October 13, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Two nonprofit organizations that provide online fund-raising tools for other charities — Network for Good, in Bethesda, Md., and Groundspring.org, in San Francisco — have merged. The combined organization will use the Network for Good name.
Founded in 2001 by AOL, Cisco Systems, and Yahoo, Network for Good operates a Web site where donors can contribute to more than a million charities. In addition, more than 4,000 nonprofit groups use Network for Good’s Donate Now function, which allows them to collect online donations through their own Web sites for the cost of transaction fees.
Groundspring.org, which was founded in 1999 by the Tides Foundation, offers its 2,000 nonprofit customers donation pages that they can customize to look like the rest of their Web site and an e-mail tool that allows charities to send messages to their supporters and track how many opened the message or made an online gift as a result.
Bill Strathmann, chief executive officer of Network for Good, says that Groundspring’s e-mail services and training provide a natural complement to the services that his organization offers.
“If you’re a small nonprofit and you put a Donate Now button on your Web site, not much happens,” says Mr. Strathmann. “We were essentially giving these nonprofits a fishing rod, but not technically teaching them to fish, nor were we giving them additional tools, like a net to land the fish — and that’s what Groundspring has done so well.”
Mr. Strathmann says the two organizations first started talking about ways to collaborate more in the spring of 2004. Those talks stalled. Then this February, Groundspring appointed a new executive director, Joseph Mouzon, who says that soon after his arrival, he reached out to Network for Good to start merger negotiations.
Mr. Mouzon says Groundspring was moving in a direction that he ultimately didn’t think would work. “They were essentially building their own tools,” says Mr. Mouzon, who now serves as executive director of nonprofit services for the combined organization. “I didn’t think that was a winning strategy.”
Mr. Strathmann says that Network for Good will continue to focus on the small to medium-sized charities that have been the bulk of both organizations’ customers.
For more information: Go to http://www.networkforgood.org or http://www.groundspring.org.
