Journey from TripAdvisor to Philanthropy

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Today we're honored to have with us Steve Koffer, who you know his work as the founder of TripAdvisor. But what you may not know is now he's doing a new thing and it's focused on philanthropy. So we want to find out all about that from Steve today. So first up, Steve, thank you so much for joining us.

My absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks so much.

So I think the question everybody wants to know is, you know, you, you had great success as founder of TripAdvisor. I think everyone knows TripAdvisor. Everyone's used it, right? It was such a great resource. So instead of starting up a new gig, why not just ride off into the sunset, retire, enjoy some margaritas, you know, that sort of thing?

Of course, that had to be in the consideration set when I decided to step down. But I actually did make the decision to move on from TripAdvisor for the express purpose of, hey, let's do One more, let's do at least one more startup. I was, you know, turning 60 and like, I feel I have at least 10 more years of productive, fun stuff. And I love the challenge of starting some, of building something. And look, TripAdvisor was a hell of a ride, ton of great challenges. ahead. Uh, company's doing wonderfully, over a billion reviews, lots of, of great things there. But, you know, one couldn't deny that after 22 years in the seat, perhaps A, time for somebody else, and B, I was getting a little tired of thinking about travel. Uh, so now with this new gig, I'm like, I get to think of a whole nother set of interesting challenges while at the same time leveraging, I'd like to think, a ton of what I learned and was able to master at TripAdvisor.

Okay. So you say you're 60, but you sound like you're 30 based on the amount of energy you just put out there and interest to do something new. I guess part of the question is, what would you say are the greatest lessons you learned at TripAdvisor? that you're using to move into the field of philanthropy?

Sure. So, I mean, if you think about how TripAdvisor changed what we think for the better, the way people research and plan trips, we went from a world where if you could find a guidebook that covered where you were going, you could read one person's opinion. And that's kind of like the big or the branded perspective. Fast forward to what we created there, and it's like a billion reviews really represents the democratization of what defines a great hotel or restaurant or attraction. It leads you to places that a guidebook author never went, and it really opens up The ability to share an amazing experience with a tiny restaurant or a small attraction in the middle of nowhere that doesn't have a marketing budget. So that spreading the, I call it the democratization of the travel planning process, because really we had millions of things to review and over a billion reviews to help you find it.

Mm-hmm.

How about taking that notion and, and applying it to philanthropy where there are already a million charities? And I'm not talking about rating service of how good those charities are. A couple of those already exist, but how do we tap into the fact that everyone says they're a philanthropist or likes to donate to charities, just like everyone likes to travel and everyone has an opinion on where they've traveled. How can we harness that good feeling towards a cause and inject it into everyday life, as opposed to the occasional giving once a quarter, maybe once a month, more likely once a year to a handful of causes? And so we came across this notion of, well, everyone is already online. They're already buying stuff they need. And, you know, you don't need any market stats to know that online purchases continue to grow and people buy them through their browser and through apps. And so if we can tap into that existing behavior, buying stuff, if we can tap into the emotional benefit of like, hey, I found a coupon when I wasn't even looking for it, I saved a little bit of money. And give the user a surprise and delight of, hey, and 2% of what you bought just went to the charity of your choice, paid for by the store. Like, hey, wow, that, that's a pretty, I'll call it a win-win-win situation. The consumer's happy. They just saved money and they didn't even work for it.

Mm-hmm.

The charity's happy. Ooh, they just got money and they weren't even looking for it or looking for it, but they weren't looking through it through this channel. And the store's happy. They just made a sale. So all of this happened and a little bit of e-commerce money that flows around naturally went into the philanthropy bucket. And then it's my turn. After you activate a donation, you bought a new toaster at Walmart and 2% went to the charity of your choice. I get to take that and celebrate it. And the amount that one person is going to be able to donate to their favorite charity through this scheme, so $20 a year, maybe $40 a year, not a life-changing amount for anyone involved. But if we can grow this to $100 million or $200 million, Which relative to the world's population, not that big. I mean, TripAdvisor was doing 400 million uniques per month. Average that out over a year. If GiveFreely can do, call it 200 million, which is a really big number, but doable. 200 million times $20 a year and how this commission stuff flows. That's $4 billion. And as they say, that even in government terms, that's real money. And if it's $4 billion going to the charities that users, that the folks who install GiveFreely care about, that's going to make them feel great. And I want to be able to celebrate that you donated $2 to your favorite charity and that all of the people who selected whatever your favorite charity is cumulatively, or giving $300,000 or a million or, you know, whatever that number might be. But if we have enough users, that becomes a very big number, which like that level of excitement is what gets me up in the morning. And to your very first question, hey, that's way more interesting than, I mean, I love the beach personally, but it's way more interesting than watching the waves crash. the beach or perfecting my body surfing.

There you go. So now you founded GiveFreely. What year was your startup year?

It was just last year.

Okay. So how are you— how would you say you're tracking so far?

Sure. So the— we launched in October of 2023, and we had a set of launch partners who was Some rather, you know, good-sized names in, in the philanthropy world. And we're featuring them as you install as charities you can pick, but you can pick from over a million. And in return, these launch partners helped us kind of get the word out to their base. It's gone okay. I can't say it's gone great because it's hard for Anyone to cut through kind of the noise of like consumers are bombarded with hundreds of messages per day and charity's sending them an email announcing this kind of, it's one other bit of bombardment and the user's gonna be interrupted from whatever they were doing, reading that email to then act. So, and we knew this, it was going to be an ongoing process where it's multiple instances where we're teaching people, hey, Give Freely is here. Number one, awareness. Number two, it's going to benefit you by saving you money with coupons and it's free. So like the value proposition there. And then, hey, it's you and your friends and your group and other supporters of the charity you've chosen and bringing home that celebratory moment. And then I hope to take advantage of social media in a way to kind of like spread the word that just didn't really exist in its current form 10 years ago. But imagine influencers or folks with lots of followers sharing this kind of good aspect to their own personality. Like, hey, every, all my followers, you know, I'm supporting the blank animal shelter or X cancer society. Here's a way that you can help. At no cost to you. In fact, you save money with the coupons. Go to givefreely.com, download their browser extension. You save, charity wins. You don't have to remember anything. Safe, easy, secure, 60 seconds to install. Kind of the, the rest of the pitch that's on the website. And guess what? That influencer might do that because they really love the charity. Or they might do that because it makes them look nicer and they're not actually asking their contributor or asking their followers to pull out their wallet because it's all free.

Mm-hmm.

Net-net, if that sort of thing can gain, I dare call it kind of movement status where people feel like they want to be part of that. That's how a movement starts. And I, and my analogy of course is Giving Tuesday where like it was nothing 13, 14 years ago, and now it is generating billions of dollars every year, not because it's run out of an organization in New York that drives this. They have no control over whether corporations decide to do something on Giving Tuesday. They print a blueprint, they share best practices, and they've let it— my understanding, they've let corporations, stores, retailers, anyone kind of co-opt the movement into their own thing.

Yeah.

And it spread like wildfire around the US and around the world and has genuinely achieved movement status. Great. What lessons of that can I copy? 'Cause that's at the corporate level. Amen to that. Fantastic. And it's not just Tuesday. I hope to be on the everyday level with mass participation.

Mm-hmm.

And then if you let me, like phase 2, and I'm far away from phase 2, but imagine having millions of users shopping, doing their regular browsing, seeing their favorite charity logo on their browser or maybe more than one. And now that charity can message the user saying, hey, looking for a contribution, it's double match month on Charity X. Or, hey, here's 3 things you can get involved with in Newton, Massachusetts where I live, like targeted at me as an individual listing the things I can get involved with.

Mm-hmm.

And I don't have to open an email. This is something I see in my browser, and my browser is something I use every single day. I'm on Google or Bing or some search engine doing my searches, and I get to see this message from the charity. What does that lead to? It leads to more engagement from individuals with their chosen cause. And oh my goodness, the benefit of both pulling someone up the donation ladder from the nonprofit or the volunteer, the more you can engage ordinary citizens in small acts of philanthropy, that builds the habit. And wouldn't we all just love to see the individual participation rate in philanthropy volunteer or dollars or whatever go from, you know, whatever it is now, 50% to 90%. That type of impact, ooh, super exciting to think about.

Now, do you see the act of philanthropy as being something on the rise? And part of my question actually comes from, you know, for a long time we heard about philanthropy, Then it kind of fell off the wayside because everybody turned to cause marketing. So it became kind of a different struggle in that it used to be, let me give dollars for good, to let me give dollars so that I look good for whatever my brand is. So do you see kind of a turn back of the clock to, let's go back to straight philanthropy itself? of doing the right thing just to do the right thing?

I try to think of it. I think it's a great question. I try to think of it in kind of parallel buckets. I love cause marketing.

Why?

Because it pulled in this entire set of additional, call it assets, corporations to get involved in a way that Helps their brand. Fine. That's what's in it for them, but actually generates real dollars for worthwhile causes. Great. That's what's in it for, you know, for, for helping make our, our world a better place.

Mm-hmm.

I don't think that's come at the expense of individual giving. I love the fact that A newer generation often looks to a company and asks, hey, what's your mission? Show me how you are a kind company. Show me how you are mission-driven. Show me how you're philanthropic in your own way. That's cause marketing. So to your question, like, Is it a cycle back? No, I hope cause marketing continues to grow and I hope companies start to feel like, well, if they don't do something, they're left out. Because the power of— I'm a capitalist— the power of having all these companies engage for whatever reason they want, but flowing dollars into philanthropic efforts, great. Individually, Yeah, not much has changed in years. So like, what are the new ways that donors can, that nonprofits can connect with their donor base? How can we up the recruiting of, you know, volunteer efforts, as I say, give freely? It's like, it's not out there campaigning to do more for charity. It's trying to sneak in into your everyday activity because everyone shops and everyone is always going to shop. And if we can turn that into, oh, you save money, nice job, and you're buying exactly what you want. So I'm not trying to throw a ton of deals at you for shit that you don't need.

Yeah.

And when you do buy the stuff you're looking for, you get a Hey, and guess what? You're, uh, uh, you also did some good. Funny little anecdote, because I'm living and breathing this every day, right? I have GiveFreely installed in my browser, of course. And, you know, my printer runs out of paper. I'm like, yeah, go to staples.com, and I'm gonna go get my case of paper. I'm lazy. I'm gonna go have it delivered. I put the thing in my cart. And up pops this box says, hey, would you like 2% of your purchase to go to MS Societies, who I, who is my chosen charity? And I'm like, yes. That was like my moment where I hadn't even thought about it. I wasn't thinking about GiveRelay. I wasn't thinking, I was thinking about trying to load my printer because it ran out of paper. And this very ordinary task became a Oh, that's nice of me to have this everyday action do some good in the world. And even though I'm extremely aware that 2% on my $20 box of paper is a small amount of money, it still felt good to have that. They call it an everyday action, do some good. And then of course, I want, you know, it doesn't happen yet, but I want some confetti to fall on that purchase page. I want to celebrate that moment. I want to share how Steve Koffer and all the other people that have selected the MS Society as our featured charity, uh, have donated this amount and make me feel part of this movement so that maybe I'll tell some of my friends, because why not? It's easy. But of course, when I'm chatting with my friends, I, I don't always remember. So again, building that community like TripAdvisor, making those small moments into, you know, showing that the bigger good. It's to me, hey, I like saving money. It's not why I downloaded GiveFreely, but everyone likes an accidental savings whenever they're shopping. And frequent donation, just a, it's an easy value proposition to talk about.

Yeah. May I ask why you chose the MS Society?

Oh, a long history in, in my family. My mom passed away from MS, other, other relatives. So, uh, uh, lot, not unlike how many people select their, their various causes, there's some personal connection there.

Yeah, exactly. So now, are you finding a difference with the way nonprofits are interacting with you based on their size? Because I'm wondering if smaller nonprofits understand the usage, if, you know, maybe they're not tech savvy, maybe they're limited in terms of what they have in their own resources, so that maybe they don't really understand how this works.

There's probably some of that. I think the picture, what I'd like to convey is that we selected a handful of larger charities as launch partners because they had a lot of people that they could market to. But from day one, we automatically brought in every legitimate charity. You got to be in the good IRS list and the good California list, and you're in our database.

Yeah.

So whether or not, if, if there's a, a nonprofit listening, whether or not you've ever heard of us, we have you in our database and any one of our new users can select your charity by your name or your EIN number. You just type it in. If you were as a nonprofit to come and register on our site, you get access to our portal. Which is where you can see who, how many users you have, but how many users of GiveFreely have selected you as the charity. You can generate a campaign link, which in turn you can send out and market to your supporters. And that link is kind of preconfigured to pick your charity as the selected one. A user can always change, but that's what charities are putting in their Email. Some charities have done a, uh, uh, an email blast to their entire base saying, uh, hey, a new free way that you can support us. Body of the email is download GiveFreely, use this link, automatically supports us. And there's a promotion running now that is $10 that GiveFreely is giving instantly to the charity. Plus, the commissions that we generate from, from all the purchases that a user makes. So there's really kind of no downside on the charity's part other than it's a little time and effort to send out an email. The thing that we find is working even better is a popup on the nonprofit site. Because nonprofits currently might have a profit popup that says donate now.

Mm-hmm.

Like, it's not hard for a user to find a, The donate button on a website. So it's unclear that that's actually generating incremental. If the message is, you know, double match for this week, that can be very powerful. But most are just donate now. And the other thing is like sign up for our newsletter. I see that from time to time. Again, useful for people that sign up. We're suggesting, hey, try a pop-up. And to your question about a small charity, we will run this thing entirely for you. Small nonprofit, small or big, add 1 line of something called JavaScript to your site. But literally anybody can do it. And then we will have the popup appear. It'll say something along the lines of a free way to support us. It's customizable by, by any nonprofit. It'll pop up with an instant $10 donation. Download, give freely, save money for you with coupons. Shopping at 10,000 stores generates more funds for us doing our great work, you know, fill in the blank. And it's a way to get in front of an audience. So to the nonprofit, small or big, I say, hey, did you ever do any marketing of Amazon Smile? Can you resurrect some of that? Because you're not going to get any benefit of GiveFree— from GiveFreely until you actually do some pushing of GiveFreely. Because if you're a small nonprofit, our general audience isn't going to accidentally select you. Uh, and we try to make it very easy to do that.

Well, that's very kind of you because a lot of places don't understand that mentality at all. But I was going to actually bring up Amazon Smile because that they phased out. So would you have considered that perhaps competition?

I loved Amazon Smile. I had to remember to go to smile.amazon.com, which was unfortunate. And look, Amazon just got greedy, I think. I don't know anything, but the program was wildly successful. They were doing $100 million a year, and that's public information. And they claimed it wasn't impactful enough.

Really? What the heck?

I'm like, yes, the average charity got a small amount, but go ask any of those average charities if they didn't want the money anymore. And not a single one would say at any amount, oh, I don't care. Small charity cares about small dollars. Big charities care about big dollars. So, I— everyone cared, but Amazon didn't need the program anymore, so they shut it down. I looked at Amazon Smile and said, what a great program. Too bad it's only on one store with half a percent, and you had to remember to go to smile.amazon. Right. How can I do this on 10,000 stores at commissions that are usually like 1 to 10%? Not make you have to remember to go to givefreely.com and then go to the store. You just have to remember to go to GiveFreely once in your life, and then we're in the browser and we're always looking around, looking out for you, saving you money. And then if you're on one of these 10,000, it's probably up to 12,000 now stores, we're just kind of automatically going to be generating this donation. And it's a lot more than half a percent on average. So if we can get the reach we're looking for, that could generate billions of dollars. And as they say, that's real money.

Now give me an idea. What's your average day like?

Ooh, I wake up in the morning, I try to do a little Exercise on the elliptical, get the heart racing, wake me up. I do my New York Times spelling bee or whatever else will keep me occupied to keep my mind off of the pain of exercising. And I'm kind of at my desk almost always by 9:00. My desk is my home office. We have a remote-first culture. We have an engineering team in Argentina. We have some folks in New York and several in Boston. And so I'm using Slack or Zoom or Google Meet or whatever to be face-to-face several times a day. I'm reaching out to nonprofits or real Not— didn't mean nonprofits aren't real companies, but normal corporations looking for folks that will help give freely, distribute our products. So if, if one of your listeners is working at a corporation that sells widgets, I've got a great value proposition for you. How about if we want to thank everyone who buys a widget on your site? With a free $10 gift from your company to whatever charity the user wants. So put yourself in the user's position. You just bought a widget, and the company I bought it from says, hey, here's $10 to, uh, as a thank you to you in order, uh, to give not in your pocket. it to any charity you want. Some percentage of the audience is going to be saying, oh, that was very— well, 100%, I hope, will say, oh, that was very nice. And some percentage will say, okay, I'll click the claim the $10 donation button. And then what happens is, hey, in order to— we've partnered with GiveFreely so that you can pick from over a million different charities. Install GiveFreely, pick the charity you want. And by the way, if you keep GiveFreely installed, you'll continually generate more donations for, for that charity at no cost to you. And we'd even save you some money with coupons. So a good value proposition for a company, which is why I'm spending some time talking with them. Great value proposition for the consumer. They They just got a free gift card to give $10 to any charity they want. And if I can get a couple of thousand stores that do a lot of transactions to do that, what a fantastic selfishly distribution channel for getting GiveFreely installed in on a lot of different computers.

Yeah. So you're spending most of the day talking to folks like that.

I, right. So I almost forgot your question. How does a day look like? There's a little exercise. There's the team meetings. I work on changes that we're making to the product. I work on reaching out to a variety of, you know, the nonprofits, the for-profits, looking for different ways to help Educate on distribution. I work on the PR side of things to spread the word. I'm personally not terribly active on social media. People tell me I need to get more active. Again, it's just spreading the word. And when— and I do have some experience with this— when you're doing a startup in the early stage, you just reserve some time of every day to like think of Hey, what new thing can I try? Probably not going to work, but I got to try a bunch of new things in order to find some, some, some gems in there. And yeah, and again, it's in a sense, it's depressing because more things don't work than do. But in, if you're a startup person like me, It's exhilarating to be like, all right, 2 new ideas. Can't wait to see if these work. Oh, bummer. Neither worked. Okay, come up with 2 more. And so we're having success with some and it's not working with others as expected. That's the life of a startup.

There you go. So how many hours a day are you saying you work? Because it sounds like you're working 26 hours out of 24.

I'm at the stage where I have a pretty good work-life balance. I'd say on average I'm doing 50 hours a week. That's about what I was doing at TripAdvisor. There are weeks I work harder, but I'm not working most of the weekend and I'm always at the dinner table. Unless I'm traveling, unless there's something else going on. And so I've, I, in my younger days, I was working regularly 60 hours, but I like to think some of my experience and wisdom make up for the shortened work week. Absolutely passionate about it. Everyone I, everywhere I'm going, I'm talking to more people. Soliciting ideas. Hey, have you tried it? What do you think? What should we do? Do you have new— like, it's almost true that there's not a single idea embodied within GiveFreely today, the product or any of the distribution strategies that hasn't been done before. And I didn't learn about by asking someone. So, So you just have to be very flexible. And that's what we are as a startup.

Now, how important from your perspective is it for a CEO to listen?

I can't think of a successful one that doesn't listen. So yeah, of course, super important. You know, listening to everyone equally, not a good idea. Listening to the folks who are looking to buy or use your product or service. Yeah, that's way more important than listening to, you know, consultants. You know, friends are lovely to talk to because you can have very casual conversations, but they will— accidentally lie to you frequently. Oh, right. That's a great idea. Well, they don't want to hurt your feelings and they think, oh, I would never do that. So like, you have to go beyond your personal circle to find people that either don't know you, so they're going to tell you what they really think, or like, Can, that you have a relationship with that they can tell you, hey Steve, well, I understand the idea, but I think it sucks. You need to come up with a better one. Like, oh, thank you. And genuinely, that's a thank you. Because if I can decide not to build something or embark on some program, that's the fastest way to get a project done. And we've all lived through the Initiatives that took a bunch of time and didn't work, and you don't get that time back in life. So anyone that can dissuade me from doing something is a true friend.

Okay, we're at time, so we need to wrap up. I've got 2 more questions for you. So the first one being, what in your experience thus far with philanthropy, what has surprised you?

I, with GiveFreely in particular, it surprised me how hard it is for organizations that have a lot of supporters to reach and get engagement from that base. And in a sense, well, geez, it should have been obvious to me because Hey, TripAdvisor had a lot of members, but only a small portion were highly engaged members. But I just kind of thought, or was ignorant enough about the philanthropic space to know that, hey, a million donors, a small number are even going to open an email, let alone interact with the part. And those numbers tend to be worse on the philanthropy side in my limited experience. than on the corporate side. And I thought it was pretty bad on the corporate side too. So.

Okay. Interesting. My final question, and I want to thank you for entertaining my questions because people should know this isn't rehearsed and I'm not working from any set questions. So I'm just doing my best to listen to you. And I thank you for what you've shared with us. Final question. What's the best part about being Steve Koffer?

Oh, at this stage in my life, blessed with a wonderful wife, beautiful family, thriving children, we're all healthy. I mean, there's on the personal side a lot I have to be grateful for. To be able to professionally, to have had TripAdvisor as the success means that I can do this passion project, give freely. I can do it without any outside financial investment. I can invest without concern about making a profit, and I can do that without concern about feeding my family or paying tuitions or the rest of expenses because TripAdvisor was successful enough. So the ability to Be able to have the type of, hopefully be able to have another impactful professional chapter without the normal risks associated with a startup. My God, that's, that's, you know, my favorite professional blessing. I'm learning something new. It's exciting. It can be really impactful. I know what the odds are of success.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm trying to maximize all of my chances there. I, because I know if GiveFreely can reach its kind of critical mass, it can be incredibly meaningful in so many ways. That's what drives me. And, you know, compared to sitting on the beach or doing a bunch of hikes, like, I still enjoy the beach and I still go on hikes. But, but the day-to-day I love being like really engaged in, in the challenge. And this is a challenge. The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org.