Imagine if it was the reverse, like you just need to give everything, you know, give what you can. And my girlfriend was like, I just, I wish I could give, you know, she said, I wish I could give $500. If only somebody would lend me the money for me to do this. And I could, and I could just do it. And I said, well, unfortunately, we're not working to go fund me right now, but that is the promise of, that is exactly the generous, right? We, the way this product is structured is that you can go and donate to somebody experiencing whatever it might be homelessness or a crisis in Hurricane Ian, right? Whether it's the Red Cross or another disaster relief philanthropy organization, and you can give what you want to give today, not necessarily what you've traditionally been constrained to give, because you get to split those payments over three, six, or nine months. So you might not have $500. I understand that, right? Most people don't have $500. They can just give away. But if you could split that off over 10 payments, for example, as I just said as an example, okay, then it's $50 a month. And you know that the generous is sending the Red Cross $500. So the Red Cross, which needs money now because it's responding obviously to what's happening on the ground now says, I don't want $50 a month. I want, I want $500 now because I need to help the people that were in the path of the hurricane. And so the Red Cross gets its $500 as an added bonus. The donor gets their $500 tax deduction. $0 comes out of their bank account today. And in 30 days, only $50 is subtracted. And then it's only for 10 months. And then it cuts off. So you're not, for donors, you're never going to be in this, you know, I've heard complaints from a lot of donors that sometimes they put money down in monthly giving. They forget it. And they're furious. They've been charged, you know, over and over and over again. And of course, nonprofits don't want to upset their donors. And nonprofits, especially when you're dealing with like a disaster, they don't necessarily want to drip in money over the course of two years. They'd rather have that liquidity upfront right now. And that is exactly what Be Generous does. So Dom, tell me, I mean, I love the concept. I understand the management of it on one side. Talk to us. And unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time left, but talk to us from that vantage point of the nonprofit. Like, how does a nonprofit get engaged with this process, with Be Generous? And how do we get the ball rolling if this is something that we want to do with our organization? Yeah, it's super simple. So our website is actually, you know, right behind you. And it's also on my hat right here. It's the letter B and then generous.com. There's no space in between the B and the G, but be generous.com. And you're able to learn as much as you'd like. There are lots of videos. There are lots of FAQs. There's lots of questions. There's basically a sign up form where if you write to us, we'll basically contact you within 24 hours. And here's the beautiful part. I get asked all the time, what's the integration process like? What's the onboarding process like? This takes about an hour to integrate. Okay, we're talking about an hour. And from when you first engage with you and sign and you sign up, and it's probably it's free to sign up from the nonprofit standpoint, completely free to sign up. But when you first sign up to us, your first transactions can come to you within three days. So you're talking about start to end the whole whole integration process three days with the actual button going live on your website within an hour. So it's like as simple as it could pretty much be. And also we're rolling out, we just signed a partnership with BlackBod. And so we'll be rolling out a suite of integrations with BlackBod and a lot of the BVCRM products as well. So that's really exciting as well. So we have a whole slew of cool things coming out. Yeah, but I mean, this product is completely proprietary. And here's the thing, it works. That's all like it works. You look at the data that we have, I mean, it just works, right? And so that's basically how a nonprofit can get engaged. I love it. And this is something, you know, again, we as a sector are slow to adopt, we are so run by fear, so run by scarcity mindset. But all of what you've shared with Be Generous, I mean, it's right there in the title, right? People want to be generous. And they also realize that, you know, maybe doing it in one lump sum, some right now is not feasible for all people. And they can truly be generous, you know, throughout that time, I love that it happens automatically. I love that the liquidity for the nonprofit is instantaneous. I just see all good things for that. So it's so fascinating to hear this because, again, as slow adopters in the sector, you know, I love hearing the success you're having, Dom, because this really it makes so much sense. And, you know, for the for profit sector, the nonprofit sector, like, it's time to play big, I would just want to say that out loud on recording, like, it is time to play big, let's do it. And I just love this, Julia, do you think you're, you know, the organizations you're a part of, how would you perceive this? And I know I'm putting you on the spot. But sitting around the boardroom and saying, Hey, I just talked to this rock star. This is what's happening. Let's consider this for our nonprofit. How do you think that would be received? I don't think it's going to be received well until there's enough larger boots on the ground. And I think, you know, Dom, we talked about this in the green room chatter is that the nonprofit sector is scandalously and woefully behind the times on any emerging technology or advancements and new ideas. And so I feel like those that adopt early are going to be the ones that benefit more fully and earlier. It's an interesting dynamic. And unfortunately, it just seems like the nonprofit sector is just so... But you know, Julia, the proof is in the pudding, right? Don't take my work for it, look at the data. I was just in New York City, okay, at a gala. First of all, we've signed up a lot of nonprofits. So the ones who get it, get it right away. Right. I would imagine. So I was in New York City recently at a gala and this organization had integrated Donate Now Pay Later and they wanted to use it for their auction, right? For people to bid on their auction and to sell gala tickets, which makes a ton of sense, right? So I was sitting at this table and the guy next to me did not know that I was a CEO of Be Generous. So he and I struck up the conversation. The auctioneer begins and he's going in 10,000, 20,000 and he gets to a product that this guy next to me happened to like, by the way, and I swear to God, this is a true story. So this was like two weeks ago. So he's sitting next to me and he says, oh, wow, look at this, look at this cool product here. It was actually a signed guitar by a very famous band and the auctioneer says, okay, we'll start the bidding at, I think it was like $5,000. So I said to the guy, are you going to bid on it? And he goes, oh, I'm thinking about it. And I go, you should bid on it. And he goes, so it's not $7,000, $8,000. The guy says, I really want this guitar, but you know, he goes $8,000 a lot of money. I said, well, have you heard of donate now, pay later? And he says, no, no, no, what is that? I said, you can buy this basically because auctions are donations at the end of the day. You can essentially bid on this guitar. If it's $8,000, this nonprofit will get $8,000 from you today, but you don't have to pay this today. You can pay this off over nine months. And he was like, are you serious? And I'm like, he's like, what does it cost me to do that? I say it's free. And he raised his paddle right in front of me. And the guy ended up winning it. The guy ended up winning it. And I'm like, this is exact, if I only had a video camera to show the world, this is exactly what I'm talking about. When you allow people in any industry to pay for something over time, whether it's a credit card, a mortgage, a car payment, or a monthly donation, people will give or pay a lot more money. Which is the reason that the average one time online gift in America is $177. The average monthly reoccurring annual gift in America is $648. And we're bridging those two and saying, let's send that $648 right to the nonprofit today. And they never have to worry about collections, defaults, or anything like that. And I watched this guy in real time make this calculation of like, if I can pay this off over nine months, why not? And this is $8,000 that this nonprofit 100% would have not gotten from this guy. How do you have to pay this all today? And it made no difference to the nonprofit. They got all the money. What a great story. It's fantastic. I'm so glad to hear that this is here in our sector. So glad that you are here with us, Dom. Again, founder, CEO of Be Generous, you are someone from your company, your field tech company is going to be with us each and every month going forward. Thank you for being a sponsor here at the nonprofit show. I'm just thrilled to be with you as you ignite change, positive social change here in the sector, way better than you working in government or, you know, on the Capitol Hill, any of that good stuff. So thank you for being of service and being generous with your time with us. Julia Patrick, always good to be here with you, my friend. And I'm Jared Ransom, your nonprofit nerd. Julia tried to claim all of me, but I don't want to claim all of me. There's plenty of nerdiest to go around, you know, like, I always have them super close, super close by. But anyway, we also want to thank our sponsors for today's show and every show. So thank you very much to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Be Generous. You heard from Dom right here today. Also your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader, and nonprofit nerd. These companies allow us to have these conversations. They allow us to shake up and stir the nonprofit sector. Some of it like a shake-in. Some of us like it stirred, but it's always a fun time. So thanks for being here with us. Julia, I'll let you take us offline today. Hey Dom, welcome to the family of the nonprofit show. We're so excited that you're in our sector and we can't wait to learn more from you and about you as we move forward. Hey everybody, as we like to remind ourselves, our viewers, our listeners, our guests, stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.