“My friends are pretty socially conscious and generous, but I found I was attending these weddings that better reflected a Pinterest board than their actual values,” says Glantz. “I thought, ‘gosh, I’m buying all of these things for my friends, but my village doesn’t even have access to running water or electricity. What if I could have a registry for malaria medication, or text books? It would be so meaningful and such a great legacy to create with a marriage.”

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While Glantz was happy to buy sushi plates and Crockpots off wedding registries, she thought there was an opportunity to do more. “I thought gifts were a really interesting place to incorporate philanthropy into weddings.” So she got to work prototyping her idea in early 2015 as Heartful.ly.

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The pitch

Glantz, founder and CEO of Heartful.ly

“Heartful.ly offers gift registries for charitable giving. We feature over 1,500 nonprofits in 150 countries. Through a partnership with GlobalGiving, we are able to ensure the gold standard of vetted nonprofit activities to people in the United States who want to contribute to specific causes.

“Most Heartful.ly registry-creators also create traditional gift registries. My advice is to register for just what you actually need and use Heartful.ly for the rest.

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“We’ve been in the market for about a year, working mostly with D.C.- and New York-based couples. After each wedding, we send an impact update that shows how the couple and their community have collectively made a difference. What makes it even more personal is that we offer people the chance to contribute to real projects (like building a classroom in a developing country) and we break down the donation amounts into tangible contributions (a pallet of bricks or bag of cement).

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We were seeing a lot of wedding guests use the platform and then request it for their own birthdays and other occasions, so we listened. We just opened up the site to create registries for birthdays and in January, all of life’s milestones.

“I’m looking forward to tapping into Heartful.ly evangelists who are so excited about the service we offer, but maybe aren’t planning a wedding. Now they can use Heartful.ly to create a registry for any type of event.

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“To make money, Heartful.ly takes a small cut of each transaction, which means our business model relies on having a lot of users. The word-of-mouth referrals from our current users are so important. I now need to find a better way to mobilize and empower these ambassadors to share what we’re doing with their networks in the easiest and most compelling way possible. I can’t afford to pay for digital acquisition of new users now, so I’ve been focusing on recruiting influencers in the weddings space – venues, wedding planners, caterers, etc. – to share what we’re doing. I also do a lot of speaking at different pitch competitions and participating in panels to spread the word on Heartful.ly. How can we more sustainably grow our user base?”

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The advice

Elana Fine, executive director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith

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“Increasing your user base might require stepping back a bit to figure out the customers who are most interested in forgoing gifts in exchange for charitable giving.”

“It’s smart to open up your platform beyond weddings because that gives you more opportunity to attract users that you hadn’t previously considered. Typically for first time weddings, friends and family want to give the couple gifts to help them get their start. Other lifecycle events, like birthdays and funerals, might offer better opportunities for gift-givers to contribute to charity. The success of #GivingTuesday might be a strong indicator that Heartful.ly is the best holiday gift for the person who has everything.

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“If you do determine that Heartful.ly’s best product-market fit is with weddings, you need to determine your best target market. Think beyond the traditional young couple from a bridal magazine and consider people who are getting married for the second time, couples getting married later in life, wealthy couples, or couples who are very passionate about charitable causes, like your peers from the Peace Corps or employees at non-profits and other mission driver organizations. Once you have focused in on a well-defined target, you can better figure out where to find those people and start building a broader customer base.

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“Because people often really do like to give gifts, perhaps you could even consider an option to create a triple-bottom-line registry, where gift-givers could purchase items for couples that would also have a charitable benefit.

“You are addressing a clear problem of consumer excess and income inequality. Step back and really think about how to best leverage your platform to solve these problems.”

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The reaction

Glantz

“That is very helpful and timely advice as we just expanded into birthdays, launched a holiday gift marketplace, and are gearing up to pursue B2B [business-to-business] opportunities in 2017. We’re also honing in our target couple (slightly older, cohabiting, or remarrying) and finding that these registries are much higher value and have high average donations per person.