Givz’s Pivot Power: From Nonprofit Tech to Enterprise SaaS

Successful pivots in B2B tech often start with intimate knowledge of an industry’s pain points. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andrew Forman shared how his dual life in finance and nonprofits led to Givz’s evolution from charitable giving platform to enterprise SaaS provider.

The Nonprofit Origins As an investment banker, Andrew spent five years moonlighting as a nonprofit treasurer. “I kind of had these two yin and yang things,” he explains, “the work that paid the bills and then the nonprofit that gave me a bit of more meaning in my life.”

This experience revealed the challenges nonprofits faced in working with brands. Traditional cause marketing often meant brands choosing specific charities, creating friction with their target communities. The clearest example came from H&M’s Pride Month initiative, where a $3 million donation sparked backlash because of charity selection.

The Initial Solution Rather than trying to fix nonprofit fundraising broadly, Givz focused on a specific enterprise pain point: how could brands drive sales while supporting causes their customers care about? The answer lay in replacing traditional discounts with donation incentives.

“What you can do instead is you could do something like 20% off plus 20% to give to charity during Black Friday Cyber Monday,” Andrew explains. This approach let brands maintain margins while giving customers choice in charitable giving.

The Enterprise Pivot The breakthrough came when testing revealed unexpected business benefits. “Email that goes out to their X million loyalty members that doesn’t have a discount code in it that says, hey, if you spend $60 or more, you’re going to get $10 to give to charity over the next seven days, will that work?” Andrew recalls. “And to the tune of H&M donating $150,000… it worked.”

This data changed the conversation from charitable giving to business performance. When brands implement Givz’s donation incentives above certain purchase thresholds, “Average order value goes from 67 to 84 within a couple of weeks and it stays there for the rest of the year.”

Expanding Beyond Retail Success in retail opened doors to other verticals. “We’re already extending outside of Ecommerce into brick and mortar, but also into incentivizing anybody to do anything,” Andrew shares. Financial services company Betterment now uses Givz to encourage recurring deposits, while jewelry stores leverage QR codes for high-value purchases.

Building for Scale The key to this expansion was building an API-first platform that could power donation incentives across any customer action. As Andrew explains, they’re creating “the fabric that basically powers the future of this giving economy.”

For B2B founders considering pivots, Givz’s journey offers valuable lessons. Start with deep industry knowledge, focus on solving specific pain points, and let data guide your evolution. Most importantly, be willing to reframe your solution when market feedback reveals unexpected opportunities.