Robert Tolmach talks to us about how Changing the Present hopes to give non-profits a chunk of the $250 billion US gift market, and why giving charitable gifts on Facebook is much more rewarding than throwing sheep.

 Jed Sundwall: Can you tell me about how Changing The Present got started?

Robert Tolmach: Changing the Present is a new kind of non-profit website for people who want to make a difference, and it makes giving more rewarding by letting you choose exactly what you want to accomplish. So, instead of just writing a check to a non-profit, which is perfectly fine, you get that emergent satisfaction, for instance, that you can preserve an acre of the Rain Forest, you can fund an hour of cancer research, you can provide a child her first books so she learns how to read.

For $60.00, you can restore a blind person's eyesight with cataract surgery. There are thousands of these donation opportunities, donation gifts from hundreds of leading non-profits, addressing a full range of causes. We hope that this makes giving more rewarding and will give people more awareness of the problems that exist in the world and their opportunity to do something real about them. We hope it encourages people to give more. But also, one of the key elements of the site is that we encourage people to give these donation gifts in a friend's name, instead of buying a traditional present.

At the same time, none of the non-profits have enough money, and we're all passionate about our favorite cause. We're spending 250 billion dollars a year in this country alone, buying presents for each other. We've all given and received some great presents, but we've also all given and received some not so necessary ones. A lot of people just don't want any more stuff, so, you don't have to buy stuff to show your love. Another way to show your love is do something meaningful in a friend's name.

By offering these very tangible donation opportunities, we think it's more rewarding and meaningful for both the gift giver and the recipient. We have Wish Lists and registries so people can let their friends know what it is they really much care about, and it insures just the perfect gift. We also have personalized printed greeting cards so you can write or choose a caption and write your message inside. The card we mail out for you includes a photograph, a description of the gift you gave, so it's very real to the recipient exactly what you've done. And people are using this for wedding registries.

One couple recently created a wedding registry about a week ago. 141 donations had been made in their name. And they thought that was a more meaningful way to celebrate their love and their lives coming together than more gravy boats, blenders and whatever. It's wonderful. Together, they and their friends made a big difference in the world. We're never going to put Bloomingdale's out of business, don't quote me on that, but the 250 billion dollars a year in gift money would be a lot of new money for non-profits.

My wife and I had the same impulse. There's only so much we wanted to register for, so we did have a lot of guests donate for us. What's really nice is knowing we can do this for all sorts of events, for all sorts of different causes, and that you're formalizing it.

You can stand on the street corner and admonish people to do it, but unless you make it easy and rewarding, convenient and tangible, giving them a way to express and share it with their friends, it's hard to compete with so many different companies and retailers who work very hard to do just that.

How many non-profits do you have on board now?

I think there are about 300 or so, though you can give to any of half a million non-profits. We have a database of all the public charities that file a tax return, and there are about a half million of them. You can give to any of them. You add any of them to Wish Lists, you can add any of them to registries, create a fund-raising drive and raise money for any of them. If you give a donation in someone's name, you can send them a greeting card about it. But, the number that currently have tangible donation gifts on the site with pictures is currently about 300 and growing.

Any non-profit that's a public charity can come to the site and click the tab that says, "For non-profits," sign up and avail themselves of all these tools. The cost to the non-profit is $100.00 a year, really cheap. The only cost beyond that is the transaction fee which is just a standard credit card fee, it's three percent or 30 cents just to cover our out of pocket expense of processing it. If they took the donation on their own website, they would pay the same and if they took it through a lot of other donation portals, they would pay more.

One of the things I want to make very clear in this interview is that I want non-profits to know that they're all welcome to come to the site and use all the tools to capture some of this gift money&and use the banner, widgets, everything else, encouraging members to help raise money for the organization. It's very much the social media approach, right? And start spreading the word, promoting this idea of the donation gift, the charitable gift, instead of buying more stuff. We provide those tools to make it easy.

Changing the Present is a non-profit?

Changingthepresent.org is the website of a 501-C3 non-profit. So, when you're donating, you're donating to it with the instructions to pass your money through to Unicef, for instance. You're further instructing them to use it as you specified for the blankets, not books, for the kids. When they sign up on the site and list their donation gifts, they agree in advance that they will use the money for that purpose, so you give with total confidence. You know exactly where the money's going, exactly what's being done with it and exactly what it will accomplish.

Can you tell me about how you've marketed the site so far?

Yeah, it's a number of things. Some of it is we're running banner ads that have been donated from a whole bunch of different websites. Some of it is non-profits that are sending members to us because this is probably the best opportunity for them to capture some of their share of that 250 billion dollars in gift money. Statistically, their members spend more money buying presents than they donate to non-profits each year. Americans spend 250 billion dollars a year on presents, and individuals donated 232 billion, so pretty close.

Some of the non-profits recognize that there's an opportunity to capture their share of that money by making sure that their members and supporters know about this opportunity. The smart ones tell the non-profit, their supporters, "Go to the site, create a Wish List, create a registry, and let your friends know that you would welcome a donation to our organization in lieu of more stuff. And when you're giving gifts, keep us in mind."

So, that's another way that we give some exposure. There's been a good amount of press. We get a wonderful response. The New York Times referred to us as "the Amazon.com of non-profits." Oprah Magazine, Kiplinger.com, Motley Fool, Parenting.com, Huffington Post, repeatedly, it goes on and on. We've been getting this wonderful, warm, loving response from a bunch of publications. We get a little bit of television, a lot of blogs, and that's really heartening.

You just said a magic word, "blogs." How else are you using social media to your advantage?

There's a social element to Changing The Present, in that you can create your own profile page, which includes information about you, your thoughts on making the world a better place, your favorite causes, your favorite non-profits, your favorite gift items. If you create a fund-raising drive, you can say what it is, why you care about this and why you're raising this money for them. You can display the banners and the widgets, etc., for these different things, and so, there's a very social end of all that.

We have a small presence on Facebook (Changing the Present's Facebook App). We haven't had the time yet to do anything on MySpace or the other social networks, but a lot of bloggers are picking up the story. We'll see someone's blog and we go, "Oh, this is really cool, they like it," and we send them a little note. Sometimes, we just get the notice from Google that something else popped up on the radar. We find these wonderful, loving, glowing, warm, fuzzy stories that are like, wow, who is this person? I like it. And they pick up the pictures from the site and some of the text and they show all of their favorite gifts, and it's like wow, this is wonderful!

It really strikes an emotional chord with a lot of people, and part of the process is just getting everyone to know about it. We don't have 45 million dollars for marketing the way Apple did when they lost iPod. It's a lot of money for a launch, isn't it?

It's interesting you mention Apple in this context because I was speaking with Alexandra Samuel for NetSquared, and she made the point that brands want to connect on an emotional level with people, and there are so few that can do it. Apple's one of them that can, but it's thanks to a very large advertising and marketing budget. That stuff doesn't just come out of a vacuum.

But, what she's realizing is that if brands really want to connect with people, they need to partner with non-profits and NGO's because the non-profits and NGO's are the people that are doing the work that people really care and get excited about. And just perusing Changingthepresent.org, instantly, you see a dozen things you really care about that strike chords.

I hope so, and even more.

How did you get the idea, how did you get into it?

I used to be an architect and real estate developer. Actually, if you want sort of a longer story, I'll chat with you about it, but the longer one is if you go to the web, to the blog, there's an advertising guy named Scott Goodson. If you do a Google search, Scott Goodson and toad, plus blog, he's the founder of a great agency worth mentioning, called Strawberry Frog, a really hot, creative agency. And they recently took on Changingthepresent pro bono. He did an interview with me, which you can read on his blog, and he gives sort of the longer version of this story.

But, the short version of it now is, for myself, it was a combination of a long-term personal intent, you have to do something meaningful in life. I discovered when I was in my teens I wasn't going to be a doctor as my father is because I don't like blood and guts. I'm not patient enough to be a teacher, nor noble enough to be a social worker. And what do you do?

I was really moved by my hero, Bill Drayton, and the whole concept of social entrepreneurship, of going to find a problem and fix it, build or change a system. I used to be an architect, and what architects do is they design systems, right? Build a new system of how to do all these different activities and pieces come together and how do you fit into the larger system of your fabric? And what real estate developers do is they martial resources to make things happen. Those are the two things that I do now, but in this realm.

In particular, Changing the Present came about in conversations with a friend, named Steve Spiegel, a lawyer who used to be at Skadden Arps, who's now the Chairman of Important Gifts, a non-profit that owns Changing the Present. One of the things we talked about was "Gee, none of these non-profits have enough money and what do you get as presents?" There are a few non-profits that make giving meaningful by making it tangible and then, starting to tap a little bit of that 250 billion of gift money. But, what you really need to make that happen or to facilitate it and to promote it as a service more is you need a system with all these different elements that I alluded to earlier.

And so, we started putting the pieces together and we got wonderful people on the Board of Advisors; it's an amazing group. It's Bill Drayton from Ashoka, Alex Counts from Grameen, Susan Davis from all sorts of things, the head of Sesame Workshop, Sierra Club and the Rain Forest Alliance. It's an amazing group, about 125 very prominent leaders from the non-profit world. We worked with them to hone the idea and figure out what are our prominent causes, what are the issues we want to address within each, and which non-profits do we want to invite?

We've similarly had a lot of great input from people in the business world and the web world, people like Esther Dyson, the Internet luminary. And like any creative venture, it gets its changes as you work on the design and progresses. There are still a lot of things we're planning on adding and modifying. What you see now is just where we are at this step of the process. It's not by any means, the end.

Well, that's really inspiring, to come from architecture into web development.

One of the nice things about the web is compared to buildings, it's much faster, much less expensive, and you can change it and move a column. You can keep adding on. You don't have to worry about there not being any more land.

Right, it's much less resource-intensive!

If you figure out a way to use this wonderful technology and social medium, it's also a really powerful medium for social change.

That's really what NetSquared is all about, figuring out how to make that happen. What have been the more popular charities that you've seen so far? What's getting the greatest response?

I've never looked to see which non-profit gets the most money or which gift item gets the most. If we had more resources, we'd spend time analyzing it more I'm sure than a retailer would. But right now, we're so busy doing everything else that it is what it is. The real point isn't what's the most popular; the real point is when you come to the site, you will find something you really find meaningful. When your next-door neighbor and your sister and your father come, so will they because whether they care about animal welfare or human rights, Veterans, cancer or AIDS, you name it, it's here, with really compelling stories and pictures. The stories are of the problem, putting in context why you might care about this.

Here's the opportunity, here's what the gift does: A problem in one case, many girls in Africa don't get to attend school because they simply don't have shoes. The roads are really hot and uncomfortable. They say you get hookworm from walking barefoot. In a lot of schools, you're ostracized and not even allowed to attend if you don't have shoes. There are girls who simply don't have shoes and can't attend school because of that. That's the problem that's defined on the site. The gift says for $14.00, you can provide a girl a pair of shoes, so she can attend school, get an education, and totally change her life for 14 bucks! OK, I'll take two. For $14.00 a pair, I'd take two pair.

What strikes me about this is we talk about social networking via the Internet. You and I are friends on Facebook now, and that's great. But, really what you're doing in that instance, and also in the instance of curing eyesight like through cataract surgery is that it's the same kind of social networking. It's connecting the gift giver or gift receiver, however you want to look at it, with this person who isn't on the Internet. You're not directly interfacing with them via the Internet, but you are affecting their life? It is social networking.

Well, you're certainly connecting through the other people. You go to someone's Wish List. It's interesting, even some of the people where you're not going to the site, but where you're talking to them. We had some conversations with couples, who created their registry together. There's one couple, we were together with them on ABC TV. He's really interested in education, and used to work for Teacher America. She's really interested in the arts. They'd gotten to the point where they knew each other well enough to get married, but they never really talked about their social concerns and passions. It's like a lot of us never talk about those things with people we know.

In the process of creating the registry, they really started exploring and said it really was a wonderful thing. They learned a lot more about each other, and it really brought them together. And when I come and I see your profile page on Changing the Present and I see that you're really interested in whatever and why this is meaningful to you, why you think it's important and effective, I'm going to learn a lot more about you, which is, I think, more appealing than what is they throw, sheep? One of the apps is about throwing sheep.

One of the things we hope is that this helps contribute toward a sort of discourse about the most important issues facing humanity and crises, in many cases, and about the things that people are most passionate about. You've got to be really passionate to give away, collectively, 232 billion dollars of your own money. And we all have a few friends for whom this is a big topic of conversation, but for people outside of the sector, it's not. Maybe we ought to talk a little more about what we're going to do about malaria or AIDS or this or that and why this deserves attention in our energy and our resources.

I don't know if my wife and I are bellwethers, but we just had this conversation two weeks ago. I just had my birthday; she just had her birthday, and we were both realizing we don't want any more stuff.

Or the stuff you want is too expensive for your friends to get you.

Right, there's that, too. But really, we just don't have space! We don't want to clutter our house with stuff. The appeal of owning a lot of things is gone. And like I said, I don't know, I don't think I'm a bellwether, but I think your timing's right. That's the feeling I got. You mentioned earlier something about you had a hero that inspired you?

Yes, one of my heroes is Bill Drayton, of Ashoka. And he has done more than anyone both to support social entrepreneurs individually, and to promote the concept of social entrepreneurism as a norm. He recognizes his purpose is just as in the business world, real change doesn't come from the giant companies, and it certainly doesn't come from the government. It comes from entrepreneurs, from Bill Gates and Michael Dell. I named two tech names, but it's certainly not all in the tech world, people who have a vision of how they want to change things.

It isn't just opening a business. It isn't like opening a pizza shop, but people who have a vision for how to change society or how to change whole systems, and then, they have the drive, passion, dedication and perseverance to go do it. So, what they look for is social entrepreneurs, which is people who have those same characteristics that desire to change the whole system, with the intent being not to make a billion dollars, but rather, to alleviate suffering, promote human welfare, protect the environment, whatever. And they have this phenomenal track record, where they've done a great job screening and identifying social entrepreneurs, whose programs have scaled tremendously.