Cryptocurrency’s growing acceptance in the realm of charitable giving is forging a partnership between donor-advised cryptocurrency platform Endaoment.org and crowdfunding platform GlobalGiving.
The partnership will enable donations of more than 1,000 forms of cryptocurrency as well as NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and other digital and blockchain-derived assets to be made to more than 7,000 nonprofits worldwide. It affords Endaoment donors a previously unavailable global reach while expanding GlobalGiving’s platform beyond the more than 80 national currencies in which it currently operates.
The partnership effectively triples the number of verified organizations available to Endaoment donors for cryptocurrency and NFT-derived donations.
“Endaoment started in 2020 as an internet-native U.S. community foundation, but the crypto community is inherently global so the chance to bring on board all these international nonprofits served by GlobalGiving is a huge leap forward in our ability to address the philanthropic needs of our donor base,” Robbie Heeger, founder/president and CEO of Endaoment, said to The NonProfit Times.
For GlobalGiving, the partnership represents a chance to unleash the generosity of cryptocurrency donors to its worldwide network of recipient nonprofits on a significantly upgraded scale. Since its founding in 2002, GlobalGiving has raised more than $826 million from 1.7 million donors for 34,000 projects in 175 countries but has only recently begun the foray into cryptocurrency. “We don’t yet have a partner that’s able to take donations in crypto, so it’s a great fit between our two organizations to fill in the different gaps between us,” GlobalGiving CEO Victoria Vrana told The NonProfit Times.
Endaoment was founded as a community foundation and donor-advised fund (DAF) manager with an eye toward catering to what Heeger described as a younger, more tech-savvy and internationally minded generation of philanthropists focused on reproductive rights, climate change and related issues. The platform uses software developed by sister organization Endaoment.Tech to immediately convert digital assets into currency that can then be granted to approved charities and nonprofits.
Endaoment has raised $52 million since its founding of which approximately $37 million has been donated to U.S.-based nonprofits with the $15 million balance remaining as assets under management. Grant recipients have included domestic organizations engaged in support for Ukraine, earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria, and other charitable work abroad. This partnership will allow Endaoment to further that support by enabling crypto donors to give directly to nonprofits beyond U.S. borders, said Heeger.
“A huge amount of developers and professionals in the cryptocurrency space live abroad or have communities and issues they care about abroad, so it’s a huge blessing for us to be able to connect with GlobalGiving and lean on their reputation of over 20 years of doing international grantmaking,” Heeger said.
The seeds of the Endaoment-GlobalGiving partnership were sown last October when staff members for both organizations met at the 2022 DAF Giving Summit in Miami. Work on formalizing the partnership began in earnest shortly after Vrana took over as GlobalGiving’s CEO in January. Before that, she spent 11 years as a program officer and deputy director with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Heeger, a software engineer, got his start with Apple where he worked for more than six years. “I knew I wanted to stay in the software and technology space, but I also had a deep and newly found interest in cryptocurrencies and digital assets and knew I wanted to do work with more of an impact. That’s what led into what has become Endaoment today,” he said.
Endaoment recently launched a suite of free developer tools for nonprofits looking to add crypto giving to their infrastructure. Its 2022 Impact Report can be found at www.endaoment.org/impact.
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