An interview with Hedado's founder, Viren Tellis, about how Hedado helps individuals manage charitable donations.
Meet Viren Tellis, (twitter) Co-Founder & CEO of Hedado.com, a free tool enabling corporations to offer employees charitable matching campaigns. Hedado offers individual donors excellent donation tracking tools, and corporations easy donation campaign management, serving both consumers and businesses with a smooth user interface and powerful customizations.
Companies are eager to engage their teams and communities in philanthropic giving as a way to increase engagement and demonstrate their corporate values. However, managing corporate giving or donation matching programs quickly becomes administratively burdensome because of the number of donations and variety of nonprofits
Hedado builds corporate giving tools to help companies create these programs easily and manage them efficiently. Hedado is designed with the individual employee donor in mind, making the tools a joy for employees to use and extremely convenient for companies to manage. Many other corporate giving platforms suffer employee backlash because they are clunky for employees to use, but Hedado is designed to the high standards individuals expect from their digital products.
For donors, Hedado simplifies managing donation reporting and visualization by getting the data out of email inboxes and spreadsheets and into beautiful powerful donor tools. So many individuals track their donations by searching their inbox for donation receipts; Hedado frees the data from your inbox so you can waste less time after donating money.
As I was changing careers during the pandemic, I took a moment to reflect on my own philanthropy. I realized I wanted to give more, but I didn’t have anywhere to start the journey, compare what I had done in the past, or learn about organizations that aligned to the problems I wanted solved.
From chatting with friends and acquaintances, I realized I was not alone and uncovered many other donor and company problems that weren’t being addressed by the technology that currently serves nonprofits and fundraisers.
Hedado comes from the spanish phrase He dado, which translates to I’ve given. We want that phrase to be evoked after donors have used our platform.
It also helped that Hedado is a six letter, dot com domain that didn’t cost thousands of dollars! Most short company names with the words give, generous, and donate are taken or are squatted on.
For our recurring donors, there are two features that users tell us really standout. The first is the Hedado portfolio. It allows donors to choose multiple nonprofits, save them to a list, allocate donations to that list like a 401K, and give in a single transaction. Changing the nonprofits or the allocations is easy and doesn’t require updating payment information. This enables donors to easily increase the total size of their giving pie, allocating amongst the nonprofits in their portfolio, and also rebalance how much goes to each charity on the fly.
We also know that not all giving is going to happen on Hedado. So we let our donors forward donation receipts from anywhere to donations@hedado.com and automatically add those transactions to their history. This creates a great view of a donor’s philanthropy in one place and readies them for tax time. Instead of searching your inbox and building a spreadsheet, you simply check your donation history on Hedado.com. Some users set up automatic email forwarding rules in their inboxes to make it even simpler.
Our business customers love that Hedado is easy to use and can be customized to their needs quickly. Creating a campaign and then managing it can be done in minutes. It lets our customers focus on the rest of their jobs and eliminates the administrative burden of running a donation matching program. Companies can go from deciding to launch a company program to support employee charitable donations to facilitating donations in a matter of minutes, delivering employees another reason to appreciate their company.
Companies also like our workflow and design of our product for donors. Because of its intuitive design, companies don’t need to train their employees on Hedado. They simply explain their matching campaign in an email and link to their Hedado page. The Hedado experience for employee donors is self-explanatory and makes our corporate customers look good.
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