Link To Guest Website: https://impact.cybergrants.com/

Title: “Helping Facilitate Corporate Giving, Grants, Donations, & More”
Guest: Mark Layden – CyberGrants
Interviewer: Jeffrey Davis – MAGE LLC

Click here to read the transcript

Jeffrey (0s):
Hello everybody. And this is another segment of Radio Entrepreneurs. My name again is Jeffrey Davis. I am the host, at least for the day, most days we hope. And also chairman of the board CEO, founder of Mage LLC management consulting firm to entrepreneurs, leaders, strategic leaders, strategic family, change all of the above. Plus a little bit more since 1985, our next guest Mark Layden, CEO of CyberGrants. Hi Mark.

Mark (31s):
Jeffrey, Thank you.

Jeffrey (32s):
Thanks, let’s sit down on the couch. Let me lie down and you’ll tell me what CyberGrants means to me and means to us.

Mark (41s):
Yeah, get comfortable. But so CyberGrants is a company it’s been around for a long time, but its mission is wildly more, more important today than it. That it’s always been important, but I think even more so today we help companies and other organizations, including foundations and so on effectively giveaway their resources to improve, you know, their communities in the world. So that would include things like providing grants, ranging from philanthropic grants, community grants, all the way through medical education grants to help educate people about, about, you know, important healthcare capabilities.

Mark (1m 23s):
And so on. We also provide the ability for employees and customers of those companies to participate in that process. And very often companies are ready to encourage their employees and customers to participate by matching those gifts. So we do matching gifts. We do employee giving programs. We do grants, we do volunteerism more than 50 million hours a year are volunteered through our applications to help not-for-profits make things happen. And just to give you a couple of scale things, do you have, so thanks six more than $6 billion and more than 50 million hours are provided to communities. And not-for-profits through the organizations that we serve.

Jeffrey (2m 5s):
Sounds like you’re a very strong backroom component to social responsibility.

Mark (2m 11s):
Yeah. That’s kind of what we do. We, we, we, first of all, it’s hard to give away that much money and so you need to do it well. And so we provide the infrastructure and rails and security and, and efficiency to make all that possible. So, yeah, and kind of we’re the, we’re the philanthropic plumbing,

Jeffrey (2m 32s):
But I would assume also you don’t make value judgments of who you sell a sell to that. That’s not your job. You’re not evaluating it for efficacy. Any of these organizations you’re just providing the mechanics, correct.

Mark (2m 45s):
Yeah. Of sorts. I will say, first of all, everybody that wants to help and contribute as a good thing, as it relates to the causes, to which they are contributing. You know, we scan our hate groups, things of that nature. We certainly don’t provide, you know, we, we deal with all sorts of things around OFAC and other governmental requirements to avoid terrorist organizations, things like that. But generally speaking, we don’t create a lot of judgment. You know, you decide how you want to help the world and we help you make that possible.

Jeffrey (3m 15s):
So give me a sense let’s I always like to say, let’s get in the way back machine. I’m a big fan of professor Peabody. Have to remember that. Good, good, good cartoons, especially with what’s going on. And now in Asia and you know, the cold war cartoons are very relevant to, but let’s get a sense of just let’s keep this close to home because I could go run a muck. Let’s let’s find out about your career. How did you evolve into this and how did the whole thing get started?

Mark (3m 46s):
Well, I, I think how I evolved into it is, is, you know, less interesting. You know, I came as, as part of, of an investment company that the, the original founders felt like this thing had gotten bigger than they were able to be able to manage it. And so they were looking for a partner to make that happen and very, very happily. They selected BMI team to make that possible. The company itself started a long time ago, sometime before 2000, let’s call it late 1990s, 98, something like that. They were doing some programming for a company at that time, which you might be familiar with called NYNEX.

Mark (4m 27s):
And the chairman of the night X or organization was talking to them and said, Hey, by the way, I have a foundation and it could really use some kind of software because they’re kind of Backwoods programming and so on. And so the original founder got him, Sean flat, again, worked with the foundation and invented grants management on the, on the internet. Now fast forward to today, nine X, three, many acquisitions is now Verizon and Verizon is still a customer. So our first customer is still with us. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Oh, how

Jeffrey (4m 60s):
Was it? You know, I would assume the technology in your industry is changing dramatically. Is that, is that correct?

Mark (5m 7s):
You know, I, I do suspect that depends on your definition of drama, but, you know, I would say, you know, it’s just, it’s, it’s more important. I think, I think we’re, we’re trying to use techniques to help individuals participate in the ways that they want to. So integration with, you know, sort of different kinds of office applications is, is a direction that we’re heading. We’ve got lots of techniques to help people think, think about rather than using, you know, sort of targeting techniques to help you figure out which products you want to buy. We’re using targeting techniques to help you pick out the causes that are best able to serve your interests.

Mark (5m 47s):
So, so there’s a number of things that we’re doing to help make this improve participation. And then also driving impact $400 billion annually are by corporations and individuals in the United States. And we want to make sure that we do our part to help to make that 400 billion count. Does that help?

Jeffrey (6m 7s):
Yeah. You know, I heard some statistics about what you’ve done over the last 12 months. Do you want to share those with our listeners? Well,

Mark (6m 13s):
We talked about that a little bit, as I said, six and a half billion dollars of resources that have been traded. I also, you know, I think one thing’s interesting is that we reach into more than 20 million current and prior employees for the companies that we serve. So there’s 20 million people that have access to our application by and large. So, you know, they’re, they tend to be relatively big numbers. As I said, it’s hard to, it’s hard to operate at scale without this kind of technology.

Jeffrey (6m 46s):
And I heard something like you processed over 6.5 billion in donations and 50 million volunteer hours. I mean, the numbers are kind of staggering when you think

Mark (6m 56s):
About it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, hundreds of thousands of, of grant applications, literally millions of individual donations is big stuff, but that’s what technology does, is make that possible for, for companies and organizations and individuals to operate at go.

Jeffrey (7m 14s):
So is it a very competitive field that you’re in or do you stand alone?

Mark (7m 19s):
Well, I think there are other companies that do what we do and I think we’re the biggest, we do probably three times more than our nearest competitor relative to total donation volumes. I think I I’d like to think, you know, and I I’ll say this until somebody proves me wrong. That we’re the, we’re the biggest and best company that does sort of the full spectrum of corporate social responsibility programs. I think there are people that specialize in employee programs and brands and different sorts of things. But when you, when you’re looking for a platform to serve the broadest possible set of set of requirements, I think we’re the, we’re the ones that can do that.

Jeffrey (8m 0s):
Interesting. We’ve been speaking with mark Laden, CEO, CyberGrants. Great speaking with you, mark. If someone’s looking for, you wants to know more about CyberGrants, how would they find you

Mark (8m 11s):
CyberGrants.com? Don’t forget the S

Jeffrey (8m 14s):
Great look. Very nice meeting you. And we hope you come back again to radio entrepreneurs.

Mark (8m 19s):
Thank you, sir. It’s been fun. Good.

Jeffrey (8m 21s):
We’re going to take a break. We’ll be right back after this short message.

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