With all you have going on, making giving back a habit can be a struggle.
We felt that same struggle. We wanted to make it much easier to give back on a regular basis—and to know exactly what kind of impact that giving was making! So, we built Percent Pledge, a platform that lets you support the causes you care about while leaving the rest to us.
How does it work?
Portfolios of Charities
Percent Pledge enables you to seamlessly give a percentage of each month’s pay to the causes that you care about most. To accomplish this, we’ve researched and partnered with accomplished charities that do effective work. Then, we’ve grouped them into Cause Portfolios based on their missions—like charity mutual-funds—to make it easier for you to find rock solid charities that do work that you’re passionate about supporting.
Automated Giving
Once you’ve found your Cause Portfolio match or matches using our simple pairing process, pick what percentage of your monthly income—we call it a Percent Pledge—feels right for you to give. Don’t worry: our platform will help you through these decisions. Once you’ve settled on your Percent Pledge, we’ll automatically withdraw your donation each month and disburse it evenly across all the charities in your chosen Cause Portfolio(s).
Tailored Reports
Just because you’re not hitting send on your donation each month doesn’t mean that you’re out of the loop! We work with all of the charities in your Cause Portfolio(s) to keep you updated on your impact. The charities you support provide us content on the great work they're doing, and we bring you that feedback in a concise way that lets you see how your Percent Pledge is making a difference.
Simple Tax Season
One of the benefits of donating through Percent Pledge is that we also track your giving. Not only does this let you see how your giving stacks up over the year, providing you with a nice sense of accomplishment, it makes tax time easier, too. When it’s time to file your taxes, our platform will provide you with a report to help you take advantage of any deductions for which you may be eligible.
Our Story
One evening, late in 2016, I was walking from my consulting firm’s office to the train in Chicago’s Loop. It was the same walk I made every day and it always took exactly 10 minutes. The perfect length to check in with family and friends. That day I decided to check in with my Dad, and I'm forever grateful I did.
My Father, Marc, has worked in philanthropy for 20 years and philanthropy was the topic we landed on that day. I joked about how irregularly I was giving back at the time. We laughed at how that made me feel badly as an adult when it never used to as a kid. We reminisced about how I tried to resist when my parents made me give 10% of my Bar Mitzvah money to charity or when they gave 10% of our family money away each year to charity. "Mom, Dad, why would we do that when it could be better spent on new basketball shoes or the latest Abercrombie & Fitch cargo shorts you never buy me!"
As a young adult, the importance of giving back had become clearer to me and this conversation made me wonder if there was an easy way to give back some percentage of my income? Like my parents always did. After repeating that question again, this time out loud, my Dad said he didn’t know of anything like that and as a philanthropy expert for more than 20 years he would be a person to know.
This thought awakened something inside of me and from that thought, Percent Pledge would be born. I told Dad "love you, gotta go", rushed home to jot down as many things about this idea that I could think of, and then spent a year talking to everyone who would listen about this idea I thought was cool.
I eventually found four incredible people with the right combination of passion and expertise to help me bring Percent Pledge to life. I am eternally thankful to them, and to Dad.
I, we, hope you like Percent Pledge.
I, we, hope you tell us exactly how we can improve along the way.
I, we, hope you Make the Pledge!
Sincerely,
Joel Pollick, founder
Eric Zoberman, president
Colleen MacDonald, design
Pat Carolan, development
Aron Macarow, development
John Nguyen, development