June 16, 2014 | Read Time: 1 minute
Network for Good has raised $10-million in investment capital to expand its technology and services.
The nonprofit created a for-profit subsidiary, NetworkforGood.com, to accept the financing. Investors include Camden Partners, a Baltimore investment firm; Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, and his wife, Jean; and Vince Talbert, co-founder of Bill Me Later, a payments company acquired by PayPal.
NetworkforGood.com, the for-profit subsidiary, has also acquired GiveCorps, an online giving company for which Mr. Talbert was chief executive.
“With this funding and our new social enterprise, we are investing in our technology and our people and expanding our capacity to help more charities raise more money and do good faster,” says Bill Strathmann, chief executive of Network for Good.
Investors see a lot of promise in companies that provide technology services to nonprofits, he says. They look at the charity world and see “this last frontier of e-commerce,” one of the last industries in which payments are not made primarily online.
“When you think about a donation, pretty much everything else about it is built for digital,” says Mr. Strathmann. “There’s nothing to ship. There’s no brick-and-mortar retail store that you would otherwise go to pay. It’s simply a financial transaction with some special features that need to be wrapped around it.”
Earlier this year, Network for Good hit a big milestone, passing the $1-billion mark in online donations it has processed.
For more information: Go to networkforgood.org.
