EA - Rebooting Tyve, an effective giving startup by Raoul

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rebooting Tyve, an effective giving startup, published by Raoul on April 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.In January this year, I took over running Tyve, a start-up that promotes workplace giving. Through Tyve, employees set up recurring monthly donations to charity. The donations are simple to administer. And they come straight from their pre-tax earnings. So they save the average employee hundreds of pounds a year.Ben Clifford (@Clifford), Ben Olsen and Sam Geals in 2019 founded Tyve in 2019. After strong initial growth, Tyve they put Tyve into ‘maintenance mode’ in late 2021. Ben Clifford talks about these initial years in Lessons learned from Tyve, an effective giving startup.In this post, I’m going to cover:why I got involved in Tyve;why I believe Tyve could raise large sums for effective charities;what we’re doing differently this time around; andhow you could help (if you were so inclined).TL;DRIf you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s a short summary.Only a fraction of adults in the UK who give to charity do it through the workplace (many more do in the US). Workplace giving seems a relatively undertapped channel.When Tyve launches at companies it gets high participation rates and is very sticky (high retention rates).Most donations are “new money” that would not otherwise have been donated to charity. This is especially true for the ~40% of donations that go to Tyve’s recommended (effective) charities.We’re making changes to make Tyve more attractive to companies to adopt. These include: making it free to use, adding impact reporting and testing donation matching for recommended (effective) charities.There are several (known) reasons why we may fail to get more companies using Tyve. These include charitable giving been seen as a ‘nice to have’ and there being a high hurdle for companies to do anything new.There’s an easy (and high EV) way you could help: introduce us to the company you work at!How I got involvedI’ve spent most of the last decade leading product and design teams at tech scale ups. Late last year, the most recent of these scale-ups went (the bad ‘boom’, not the good one, like at the end of a fist bump). I took it as a opportunity to look beyond the commercial tech world. I'd spent years with the next startup funding round as a key factor behind almost every decision. I was ready for something a bit different.I started to speak to some people in the EA community, talking through options, understanding where they saw the most potential impact.In parallel, I was wondering why smaller companies weren't offering ‘payroll giving’ to their employees. (This is the mechanism that enables employees to give to charity from pre-tax earnings.)At this point, I’d been giving a % of income to effective charities for several years. It felt meaningful and important. But it also required a fair bit of admin. I had a spreadsheet for tracking what I'd earned and logging donations (across multiple charities). And then trying to work out what this meant from a tax perspective (after accounting for GiftAid).I’d had access to payroll giving a decade ago when I’d worked at a massive company and it had made giving so simple. No need to track earnings and donations—and the tax benefits were automatic.With modern tech we must be able to make this available to all companies, even those without huge HR teams?Meeting Ben Clifford was serendipitous. Ben had already founded Tyve. Working with Ben O and Sam, he'd built pretty much the exact the product that I’d started sketching out in my mind (and in my terrible handwritten notes).I sat down with Ben in a bakery in what looked like an abandoned parking lot (his idea). After about 15 minutes, he asked me if I wanted to take over Tyve. Even better, him and Ben O were able to continue to he...