Special Episode: Giving Back in Today's World

Julián Duque, is a Lead Developer Advocate at Heroku. He's interviewing Matt Pfaltzgraf, the CEO at Softgiving, and Brian Wetzel, its CTO. Softgiving is fundraising platform that allows influencers—whether on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, or other live streams—to create custom campaigns to raise funds for causes they care about. This is done through custom overlays, as well as rewards and gamification. They're also very hands-on with the content creators they work with, dealing with everything from the design to fundraising goals to determining the incentives for donators.

Providing this level of customer service has been both their distinguishing factor as well as the most challenging part of their work. As demand for their platform has grown, it's required them to scale up their processes massively. They've been able to do this by keeping the processes lean, allowing them to iterate rapidly. Their close collaboration with streamers and charities has enabled them to be experts in both what people need and which groups need the most help. Similarly, their tech stack and app are kept very lean. Anything not essential to the Softgiving platform is handed over to another service, such as payment processing.

Links from this episode

• Softgiving is a platform for influencers to fundraise for their favorite causes
• The Givinga Foundation provides the data on charities for Softgiving