Cor Hoekstra, CEO of Amicus Relief Solutions, and his team are streamlining the end-to-end charity donation process – from researching organizations to writing grants to then generating an aligned impact report – by creating a software-as-a-service (SaaS) based giving platform. Amicus will change the game for donors and non-profits.
The goal of Amicus – which is Latin for ‘friend’ – is to leverage technology to simplify the entire charitable donation process for donors, non-profits, and even banks. Specifically, Cor Hoekstra and the Amicus team are focused on streamlining the donations from donor-advised funds (DAFs) to non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Hoekstra, knows there are significant challenges to improving this landscape. He mentions, “The non-profit sector has been deeply underserved by technology firms because it’s not the easiest market segment to penetrate.” NGOs do not typically have access to state of the art technology due to restrained budgets or the lack of internet in remote locations.
David Goodman who recently joined Amicus’s team experienced this firsthand – he spent the past decade as a CIO at large NGOs. “We [didn’t] have access to state of the art technology – no one is serving the market. And those that are – are not using state of the art stuff.”
Hoekstra also notes – “The DAF industry is at an inflection point.” There are billions of dollars in these accounts that people have technically already given away for charitable purposes but a large portion of those funds remain inactive. A bank’s grant writing process is very manual and high-touch. “While people get benefited [by] the tax savings, they are now actually saying ‘we want to put these charitable dollars to work.’”
“[There’s] a changing mindset of the donor and millennials. Millennials no longer give like their parents or grandparents did.” They insist on transparency and want to see the direct impacts of their donations.
Hoekstra, as well as the founders, come from decades of experience in the enterprise software space. “So we are thinking – as the software guys – let’s create a Kayak-like giving experience for people who have these giving accounts.” But at the same time, they want to provide the non-profit with the functionality to report back the impact of that specific donation to the account owner.
So their focus is on three areas – transparency, accountability, and impact.
“Amicus is unique since it’s an end-to-end platform – [we] white-label the Amicus technology for banking institutions to help them better serve their existing customer in the context of the DAF, move that portfolio downstream, and simplify the process. In doing so, we unlock unprecedented philanthropic wealth and make that available to the non-profit organizations. As part of this same platform, we now equip the non-profits [with the ability] to report back to that donor and make available to them the tools that allow them to execute these projects better.”
Outside of the technological hurdles associated with the non-profit sector, it’s also challenging to measure the impacts of a donation in a spreadsheet when not all of the improvements are quantifiable. With this, it Amicus’s plan to, “… create the digital donor experience that is connected by way of inspired storytelling based on the results from [the donated] dollars.” So after a grant is issued to the selected charity from a DAF, the non-profit can send video stories detailing, first-hand how the funds positively made an impact.
As a member of this most recent QCFintech class, Hoekstra sees benefits in growing Amicus’s headquarters in Charlotte. “The business community has truly come alongside [us] by way of the mentors and coaches”. Also, “Charlotte is the third largest financial hub and is a service oriented city [which] lends itself perfectly for a company like [Amicus].”
Outside of Charlotte, Amicus has a global presence with team members in Tel Aviv, San Francisco, New York, and the co-founders in Vancouver.
They are currently raising a Series A for product commercialization as they already have the technology built out, and plan to start field testing late-summer. You can check out their website – https://amicusreliefsolutions.com.
