How can AI turn Social Media into a Smart Fundraising tool for Nonprofits?

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

My name is Alexander Jivov. I’m a proud Canadian who was born and raised in Toronto, and I’m a somewhat serial experimenter. I originally was dead set on becoming a journalist, and my career started out as first an intern and then a city reporter at the National Post, just down the street from where I live now.

However, I quickly decided that I wanted to be on the forefront of the burgeoning tech startup scene here in the city, and quickly moved into sales at a number of different companies, both large and small. Anything I could try that was new and novel was right up my alley, including getting my own cookbook published at one point!

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

We are Hopeful - the first ‘Social Fundtech,’ that uses AI to turn social media into an easy and smart fundraising tool for nonprofits and charities worldwide.

Using our proprietary Storytelling AI dashboard, Hopeful empowers nonprofit Executive Directors, Fundraisers, and Marketing teams to connect with younger donors, who are more inspired to give by what they see on social media rather than traditional marketing tactics (i.e. email, events, and direct mail).

What is the origin story?

Hopeful came about from my personal experiences working with nonprofits as a pro bono marketing, web dev, and sales consultant.

It constantly shocked me how our world’s most impactful organizations woefully lacked even basic technology to be effective on social media, while so many technologies already existed in the for-profit space.

My Cofounder Ahsan and I essentially worked backwards from a product/market fit perspective to get to what Hopeful is today - in a sector that has so many possibilities for software innovation, the only way to go about finding what was needed most was to go to as many nonprofit leaders as possible and essentially create a prioritized list of what they needed. By far, social media intelligence built for fundraising was the #1 most asked for product.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We’re incredibly proud to have been a fully distributed and diverse (40% women!) team from Day 1 of our founding.

With team members across Canada, the United States, India, and the UK, we have managed to create a presence in 3 countries in only 10 months, and have impacted over 200 nonprofit organizations in that same time frame.

For Hopeful, we hire for a desire to have an impact first, and skills second. Every team member has been or currently is involved with a nonprofit, and we make sure that everyone is deeply entrenched within the nonprofit ecosystem. That, plus our awesome experience when it comes to AI and social media marketing, makes us the absolute best team to make Hopeful even more of a success.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

That’s a tough question. I knew I wanted to build a startup in the impact space ever since high school, but given that my resumé is such a wild ride of different experiences, I really don’t know!

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

As we operate both as a technology company and as a digital agency for our nonprofit clients, we work very collaboratively with each of the organizations we work with to make sure their own unique goals are included in our engagements.

That being said, we have our own key KPIs - likes, followers, engagement, impressions for the social side, and dollars raised from our Fundraiser tool. With every nonprofit being different in so many different ways, we measure success against their goals to make sure we keep in line with their expectations.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Since open launch in August of 2020, we’ve grown to work with over 200 nonprofit organizations throughout Canada, the US, and the UK. We’ve had the absolute pleasure of becoming the exclusive social media technology provider to some of the most prominent provincial and state nonprofit associations around. We’ve also been very lucky to have a very loyal customer base, with a whopping 98% retention since launch!

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

We’re very excited for what we see to be the increasing focus on AI as it applies to social media, and the AI engines, such as GPT-3, that make it incredibly simple to create complex analytics applications that are applicable to all major social media platforms and beyond.

Not only will it increase our agility tremendously when it comes to developing our AI offerings, but it will ideally accelerate our core mission - to show that the nonprofit sector is and should be a sector worthy of the same level of innovation as the for-profit sector.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Talk less, and listen more. It’ll make your life a lot easier!

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

While we knew the younger generation of donors was one that was giving more, giving more often and being more active in their respective communities, we truly had no idea how strong a sense of social responsibility has evolved within that generation.