Creating an App To Get Millennials Giving

The problem, says Rachel Epstein Klausner ’11, isn’t that she wasn’t giving to charity, the problem was her giving habits.

Although she set aside money to donate each year, Klausner found she was spending most of it contributing to peers’ pet causes via social media, rather than focusing her contributions on issues that mattered to her.

“Anytime someone would ask me, I would give,” she says. “It was very reactive and had no correlation with impact or what I cared about. It was totally embarrassing, actually.”

So, Klausner, who earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, began researching giving habits and found that millennials were the most likely to give non-strategically, through peers or unverified online asks.

“We’ve got to change this,” she realized.

She wanted to leverage her skills designing software products to change how young people give. And so Millie – a one-stop app allowing users to donate where they want – was born. The name, she says, is a play on “millennial.” The intention, she says, is to “create a home for giving.”

She described the beta prototype as “essentially a dating app, but no dating.” Users were matched to nonprofits based on activity, they could swipe to donate, and so on.

As the platform evolved, she added features such as searching by location or cause, and filtering by attributes, like excellent use of social media. Users load money into Millie Wallets and distribute as they see fit, or gift money into friends’ wallets so they can choose where to contribute. Klausner wanted to move away from the guilty-giving of online asks, but she also wanted to create a sense of community.

“We still felt, even though we didn't want it to be about someone asking someone else, or this peer pressure around giving, that there was something great about having a community around giving and to be able to see where people were giving, and find new nonprofits based on passively looking at other people's stuff instead of actively being sought out by other people,” she says.

The Millie team of four is expanding the community beyond individuals. In March, Millie will launch a workplace giving platform that will facilitate employee giving and company matching.

“We want to help companies with their culture around giving back and being a part of the community.”

The pilot program will include three companies. Each company will be able to choose whether they want to set up a Millie wallet to automatically match any employee donation or if they prefer to receive a notice and donate manually.

“What we had been doing until now, which was focusing on consumers, was helping individuals shift their giving from things that they didn't really care about to things they did. But it wasn't really net new dollars,” she said. “What's exciting about some of these initial contracts is it's totally new giving that never would have happened before”

The team at Millie will also launch a new podcast – Changemakers from Within – which will highlight employees at for-profit companies who are spearheading social change and “giving back” within the workplace.

Klausner says that since launching Millie, her personal giving habits have changed.

“I definitely have given more because I think about it all the time,” she says. “Every time I give, I'm really thoughtful about it. I generally don't give to peer-to-peer asks. I give based on where I want to give.”

–By Holly Leber Simmons, Maryland Smith special writer

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