FAQ

Givsly is a purpose-driven marketing and advertising solution that drives better business results through giving back to communities. By utilizing Givsly’s suite of business tools such as e.g. Givsly Donation Offers and Givsly Meetings marketers and sales teams are able to drive business outcomes and conversions while simultaneously contributing to their social and environmental commitments. For our nonprofit partners of all sizes Givsly provides new opportunities for fundraising and corporate collaboration.

No, Givsly is a for profit organization. Givsly is technically categorized as a benefit corporation, defined by being committed to creating public benefit and sustainable value in addition to generating profit.

Yes. While Givsly is creating social impact it is also a lead generation and marketing platform for businesses prospecting both new and existing clients to take business meetings, register for events, download content and convert business with other types of calls to action. Companies already exist that offer services to connect business people for meetings with the profits primarily going to the company for the introduction. There are also gifting and incentivization platforms that businesses use to engage each other through physical goods. It is common for business people to spend money on lunches, concerts, and other experiences in order to get time from and connect with prospects for business. With Givsly, we want to create a more purpose led option to make these business connections and conversions, with the money going back to causes that support communities in the U.S. and globally.

No. Business professionals can register for Givsly membership for free. Members only pay once they request a meeting or process an accepted Donation Offer.

Givsly also provides Corporate Subscriptions to companies who want to enable their employees to use Givsly as part of their on-going marketing and outreach activities. Corporate subscribers will not pay fees for single transactions, they gain early access to executive members and content, are able to use enhanced marketing tools and receive discounts to Givsly partnership programs. Contact us at hello@givsly.com for more details on Corporate Subscriptions.

Givsly’s Donation Offers allow you to reach out to prospects, partners and pretty much any professional you would like to connect with or whom you are asking for a call to action or their time & attention and to do this in a meaningful way by using the power of Givsly donations; even if they are not a member on Givsly

As a registered and logged in Givsly member, you can generate a Donation Offer in the form of a URL which you can include in your communications in emails, corporate pages, chats, phone texts, social posts and so on. When creating a Donation Offer, you will choose the donation amount and one to three nonprofits from Givsly that your recipient can select from if they accept your offer.

The same Donation Offer (like a campaign link) can be sent out to multiple people that you would like to reach. If they choose to click through, choose a NPO for your donation, leave their information and submit the Donation Offer response back to you, then you know that they are interested in connecting with you. Next steps after that are for you to process the donation payment via Givsly (paying with credit card or Givsly Credits) and to reach back to the person who accepted your Donation Offer and expressed interest in connecting.

Just like with meetings agreed between Givsly members, with Donation Offers, Givsly facilitates the payment of donations to the nonprofit organizations on its platform. Once you make the nonprofit payment, Givsly will also communicate back to the person who accepted your Donation Offer with a thank you email and impact messaging from their selected nonprofit and Givsly.

Although you can definitely send a Donation Offer out as a meeting request, you can also use them for many other types of conversion requests. Givsly members and corporations successfully use Donation Offers to ask for product feedback, as a thank you for event registration or event participation or a follow-up for visiting your booth at a trade show or to show client/partner/employee appreciation. Feel free to reach out to us at hello@givsly.com for specific case examples !

At this point we want you to be able to experiment with as many Donation Offers as you can and have not limited the number of links you can create.

Yes, when you create a Donation Offer on Givsly, the offer generation template is initially populated with those nonprofits which are on your existing profile. You can however exchange these for up to any three nonprofits as long as they exist on Givsly.

If there is a nonprofit that you are interested in supporting that is not currently available on the Givsly platform, please reach out to us at nonprofits@givsly.com to request that we reach out to them to see if we can onboard them to Givsly

You can freely choose the individual donation sum for each Donation Offer from USD 10 upwards.

Once you have created a Donation Offer you can view an offer details page. Here you will also find a preview button to see how the landing page looks for a Donation Offer recipient that comes through to your link.

For the regular Givsly members, the Donation Offer landing page text is automatically created by Givsly. It lists your name and company name (or optionally only your company name), the individual donation value you have chosen, the selected nonprofits you want to present to choose from and their impact examples.

Givsly’s corporate subscriber members can additionally customize their Donation Offer landing pages with specific images, logos and text.

This landing page is where the Donation Offer recipient is asked to make a selection on the nonprofit and submit their information for your verification. They can leave a short message to you as well. The landing page also explains that Givsly is the third-party partner who works with you and your company to get the donations to the nonprofit.

Givsly’s corporate subscriber members can additionally customize their Donation Offer landing pages with their specific images, logos and text. For more on our corporate subscriptions contact us at hello@givsly.com

Yes, you can edit a Donation Offer link that you have created. If you do not like to keep a Donation Offer live, you can also make the link inactive.

Once a person responds to your Donation Offer, including selecting the nonprofit and leaving their name, work email and company (optional) so that you can view it on Givsly, you are then asked to confirm this specific donation and connection by making the payment. The payment is done on Givsly using your credit card or your corporate Givsly Credits or a combination of both. When you have made the actual donation we will automatically confirm this to the person who responded to your Donation Offer with a thank you -email from the nonprofit.

Since Donation Offers can be sent out freely it is possible that if forwarded, someone outside of your original outreach could respond and select a donation. We are not able to verify the respondents but you do have complete control of which response you will pay the donation on. You can simply discard the acceptance and not make a donation payment, if it feels like this is not the person you were looking to connect with.

To help keep track of the budget you have paid out as donations for a specific Donation Offer, you can optionally set a “cap” on your donation payments during the offer creation step.

This means that you can confirm donation payments for that Donation Offer until the cap is reached and then get a warning to either edit the Donation Offer to increase the cap or close out this Donation Offer and make it inactive.

After the set cap USD amount has been reached, the Donation Offer link will start directing the next person who clicks on the link to a separate landing page which will inform them that this donation campaign has reached its target and thank them for their interest.

After the set cap USD amount has been reached, the Donation Offer link will start directing the next person who clicks on the Donation Offer link to a separate landing page which will inform them that this donation campaign has reached its target and thank them for their interest. You can decide to edit your existing Donation Offer to make it active again or make the Donation Offer inactive.

If you would like to manually deactivate an offer link so that visitors to that link URL are not able to accept your Donation Offer anymore, you can do so from your dashboard under each offer link. Making a link inactive means that visitors are directed to a thank you page which states that this donation campaign has reached its target and thank them for their interest.

When a Donation Offer is created it is not currently tied to any specific recipient. It can be sent out as part of your communication to as many people as you see fit.

Your Givsly account will have a dashboard to keep track of Donation Offers you have created and the responses that have been received. You will also receive an email about the acceptance to the email address defined on your Givsly profile. To submit an acceptance for your donation, the recipient is asked to also give their first and last name, their work email, their company name (optional), and if they want to leave a short message for you. You can view this information on the dashboard for each accepted donation offer and complete the donation payment for the chosen nonprofit.

Once you confirm a donation and make the payment, Givsly will send a thank you note informing the person responding to your Donation Offer that you have made the donation and it is in the process of being paid out to their nonprofit.

Since the Donation Offer links can be sent out freely, using any of your channels and accompanying such a variety of asks to the person that you are reaching out to, Givsly is unfortunately not able to follow up in a similar manner as it can when you are booking meetings between two Givsly members.

The donation sum chosen by you for the Donation Offer goes to the nonprofit. Additionally there is a 15% Givsly platform fee (except for corporate subscribers) and a payment processing fee for our transaction providers added to the donation amount to make the complete payment.

Since the Donation Offer links can be sent out freely, using any of your channels and accompanying such a variety of requests to the person that you are reaching out to, Givsly is unfortunately not able to refund Donation Offer payments once you have confirmed them.

When processing Donation Offers the donation sum chosen by you for the Donation Offer goes to the nonprofit. Additionally there is a 15% Givsly platform fee (except for corporate subscribers) and a payment processing fee for our transaction providers added to the donation amount to make the complete payment amount. When processing donations for Givsly Meetings as a default the meeting donation sum chosen by the volunteer goes to the nonprofit. With Givsly Meetings you can choose to pay the 15% Givsly fee and a payment processing fee for our transaction providers on top of your donation or have them reduced from the original meeting donation amount.

No. The donation made to a nonprofit on the platform is not a tax write off because there is value in the meeting or the business conversion in exchange for the donation.

When volunteering time to meet Givsly allows you to choose the value for your meeting time. The meetings are set in 15 minute increments of your time. You can choose to meet for 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes. As you select your time, the donation amount is adjusted based on the length of the meeting.

With Givsly Donation Offers the Givsly member who creates the offer determines a donation amount for each accepted Donation Offer.

For Givsly meeting donations funds will be held until 24 hours after the meeting is scheduled and then marked completed. With Givsly Donation Offers the person creating an offer and receiving acceptances to that offer is responsible for processing the payments to complete the donation.

From each of these interactions, when marked complete, the donations are typically sent to the nonprofit within 90 days.

Setting aside meetings on Givsly allows you to raise money for your favorite nonprofits by having individuals make a donation in exchange for a business meeting. You may get a lot of meeting requests a day or a week for external meetings already, so this helps to create social impact while forming new business relationships.

No. No one is required to use Givsly to schedule a meeting with you but it is an option available to you should you choose it. If you want to use Givsly for meetings you can schedule a meeting with another Givsly member using Givsly Meeting proposals or create a Donation Offer to send a link out via your chosen channel to get the other party’s attention.

If another Givsly member whom you would like to connect with does not presently have any available times in their calendar or if the times they have volunteered do not work for you, you can use Givsly’s propose-a-meeting feature and suggest up to three time slots to them for a potential meeting. They will be notified of your proposal and have 72 hours to accept or decline your proposal.

Absolutely. While this is optional we think everyone is trying to meet with someone for business. Someone may be interested in your specific role or expertise or hopes to understand more about the company you work at. You shouldn’t assume that others don’t value your time. By volunteering calendar time on your Givsly profile, you have the opportunity to raise money for the nonprofits you care about too.

We are constantly onboarding more nonprofit partners. If your favorite nonprofit is not on the Givsly platform, you can ask that nonprofit to join or contact the Givsly team to sign up your favorite nonprofit. To ask Givsly to sign up your nonprofit please reach out to nonprofits@givsly.com.

Givsly Donation Offers are an excellent way to propose and encourage meetings to business professionals outside of Givsly. By creating a Donation Offer and sending the offer link as part of your direct outreach you can stand out of the crowd when approaching a client or partner and show that you respect their time by being prepared to make a donation to a nonprofit they choose on their behalf.

We set limits to the amount of time you can volunteer in one week because this should not be a platform for you to book all of your meetings. Limiting the amount of time set aside helps us make sure that people can create new social impact while not abusing the platform.

Occasionally we run special event related partner collaborations on Givsly. We do not apply the regular Givsly weekly hour limit to event specific time volunteering as the events typically run over a few consecutive days and we want people to have the opportunity to connect with each other during the event and support their nonprofits in the process.

With meeting requests made through Givsly platform, if the person does not respond to your initial request or accept your meeting within 72 hours, then the donation will not be charged and the reservation on your credit card will be released and/or your Givsly credit refunded to your profile. The donation and fees are charged when a meeting is accepted by both parties.

If your Givsly Meeting date needs to be rescheduled then you can utilize the messaging feature within Givsly to agree with the other party how to reschedule the time of the meeting. We are not yet able to alter the already accepted and scheduled Givsly Meeting times or methods in the platform but provide the messaging feature to communicate between parties. We are also happy to help facilitate if you contact us atsupport@givsly.com.

Currently the easiest way to reschedule is to decline or cancel the existing meeting and to make a new meeting request to a time slot that the parties have agreed to through our messaging feature. The cancellation also cancels and refunds the initial nonprofit donation and the new booking creates another one instead. If after an initially accepted meeting the volunteering party cancels the meeting, the donation and the Givsly fee will be refunded but payment processing fee is charged. If after an initially accepted meeting the booking party cancels the meeting, the donation amount will be refunded but the Givsly fee and payment processing fee will be charged.

If your Givsly Meeting is canceled after it has been initially accepted by both parties, we recommend promptly trying to reschedule with the other party using the messaging function in Givsly and for the volunteer to set up a suitable calendar time for the other party to book and for a donation to go through to the nonprofit as planned.

The Givsly Meeting cancellation also cancels and refunds the initial nonprofit donation. If after an initially accepted Givsly Meeting the volunteering party cancels,then the donation and the Givsly fee will be refunded but the payment processing fee is charged. If after an initially accepted Givsly Meeting the booking party cancels the meeting, then the donation amount will be refunded but the Givsly fee and payment processing fee will be charged.

If the person volunteering the Givsly Meeting time does not show up after accepting the meeting and no rescheduling is done via Givsly Meeting messaging, then the user booking the Givsly Meeting and making the donation will need to notify Givsly of the other party’s absence within 24 hours after the originally scheduled meeting time and date. After this notification Givsly will also reach out to the other party to obtain confirmation of the absence before considering a refund. Otherwise payments will be scheduled as originally intended. If the person booking the Givsly Meeting time does not show up or neither person shows up to a meeting that is accepted by both parties and no rescheduling is done via Givsly messaging, we will after a 24 hour window of the original Givsly Meeting time consider the donation payments to be valid. For these scenarios or any other potential situations, users should email support@givsly.com.

When making a Givsly Meeting booking or a Donation Offer payment on Givsly you can pay using major credit cards. We support major credit cards from our customer’s banks in and outside the U.S. for the following brands: Visa, Mastercard, Diners and American Express - as supported by our payment processor Stripe. Please note that when you are making payments from certain countries your bank may require a 3D Secure authentication and verification process as part of your payment.

All Givsly donations and fees on our service are presented in US Dollars. Please note that if your credit card is under a different currency or from a country outside of the U.S. then your credit card company and bank may additionally charge you a foreign exchange fee or a foreign charge fee. Givsly is not able to determine or influence if these fees are charged by your credit card company and what they are. They will be applied on top of the donations and fees you pay to Givsly by your credit card company or bank.

If your company has acquired pre-purchased Givsly Credits, you can apply these as payment methods for Givsly Meetings or Donation Offers. You can also pay partly by Givsly Credits and partly by a credit card. In this case any available Givsly Credit balance in your profile will be applied to your donation first and the remaining balance can then be paid by card. This is intended for when your Givsly Credit balance does not cover the whole payment.

Givsly Credits are prepaid credits that let you pay for the donations you make through Givsly platform instead of using your credit card. Givsly Credits are currently sold to our corporate customers and you can inquire about purchasing Givsly Credits or becoming a corporate customer by reaching out to our service team at hello@givsly.com.

Givsly Credits are distributed in the form of credit codes which you can connect to your own Givsly profile on the service and have the value associated with the credit code be available to you as a method of payment for a meeting donation.

If you choose to use Givsly Credits as full or partial payment when making a booking, the used value is reserved and deducted from your Givsly Credit balance. If the booking expires or is declined, the held Givsly Credit will be released back to your profile.

If the meeting is accepted, but is later canceled by either party using the platform functionality, any full or partial donation payments made using Givsly Credit will be refunded to your profile’s Givsly Credit balance in accordance with Givsly refund policy.

You can have multiple Givsly Credit codes applied to your Givsly profile. Credits will be automatically used based on the date of their expiration, so that the one with the closest expiration date will be used first. Givsly Credits are valid for 12 months from the date of their issuance to your company unless otherwise agreed.

You can find your current Givsly credit balance under Payment Methods in the Account Settings tab of your Givsly membership profile.

If you have applied any credit codes to your profile, you can see a list of the corresponding Givsly Credit codes, their expiration date and the current available balance for each code. Givsly Credits are valid for 12 months from the date they are issued to your company.

If you have yet to apply Givsly Credit or want to apply additional credit value to your profile you can do it in Payment Methods, by clicking “Add Givsly Credits to your account” and inserting the Givsly prepaid credit code you have received. You can also apply Givsly Credit at the payment step, when making a booking.

No, because one credit code, after first applied to a Givsly profile on the platform, is then associated with that Givsly profile and cannot be applied to another profile simultaneously or used again.

If you are a corporate customer’s Givsly Credit administrator and need help on this issue contact your account manager from Givsly or reach out to us at support@givsly.com

If you have lost your Givsly Credit codes before applying them to your Givsly profile, please contact your company’s Givsly representative or the colleague who initially provided you your Givsly Credit codes. Givsly service team is not authorized to distribute Givsly Credit codes outside of the named company representative.

Givsly Credit is currently sold to our company customers and cannot (yet) be purchased directly on-line - please contact hello@givsly.com for more information on how your company can acquire Givsly credit for your employees!

The 15% Givsly fee enables open access to Givsly platform, supports its technology and maintenance, safe fund transfers to NPOs and the value of qualified lead generation for business connections made through the platform.

There are no refunds for processed Givsly Donation Offers.

For Givsly Meetings, when a booking request is made, an initial hold for the amount of the booking donation and Givsly fee as well as payment processing fee, is made on the booker's credit card and/or Givsly Credit.

If the meeting request is not responded to by the volunteer within 72 hours, the credit card hold on the booker’s credit card or the deducted Givsly Credit is released. If the meeting volunteer accepts the meeting within the allotted time, the reserved funds are charged from the credit card and/or Givsly Credit.

For an initially accepted Givsly Meeting, should the volunteering party cancel, then the donation and the Givsly fee will be refunded but the payment processing fee is charged. For an initially accepted meeting, should the booking party cancel the meeting, then the donation amount will be refunded but the Givsly fee and payment processing fee will be charged.

In order to consider changes to any captured payments or Givsly Credit after the meeting has passed, Givsly should be made aware of initially accepted but then canceled meetings or no-shows within 24 hours after the original meeting time and date. Givsly will need to confirm the cancellation from the other meeting party. For these scenarios or any such other potential situations, users should reach out to support@givsly.com.