The CEO and COO difference at a social impact company: Dale Pfeifer of Goodworld

The CEO and COO difference is easiest to see in a founding pair who have worked together from the beginning. Dale Pfeifer describes hers in terms of natural strengths rather than org design, and then explains the one thing they deliberately do together.

Pfeifer is CEO and co-founder of Goodworld, the social impact platform used by thousands of organizations to run corporate social responsibility programs, including Mastercard, Citi, the American Cancer Society, YMCA, Lyft and Global Citizen. Goodworld powered the online giving site for Vax Live, a concert that raised over $300 million toward vaccine equity, and Fast Company has recognized the company on its annual list.

From a New York nonprofit to a bridge

Pfeifer is from New Zealand and arrived in the US around fifteen years before this conversation, going to work for a nonprofit.

The idea came from noticing a gap she was living on both sides of. The nonprofit she worked for raised money one way. Her philanthropic friends in New York organized around causes and gave in a completely different way. Her insight was that technology could bridge the two.

Goodworld was first to market with hashtag donations, letting someone give by using a hashtag, and an early mover in rounding up card transactions to donate spare change. Today it runs a full fundraising platform for nonprofits, largely given away free, alongside a suite of tools aimed at unlocking social impact inside corporations.

Her framing of the next phase is an ecosystem play: bringing all the parties on the platform together so the impact compounds rather than sitting in silos.

She credits part of the product breadth to an acquisition. Goodworld bought Cheerful Giving about two years earlier and merged the technology stacks, which she says accelerated their platform well beyond what a company of their age would normally have built.

Why corporate giving stopped being decoration

Pfeifer's account of how corporate social responsibility changed is the clearest summary of that shift I have heard from an operator.

The old model was simple and limited. Large corporations that could afford a CSR team made donations to nonprofits on the company's behalf.

Two things moved it. The Business Roundtable stated that the purpose of a corporation is not only to make money but to serve all stakeholders. And Larry Fink's letters to CEOs from BlackRock made the case at the top of the market.

But the reason Pfeifer thinks it stuck is commercial, and she says it plainly. Companies with genuine social impact programs, particularly ones employees participate in, are not seeing the same retention problems as their peers. It engages employees, and it grows customer loyalty, with the supporting statistic that 90% of millennials will choose a product with social impact attached over one without.

The newer trend is scope. This is no longer only large corporations. Small and mid-sized companies now need a credible environmental, social and governance plan without the resources to hire a team for it, which is exactly the gap Goodworld targets by pushing the work into software.

Her example of how far the leading edge has moved is Mastercard, where executive compensation is now tied to social impact goals, and where she says it is a normal hallway topic.

Putting employees in the driver's seat

The structural change Pfeifer finds most interesting is who decides.

The traditional model has a CSR department, steered by senior leadership, allocating a budget across nonprofits. What is emerging instead is companies giving through their employees, handing them philanthropic gift cards to direct to charities they care about, alongside matching programs.

Her argument for why this works goes beyond generosity. If someone can see that their employer cares about their whole person, the things they care about in the world as well as in the job, they feel meaningfully more committed. In a hybrid or distributed environment, that matters more, not less.

What the pandemic changed

Pfeifer is unequivocal that the pandemic accelerated all of this, and specific about the mechanisms.

There was the initial period when nobody knew what would happen, followed by the realization that many large companies came through it well. Against a backdrop of widening inequality, that produced a real sense of obligation to give back.

The visible effects were a sharp rise in giving to hunger charities and organizations addressing pandemic need, and something less obvious: large companies examining their own supply chains and supporting smaller businesses within them that were struggling.

The murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement redirected significant CSR budget toward racial and social justice organizations.

Her caution about all of it is about credibility. Companies now have to walk their talk. Posting a black square is not sufficient and can rebound, in her view rightly. Living the values visibly, through giving, volunteering programs and volunteer time off, is what makes the position real.

Two founders, split by strength

Pfeifer's COO is John, her co-founder, and she is refreshingly concrete about how they divide.

Their starting condition is that they are a late-stage startup that is still a startup, so everyone wears several hats. Her aside is that sleep is not their friend.

John came from the military, and she says he runs the company with a good deal of that precision, which suits them. He has a structured mind and owns finance, organization and metrics. Pfeifer's strengths are creative, communications and marketing, and she takes the message.

The exception, and the interesting part, is what they insist on doing together: fundraising. She describes a one-two effect between them that works better than either alone.

Fundraising, candidly

Pfeifer addresses two separate difficulties, and does not soften either.

The first is raising as a woman. Her assessment is that she is not sure she could have raised capital without being part of a team. She is careful to note that John is not simply a man in the room, but someone with graduate mathematics who taught finance and economics at West Point, and who is genuinely fast. Her read is that many investors want to back female-led companies and cannot quite get there, and that having him present made it easier.

The second is raising for social impact, and here she offers the single most actionable piece of advice in the episode.

Do not lead with the impact.

Her reasoning is structural rather than cynical. Historically, investors mentally shortcut social impact to lower returns, though she notes a subset of these companies deliver market-level returns and that this is now better understood. But the deeper issue is documentation. The intent of most funds is set in their limited partner agreements and founding documents, and unless the fund is explicitly an impact fund, that intent is to make money. Raising impact as the headline puts a general partner in an awkward position relative to their own mandate.

So the pitch leads with why this is an excellent financial deal, and lets the impact sit implicitly behind it. Her phrase for the effect you want is the deal they will talk about at dinner parties, a good investment that also feels good.

She is candid that she would have made the opposite mistake without her co-founder.

Strategic investors work differently

Mastercard led Goodworld's second round, and Pfeifer's explanation of why a corporate investor behaves differently is useful for any founder considering that route.

A values-driven strategic invests for several reasons at once. They know they need more happening in social impact. They see the technology as potentially valuable to them. They want to work with the team to develop it and use it somewhere in their own infrastructure. The evaluation criteria are simply different from a financial fund's.

The cost is time. Pfeifer describes showing up at Mastercard roughly monthly for two years before the investment happened, and lists what it takes: building trust, some luck about who is in which role, access to the top of the organization, and people there willing to advocate for you internally.

Multiplying generosity

Goodworld's bet is that the social impact sector is badly fragmented and that an ecosystem can bring it together. Thousands of nonprofits are on the platform, businesses are being added, and the next phase is connecting the parties so impact multiplies.

They already have evidence. Pfeifer cites an algorithm using nudges and incentives that increases individual giving by roughly 50%.

The mechanism she is most excited about is deceptively simple. Charitable gift cards work as a reverse match: instead of a company matching what an employee gives, the company or charity gives first, and the recipient is then nudged to add to it. Inverting the order turns out to be a substantial multiplier of generosity, which is why they are investing further in it.

What they got right, and how to test an idea

Asked what worked, Pfeifer names the mission first, as a north star that carried the company from nonprofit tools through to corporate platforms and now an ecosystem.

Second, the founding team. She has two co-founders plus a CTO, four people forming the senior leadership with what she describes as a strong and candid relationship.

The quality she singles out for anyone hiring is optimism, on the grounds that the entrepreneurial path is never a straight line upward and you need people who can absorb the hits.

Third, treating social impact as a badly undervalued market opportunity before that was a popular position. She adds, without elaborating, that the list of things they got wrong would be as long as your arm.

Her advice to entrepreneurs is lean startup, and her reason for it is unusually honest. Across many product iterations at Goodworld, what she consistently found is that she understood part of the idea, but not the nuance, not the full context, and not even the problem completely. So run cheap experiments to validate assumptions, including the ones you have not yet noticed you are making, before building anything.

Pitching the President

Pfeifer's own remarkable moment came through 1776, an incubator conveniently located near the White House.

She arrived at work one day to security everywhere, dogs, and a bag scan, because President Obama was coming. She pitched him Goodworld. He first asked what she was doing in the US, having recently visited New Zealand, and then engaged with the idea sharply enough that she remembers the response: this is a big idea for philanthropy.

The second surprise came the following day, when the photograph of her pitching appeared on the front page of the New York Times above the fold, because it was the Fourth of July and the paper was covering a jobs report.

It landed right at the company's launch, producing press attention and a flood of customers they were not ready for and adapted quickly to serve.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. Split by strength, but decide what you do together. The most useful part of the founder partnership is not the division, it is the exception. Pfeifer and her co-founder identified fundraising as something that works better with both of them in the room and protected it, rather than assigning it to whoever owns finance.

2. Do not lead a general partner with your mission. This is counterintuitive and structurally correct. Most funds have a mandate that says make money, written down. Leading with impact asks a partner to argue against their own documents. Lead with the return and let the impact be the reason they enjoy telling people about the deal.

3. Corporate giving became a retention lever, which is why it stuck. Ethics alone did not move most boards. Engagement and retention did, along with customer preference data. Anyone trying to get a CSR program funded should make that argument rather than the moral one.

4. Reverse the match. Instead of matching what employees give, give first and let people direct it, then invite them to add. A 50% lift from restructuring the order of the same transaction is the kind of design change most programs never consider.

5. Strategic investors buy for reasons a fund cannot. Mastercard invested because it wanted the capability, not only the return. The trade is time. Two years of monthly meetings, building trust and finding internal advocates, is what that access costs.

FAQ

What is the CEO and COO difference in a founding team? At Goodworld it follows natural strengths rather than a template. The COO owns finance, structure and metrics, bringing precision from a military background. The CEO owns communications, messaging and marketing. What they deliberately share is fundraising, because they are more effective in that setting together than apart.

How should a social impact company pitch venture investors? Lead with the financial case. Pfeifer's explanation is that most funds have mandates set in their limited partner agreements to generate returns, so foregrounding mission puts the partner in conflict with their own documents. The impact should sit implicitly behind a strong commercial pitch.

Why did corporate social responsibility accelerate? Signals from the Business Roundtable and BlackRock legitimized it at the top, and the pandemic and the events of 2020 gave it urgency. What sustained it was commercial evidence: companies with credible programs report better employee retention, and a large majority of younger consumers prefer products with social impact attached.

How do smaller companies run CSR without a dedicated team? By pushing the work into software. Pfeifer's target market is companies that need a credible ESG position but cannot justify hiring a social impact team, so the platform handles allocation, matching, gift cards and reporting that would otherwise require headcount.

What should a founder look for when hiring early team members? Optimism, in Pfeifer's answer, because the path is never a straight line and you need people who can absorb setbacks. She also credits a small, candid senior team with strong relationships as one of the things Goodworld got right from the beginning.

Also mentioned

• Goodworld, hashtag donations, round-up giving and its charitable gift cards
• Vax Live, the concert whose giving site Goodworld powered
• The Business Roundtable statement on the purpose of a corporation
• Larry Fink's annual letters to CEOs from BlackRock
• Mastercard as both customer and lead investor, with executive compensation tied to social impact goals
• 1776, the Washington DC incubator where Pfeifer pitched President Obama
• The Lean Startup, the validation approach Pfeifer recommends to founders
• Dale Pfeifer on LinkedIn

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Dale Pfeifer on Between Two COO's

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