In The Beginning…There Were Lemons
Written by Alex Sejdinaj, Founder & CEO
“This can’t be your reality.”
Those were the first words I said after our friend Emily told us how much her organization paid for its overly complex fundraising event software.
The rest of the meeting consisted of us asking probing questions about what was required from fundraising software for auctions and events. It ended with me asking if Emily would use a platform our team would build from scratch so long as we finished it by their event, which was a couple of months away. She said yes, and GiveGrove was born, at least on a conceptual level.
As our team rushed to develop a platform called BidByte — the predecessor to what would become GiveGrove — we kept repeating a mantra, a north star for the ethos of what we were building: “It has to be easy.” It had to be easy to use for nonprofit professionals, easy for donors to make contributions, and easy for everyone to understand.
During a late-night session building the platform, our team member David said, “We’ve gotta make it easy-peasy lemon-squeezy!” The team ran with it, and not long after our logo became a lemon.
Much has changed over the years, but the logo, and the idea that brought it to life, remain.
GiveGrove has always been about making it easy. As soon as we waded into the nonprofit world, it became very apparent how overwhelmed our customers are. No one has time for complex and over engineered technology in the nonprofit space. They’re too busy focusing on mission, donors, grant writing, and the myriad of other tasks that fall under their purview (even if they don’t necessarily fall under their job description). We wanted GiveGrove to be one less thing for them to worry about. We wanted our platform to be effective and easy to use and we wanted our company to be easy to trust.
It was almost eight years ago that we sat down with Emily–eight years since we asked ourselves, “How can we make this easier?” Today, GiveGrove has helped raise millions of dollars for nonprofits across the United States.
Our logo is a lemon because we wanted our software to be easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. What better way to instantiate that idea into the minds and hearts of our team than to put it on company letterhead, email footers, stickers, and the navigation bar of the platform they work in every day?
When I think about that lemon, I think about a shift in reality — from overly complicated and overpriced software to something better: technology that’s easy to use, easy to trust, and designed to make a difference.
GiveGrove makes events and auctions for fundraising easy. Check us out at givegrove.com or email info@givegrove.com for more info. Click here to sign up for our mailing list.
