During this season of giving, we spoke with Laura Malcolm, the founder and CEO of Give InKind, about the power of people helping other people and how her company helps connect those in need with those who want to give. Laura shares her journey from an idea born out of a tragic personal experience to the sale of her company in a recent transaction that will enable her to continue her mission and leverage more technology to build an even better way for people to give.
Q: What inspired you to found Give InKind?
Give InKind was born out of personal experience, just over nine years ago. My husband and I lost our first child to a full-term stillbirth. We both worked in technology – I was a product manager, and he was leading global art campaigns for Apple. I was supposed to be going out on maternity leave. And instead, days before my maternity leave was scheduled to start, we found out that our daughter would not be born alive. It was devastating.
Through that experience, I learned that coworkers are often the first people to know when crisis hits. You're getting that call while you're at work. You have to take time off. You're emailing your teammates and telling your manager you have to cancel all your meetings.
My coworkers set up a meal train for my husband and me based on the traditional idea that, when something happens, people show up with casseroles. However, this was 2013 and California, where on demand services were starting to flourish. We had Uber Eats and Instacart, but our family around the country didn't know about these services or how to use them to send us meals.
Based on our experience dealing with tragedy and the outpouring of support from friends and family, we thought there had to be an easier way for our loved ones to learn what to do, what to say, and what to send. When these big moments happen to people we care about, we can feel utterly helpless. We wanted to empower people to say what they need in the moment and allow everybody else to have a way to give that support, whether they are next door and in person, or they are around the world and online.
Q: How does the platform connect people who need help and people who want to help?
Give InKind is most often used by people who have a network of friends and family who are wondering how to help. 90% of the time someone sets up a page for a friend, a family member, a coworker or someone at their school or church, and then that person can use the page in a number of ways. On the care calendar, users can let their page followers know what help they need – meals, childcare, walking the dog, or transportation to appointments. They can also set up a wish list for gift cards or other gifts, offered through the website and curated for particular situations. Users can share updates with their page followers and keep everyone posted with a single message. And they can also connect their fund-raising accounts – like GoFundMe or Venmo – for financial support. So, all in one page everybody can come in, follow what's happening, and then find opportunities to help.
Give InKind also connects people who simply want to help someone in need. Our users have a choice about their privacy. So, when they set up a page, they can choose either to have it completely private, where it is accessible only via a link that they provide to page followers, or if they are open to getting support from anyone, they can allow their page to be searched on the site. If a user opts in to have their page featured, we'll share it out on our social media channels and try and get more support for them from around the country. It's really powerful to see the ways in which people are helping in their communities.
Although peer-to-peer personal support makes up the bulk of what we do, we have a lot of organizations and nonprofits that use Give InKind. We are very proud that a number of Ronald McDonald House locations have Give InKind pages. They collect digital gift cards on their pages and then distribute the gift cards to the families that are staying at the houses.
And Give InKind isn't limited to situations of need or distress. In response to how we were seeing some people use the platform, this year we added a whole celebrations category for things like showers, potlucks, and family reunions. We're also seeing it used at schools for volunteer signups, school events, and teacher wish lists.
Q: How do you make money?
We want to keep Give InKind available to everyone, so all of its core features are free. However, we have a premium version that unlocks some special features like automated thank you notes. With that feature, the user can see the list of people who sent gifts or signed up to help on the care calendar and then click "send a thank you" to send a beautifully designed digital thank you card that can be personalized.
Where we make most of our money is off the transactions on the platform when people send gift cards or gifts to users. We're a marketplace, with a unique way of managing digital gift cards. Unlike online gift cards sent through a major merchant, Give InKind has end-to-end support for sending gift cards online. Gift cards sent through our platform are never lost. If a user didn't receive or misplaced a gift card, we can go back to the time the card was originally sent and resend it.
We also really love that we have a selection of curated gifts that can be purchased off of our site. We've worked with experts over the last six years to really understand the meaningful and thoughtful gifts that you can send someone who lost a sibling or a parent, or who is having surgery.
Q: How did the pandemic impact your business?
That was one of those moments we were made for – helping people help other people anywhere. One area where we saw 8x overnight growth in our usage was in hospitals and healthcare facilities, which were organizing "feed the frontlines" campaigns. For example, we had huge coverage in Chicago, where a group of individuals coordinated meal trains across multiple hospitals. Then, hospitals from across the country started using Give InKind to feed their frontline workers.
Give InKind really became personal for me during the pandemic. Six years after founding Give InKind and despite other moments when I might have used the platform – like at the birth of my two sons – it wasn't until my whole family got COVID that I turned to the tool I had built. I set up my own page, and it was incredibly powerful to get that support and use it myself.
Q: How do you drive usage on your platform and grow your customer base?
About 50% of our growth has come through paid marketing, and much of that is on Google search – attracting people who are looking for a meal train-type service, support after cancer, or new baby ideas. The rest of our growth is very organic. For example, we have a lot of growth within employers. One coworker sets up an InKind page for another coworker, and then six months later that coworker sets up a page for a different coworker. We can track that usage, and it's been fun to see the way that it spreads.
The growth in usage within hospitals was also totally organic during COVID. But since then, we have leveraged that growth to work with healthcare organizations on patient care. We now have a number of partnerships with hospitals around the country where hospitals are sharing Give InKind with their patients. We know that social support impacts patient outcomes, and hospitals and care providers understand the importance of using a platform like Give InKind to improve the healthcare experience.
Q: Give InKind is all about the inflection points in life. The company has now reached its own inflection point – the sale to Wolfe, LLC, a global leader in gift card fulfillment. As a founder, do you have any mixed feelings about selling the company you've spent more than six years building?
I feel very fortunate for a couple of reasons. I really believe in the home we've found for Give InKind. Wolfe is a strategic buyer and already owns some companies in the gift card space. They have technology that's really going to allow us to improve our business, our offerings, and our margins. Wolfe's founder is someone who truly cares and is giving me the opportunity to stay with Give InKind, which will continue to exist as a separate entity.
I do have mixed feelings, however. Give InKind was my baby. But given what is happening in tech and in the capital markets today, it's a very good opportunity for us to continue our mission without the overhang of the continuing need to raise funds. And I've been in the founder and CEO seat for six years now, and that's hard. So, all things considered, it's really a best-case scenario. Give InKind gets to remain as a company, I get to continue driving the mission and being the face of Give InKind, and the underlying technology will only get better.
Q: What advice do you have for other founders?
Everyone knows the saying that it's a marathon and not a sprint. Well, I've learned that every time you think you're at the finish line, it's just another beginning. Whether it's your product launch, your first fundraise, or hitting profitability, it's actually just another checkpoint in your journey. The journey is long and requires prioritizing. And I think I did a pretty decent job of prioritizing – I've had two little boys through this process. Because it is such a long road, you have to carve out time for your family, for your health, for your well-being. And while balancing all that, I think the best thing any founder can do, especially in this market right now, is to focus on the fundamentals of building a healthy business.