Dale Pfeifer, Goodworld CEO on Social Impact and CSR

Michael Koenig: Hello and welcome to Between Two COOs, where phenomenal chief operating officers come to share their knowledge, advice, and at the very end, a crazy story. I'm your host, Michael Koenig, and today's guest brings a different perspective to operations. That of a CEO. I'm excited to welcome our guest, Dale Pfeiffer, the CEO and co-founder of GoodWorld. GoodWorld powers mission-driven companies with tech to drive philanthropic initiatives with their award-winning social impact platform. Don't just take my word for it. Thousands of organizations use GoodWorld to power their CSR, corporate social responsibility initiatives, including MasterCard, Citi, the American Cancer Society, YMCA, Lyft, and Global Citizen, just to name a few. And to give you a concept of the scale of GoodWorld's platform, GoodWorld was used to power the online giving site for Vax Live, a concert which raised over $300 million, a lot of which went through GoodWorld's platform to further the mission of creating vaccine equity. So it's no wonder that GoodWorld was named one of the world's most innovative companies by Fast Company. Welcome, Dale. I'm excited to have you here.

Dale Pfeifer: Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Michael Koenig: Could you tell us a bit about your path to co-founding GoodWorld? What drove you to build the platform?

Dale Pfeifer: Absolutely. So I'm from New

Michael Koenig: So let's talk about your role as CEO. How do you work with your COO? What does that look like? And what areas of the company are you focused on?

Dale Pfeifer: Um, so, um, I work very, very closely with my COO. We are actually the two founders of the company, so we have just such a history of working together on, on all areas of things.

Michael Koenig: As I was looking through and, and, you know, researching and, and getting more familiar with Good World ahead of time, I was actually quite blown away by the expanse of the different features of the different product lines that you all have created, not only by just the sheer number but also by the quality. They really don't match the age of your company. There, it just far exceeds— as someone in tech who's, who's building, I was just blown away by how much you have expanded the platform. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What was the success behind just how prolific and expansive the platform is?

Dale Pfeifer: We have a bunch of incredibly passionate people who work at the company. So people come to work really to make the world a better place. And of course, of course, you know, we all work for money, so that's an important part of it as well. But everybody is so driven to do what is best for our clients and support our customers in a full way. So we're also, um, so, you know, people work really hard on building out really great products. We're also fortunate enough to acquire a company called Cheerful Giving about 2 years ago, and they have an amazing technology suite which is now which, um, we knitted our technology to— technology suites together, um, and, uh, that has helped us build out our tech stack a lot faster than many companies in our space would have.

Michael Koenig: That's great. And it's so difficult to integrate acquisitions. There are so many things that can go wrong. So to be able to do that, incorporate the tech, incorporate the team, I think actually speaks volumes and is something that we should definitely explore a bit. But before we do, I'd like to chat about the CSR initiative. And that again is the corporate social responsibility. Over the years, you really started with a consumer focus and that has continued to evolve and develop. The hashtag giving that you suggested, the Roundup giving, but now we're seeing much more involvement from corporations. Can you tell us a little bit about that and really how that has established itself? And is it still in the nascent stage? Is there more work to be done?

Dale Pfeifer: You know, that's a fantastic question because things have really changed very, very quickly in that space. And I think CSR has always sort of been around, but it's really just been large corporations who could afford to hire a corporate social responsibility team coming out and making donations on behalf of the company to nonprofits. So that's really kind of the old school way of doing it. And I think this really started to change just before the pandemic. The Business Roundtable came out and said, You know, the purpose of a corporation is no longer just to make money, it's to serve all stakeholders. And of course, Larry Fink, famously from BlackRock, came out in a number of his letters to CEOs and said, look, this is really, really important right now. And, you know, it's important because it's the right thing to do. But it's even more important is because companies that have a social impact brand and have social impact initiatives internally for employees are just seeing, are seeing, so are not having the same retention issues that other brands are having. So, you know, it's a really fantastic way to engage employees. And also it's a proven way to grow your customer loyalty and your customer base as well. You know, 90% of millennials will choose a product that has a social impact associated with it. —other than kind of a regular product. So it's become a must-have for companies. And, you know, another really important trend that we're seeing is that this isn't just the large corporations that are getting involved now. You know, small to medium-sized companies, it's really important for them to have a meaningful ESG, you know, environmental, social, and governance kind of game plan. And they may not have the same types of resources to commit to it. So where we're really focused right now on making an impact is providing really easy resources for a company who may not be able to, who may not want to or be able to afford to hire a full social impact team. How do we take most of the work out of that for them by getting the technology to do the work? And so, you know, I think, Right now, given this, this real interest because of growth, you know, because it's being used as a lever for growth, we're just seeing this absolute surge in request and a need for a CSR platform and CSR in general.

Michael Koenig: And I think for me, and probably a lot of other people, it's pretty enriching and pretty comforting to see companies like Mastercard, companies like Citi that you don't normally associate with social responsibility and corporate giving, to see them stepping up and realizing that there's more than just taking, that you have to give back.

Dale Pfeifer: And it's incredible to see the way that they're doing it. I mean, Mastercard now has executive compensation attached to social impact goals.. And that's what they talk about around the hallway, you know, because they know it's so important, but also they're a company who really stands by their values and knows that it's the right thing to do. So, you know, we're kind of starting to see it in bigger and bigger ways, but we're also starting to see a new way of doing CSR. You know, it's not just companies who have a CSR department that's largely influenced by senior leadership. Making decisions about how a certain allocation of resources is distributed to nonprofits. You know, now what we're seeing is a trend of companies actually donating through their employees, so putting their employees in the driver's seat as to, you know, which charities are supported, you know, literally like giving out philanthropic gift cards that they're able to then go and allocate to, you know, one of their favorite charities. Matching donations, of course, is like a really, really great way for companies to engage their employees in philanthropy. I mean, there's just so much innovative stuff going on in the space. It's really exciting. And I think companies are, you know, really seeing it as a fantastic way to keep employees engaged, particularly in this and this, you know, slightly kind of virtual or hybrid work time. Because I think if a person can see that a company cares about their whole, their whole person, you know, things that they're passionate about in the world as well as things that they're passionate about in their job, a person just feels so much more committed to that company for seeing their whole person.

Michael Koenig: That's phenomenal. In terms of the pandemic, you mentioned Larry Fink coming out from BlackRock. We're seeing the Vax Live event, Mastercard getting involved. Has this corporate social responsibility— do you think it's accelerated by the pandemic, or was it just picking up more and more speed, like remote work, for instance? And then this was just the natural evolution?

Dale Pfeifer: I absolutely think it was accelerated during the pandemic. I mean, I think there was that big moment where there, you know, in March when we all first went home, nobody knew what was going to happen. But then it became quite clear that, you know, big companies actually, many of them did pretty well during the pandemic, not all of them. And just, you know, with the kind of the richer getting richer, I think that, you know, through business often there was a real sense of a need to give back. And we're seeing just a dramatic increase in giving towards hunger charities and charities that are addressing direct need created by the pandemic. But we're also seeing really interesting things like big companies looking at their supply chain and looking at smaller companies, inside of their supply chain that might be having a hard time during the pandemic, and then them supporting those companies. You know, the Black Lives Matter movement and the incredible, incredibly unfortunate events around, you know, George Floyd also have created a huge trend for companies to use their CSR budgets to invest in racial and societal justice charities. So I think now, you know, companies are really needing to walk their talk in terms of this as well. It's not just a matter of, you know, posting the black square and saying it's not good enough. That can get you cancelled these days, and rightly so. You know, we really have to live our values and be transparent about our values. So, you know, philanthropy, you know, giving back, volunteer opportunities, providing volunteer opportunities for people to directly engage in these causes and maybe providing volunteer time off. These are all ways that we can walk our talk in terms of the, you know, in terms of, you know, really showing up for these crises that are happening in our society.

Michael Koenig: So let's talk about how this translates into the business. Certainly there, you, you must have seen an influx of companies coming in and signing up for your platform. Can you tell us a little bit about the go-to-market motion for GoodWorld? Has it largely been reliant on inbound or has there been an outbound motion as well?

Dale Pfeifer: There has definitely been a mix of both. While we are in a real growth area, we are, you know, we're a small company in a noisy space. So, you know, particularly when people hear about the company, people are like, often like particularly senior executives, they've got board members tapping on their shoulder going like, this is really, really important. So they're looking for something, but they don't quite know what they're looking for. And it can be really difficult for companies to understand how to authentically and meaningfully go about this kind of stuff. So, while, you know, you know, so as soon as we kind of get the word out, we have a really, it's a compelling value proposition. So, we've sort of been doing kind of a bit of both, you know, we have various, you know, I personally, and, you know, the company has a great LinkedIn presence and networks So, you know, we, we like kind of communicating with people on LinkedIn for our outbound, but, you know, there's certainly been inbound as well.

Michael Koenig: Tell me a little bit about the division of labor with your Chief Operating Officer. How have the two of you gone about dividing, especially in a smaller company, who does what when?

Dale Pfeifer: Yeah, no, that's a great question because, you know, we're We're a late-stage startup, but we're still a startup. So, you know, we often wear all— wear multiple hats. Sleep is not our friend, but that's fine. So John, who's my COO, he's just an incredible person. He's an ex-military guy. So in many ways, he runs our social impact company, you know, with a lot of the kind of the precision that you would see inside of the military, which is is really great for us. And, you know, John and I have been working together on the company since the beginning, so we know each other very, very well. Um, some things we do really great together, like fundraising. You know, it's notoriously hard for women to raise capital, but John and I have this kind of one-two kind of effect that we have which helps us with fundraising. I'm not going to say it's easy because Fundraising is never like a piece of cake, but so we do that together. But then, you know, there's things he's really like good at, like all of the— no, he does a lot to do with our finances, just organizing things. He has a very structured kind of brain, you know, every— like to do with metrics and all of that sort of stuff. Whereas I'm kind of a much more creative communications, communicating our message, much more on the kind of the marketing side of the house. And so that's sort of We've sort of kind of, you know, going to our natural areas of strength, I would say. And then some things we know that is better to do together, like the fundraising.

Michael Koenig: So, we're definitely going to have to have John come on the podcast and kind of talk about how he's translated the military rigor into a company without necessarily treating everyone like they're in the military. But you mentioned something and I would be kicking, absolutely kicking myself if I didn't ask. You mentioned fundraising, the difficulties that come from being a woman. I actually had a question for you about the difficulties when it just comes to fundraising as a social impact company. Now you have great investors in MasterCard and 1776. I mean, what was it that they, what was it that was different about those investors? But also, I mean, can you speak a little bit to that experience that you had about fundraising as a woman. I mean, you mentioned having John, having a man in the room. Did that really make a huge difference?

Dale Pfeifer: It does make a difference. You know, I actually don't know if I would have been able to raise any capital if we weren't a team. But he's not just any person either. He is— he knows graduate math. He's taught finance and economics at West Point. I mean, he is like quick, you know, he's highly intelligent and very quick. So, you know, he's just a great person. And I think a lot of investors are looking to invest in female-led companies, but just can't get their head around it in some whatever way. So having John there makes it easier. And, you know, I think I learned a lot about fundraising sort of early on, and I learned a lot from John. He's really good at it. It's always challenging fundraising as a social impact because in the past, particularly because people didn't really— people saw social impact as kind of like they just made like some kind of mental shortcut which that it meant not as good returns. But there are a subset of social impact companies that do have market and like industry-level returns. So I think that has become much more well-known in the market, and this is just also a heap of investment focused towards social impact now. Now you have to be a very particular genre to go on through those avenues, but I think one important thing that I learned really early on, if you're pitching like just regular VCs, we have, I think, 4 VCs have invested in us, is that you don't, during the pitch, do not bring up the impact that you're making. Like, I think that's a lot of the mistake a lot of social impact entrepreneurs make, and I would have made it spades if John hadn't been there. But if you go in and you're talking first about the social impact, and that's the most important thing. It's the wrong audience. You need to go in and talk about what a great invest— this money-making deal this is first, and then the social impact kind of sits implicit in the background. And now the reason that that is, as I found out, is that, you know, in many of the LP agreements and the foundation documents from each of these funds, the intentions are set in those. And in most of those unless you're explicitly a social impact fund, the intention is to make money. So by mentioning the social impact and making that a part of the discussion almost becomes a little bit uncomfortable. So what you want to do is you really want to go in and pitch what a great deal this is financially for them, but leave it kind of tantalising in the background. You know, this is going to be the deal that they go and talk about all the time at the dinner party. Parties that they're out. This is the kind of a feel-good deal as well.

Michael Koenig: It's so interesting that it's almost like VC haven't really caught up to corporate America yet. Citi and MasterCard, they're embracing CSR. You mentioned having, uh, CSR milestones, goals, uh, responsibilities within executive comp packages. But here we have venture capitalists who are supposed to be some of the most forward-thinking folks out there backing visions, not necessarily performance yet. And here they are not necessarily embracing CSR as something that can benefit their fund if it's not directly tied to their mission as a fund.

Dale Pfeifer: Yeah, yeah, no, and I think, I think that is true, although I think many VCs are starting to wake up to the fact that CSR and social impact is actually a huge, very, very valuable market. So they're more interested in it now. But I'm really glad that you brought up Mastercard because those type, you know, the Mastercard investment, and we're so fortunate to have Mastercard as our lead investor in our second round. They are a really values-driven investor and, you know, they're able to make these investments for different reasons. They're able to make investments because we know we need to have more going on in social impact. We know, we see this as a, this technology is potentially valuable for us. So we want to work with this team to develop it. We want to use it on this part of our payments infrastructure. You know, they've just got like a whole different metric on why, why they invest. And I think that can be really valuable for social impact companies. Now, to get those investments is another thing. Like, I mean, we showed up to MasterCard, I feel like, every second week for 2 years before that investment happened. I'm exaggerating, it was probably once a month. But, um, but, you know, I think like a lot of trust needs to be built and a lot of luck needs to happen in terms of having the right people in the right positions and you know, being— have access— having access to the top level of the organization and those people being able to advocate for you. Those types of things really help when you're trying to close a larger corporate investment like that.

Michael Koenig: So earlier in our conversation, you mentioned tech as a bridge. Some of the things that I find most interesting are when tech companies take analog experiences and turn them into something that's digital and make it easier and facilitate that. As you think about the next stages of tech and how it's going to impact CSR and your mission as a company, can you talk a little bit about what you think that future looks like? What are the bets that you all are making?

Dale Pfeifer: Yeah, I mean, the space is changing so fast, isn't it? It's, um, You know, with the metaverse, all of a sudden everybody's talking about that. You know, everything with NFTs, crypto, like the, the whole thing. I mean, wave a magic wand 10 years from now, it's so hard to really understand how much progress we will have made towards all of those things. The bets that we are really making is that right now the whole social impact sector is highly fragmented. So, you know, one of the bets that we're making is that we believe that there is an opportunity for an ecosystem to come and bring it all together. So, you know, we currently have thousands and thousands of nonprofits on our platform. You know, we're now really working hard on the business, bringing businesses onto our platform. We, of course, have, you know, many, many donors and employees and customers on our platform. And the next phase of the company will be working on bringing all these partners, all these parties that are on the platform together in really meaningful ways so social impact can multiply. And we've already built an algorithm which has a proven multiplier effect of about 50%, so increases individual giving by about 50% through certain nudges and incentivizations inside of the algorithm. So that's, that's what we're really excited about. We're also really excited to incorporate cryptocurrencies as a kind of a payment method and really experiment in that space. And, you know, one of the big innovations that we recently created that we're kind of really doubling down on because it's been so popular is these gift cards. They almost work like a reverse match. So what happens is a company will offer a customer or an employee a gift card that they are able to go and redeem at their favorite charity. And with that, we then, you know, there's a whole chain of events that can be triggered off depending on what the company wants, but it will, you know, nudge them to chip in, etc., etc. So this kind of reverse way of giving, which is a very simple tweak, where a company is giving first or a charity is giving first in some kind of a way and then incentivizing others to give more has turned out to be a really incredible multiplier of generosity. So that's another thing that we are going to be really investing in is building out those gift cards and that algorithm.

Michael Koenig: Okay, that's amazing. I have to call out Oracle. Oracle, stop arranging whiskey tasting for your ABM campaigns. Instead, go to GoWorld and get these gift cards. It's a much better way. So just out there. Hopefully they hear it at some point.

Dale Pfeifer: They probably won't, but you never know. Love it.

Michael Koenig: So let's talk about the success of the business. These things don't happen in a vacuum. I'm sure as a startup you've had a lot of bumps and bruises along the way, but also a lot of learnings. What, what did you learn? What did you all get right to get to this point?

Dale Pfeifer: Oh wow, this is such a great question. There's so much to be said. I think what we got right was our mission. So, you know, we're on a mission to create as much good as we can in the world, and that has been a real kind of north star for us. And, you know, and it's kind of followed us in our trajectory from a company from, you know, just nonprofit tech to now expanding out to corporations and building an ecosystem of social impact. So that, that's been a really great thing. I think the other sorts of things that we got right was, you know, I have two amazing co-founders and really getting that founding team and creating really strong relationships between us, as well as our CTO who is absolute— he's incredible. Um, you know, so the four of us are really kind of the, the senior leadership inside of the company, and we just have a very strong and candid relationship, all of us. So that's, that's been really important. And I think one important aspect of those people, which I think if you are recruiting a team or whatever, it's so important to look for, it's optimism. You know, like, the entrepreneurial journey is never like a straight arrow up So, you know, sometimes, you know, you really need to be able to kind of roll with the punches. And I think generally we got right was, you know, and this is probably before it was really popular, is this, the focus on social impact and seeing it as a highly undervalued market opportunity. That was another thing that we got right. Now, I could go through the list of things that we got wrong. That would be as long as your arm. But we learned, like, It's been honestly such an incredible learning journey. I feel very lucky to have been able to, to, to go through it.

Michael Koenig: Yeah. We've had guests on who have spoken about what they look for in companies when they're evaluating new opportunities. Uh, it seems to be evolving, or rather circling around what they've called the 3 T's of team, tech, and TAM, total addressable market. I would add a fourth one, which is timing. It sounds like Good World is checking all of the boxes, and I'm sure you all are hiring like crazy. So if there are folks out here that are looking to get involved, it sounds like this would be a winning one, a winning company to jump on board.

Dale Pfeifer: Oh my gosh, we, we would love to hear from you. You can email me directly. My email address is Dale, Dale@goodworld.com. Aim A, because a good world starts with me. Fantastic.

Michael Koenig: So aside from joining your organization, do you have any advice for entrepreneurs that have novel ideas on how to contribute to the CSR initiative that are maybe just figuring out, trying to figure out a way rather, that they can do it?

Dale Pfeifer: Yes, lean startup all the way. If folks haven't heard of Lean Startup, it's just a philosophy in many ways. It's also like there's a whole methodology, but the philosophy is test your idea, create a minimal test that, you know, you're looking for validation of your idea. So set up a series of experiments just to start testing as to whether the assumptions you're making about the idea Maybe you might not realize their assumptions at this stage, but every day I find I have new assumptions that are proven just correct. So, you know, set up like a series of kind of experiments to start validating your idea and giving your idea shape. Because what I always found, and this is, you know, from going through many different product iterations at Good World, is that I generally understand part of what the idea is. But I do not understand the nuance, nor do I fully understand the context, nor do I actually even really fully understand the problem. So, and there's so many great ways to go and get feedback now, and you know, with us all being able to do so much ourselves, just kind of, you know, at a low fidelity kind of level. So that's what I would suggest. Test, test, test, test and validate, validate what you think before you start to kind of build anything.

Michael Koenig: My last question for you, Dale. A previous guest of ours that we had on was a Presidential Innovation Fellow during the Obama administration. He actually skipped out on meeting President Obama because he was on his honeymoon in your home country, New

Dale Pfeifer: Oh my gosh, that was such a magical moment, having the honor and privilege of meeting President Obama. I was a part of an incubator called 1776, which is conveniently— was conveniently right by the White House.. And I went into work one day and everyone was like, quick, quick, President Obama's coming. There was security everywhere, dogs. I got my bag scanned. And yeah, I was fortunate enough to be able to pitch him Good World. And he was, well, first of all, he asked me what I was doing in the US because he had just been to New

Michael Koenig: We'll have to provide a link in the episode notes to that article so we can all check it out. Well, Dale, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Where can people go to keep up with you?

Dale Pfeifer: Absolutely. So the best way is LinkedIn. Just connect with me on LinkedIn. I love kind of— I'm often posting about social impact and things like that there. Or folks Can email me. My email is Dale, D-A-L-E, @goodworld.me. And that's G-O-O-D-W-O-R-L-D, Good World. There you have it.