What is the philanthropic discovery gap?

I knew early on that I wanted to work in the nonprofit sector. I loved the relationships, the work, the feeling of being connected and on the ground. Almost 15 years later, I still feel that pull.

These days I feel it from the other side. I left direct nonprofit work about two years ago to consult, wanting to help organizations navigate the challenges of an ever-changing sector. And it was that work that surfaced the problem I couldn't stop thinking about.

The most frequent question I worked through with organizations was the same one, over and over: how do we attract new and younger donors? In an era of social media and short attention spans, the organizations that can adapt and put real effort into their digital presence tend to do better. But that takes staff, budget, and bandwidth. So what happens to the smaller organizations in our communities? The ones doing some of the most important work, often with the least resources, and no capacity to compete for attention?

That question is what led me to build give GroundUp.

I don't have a background in tech. I came to this as a participant, someone who has spent years in the sector doing the work, not building the tools. But I've always been interested in how technology, when used responsibly and ethically, can do more than just make existing systems faster or more efficient. The goal was never to help nonprofits send more emails or automate their donor outreach. It was to ask a harder question: what would it take to actually change the structure of how giving flows?

The problem has a name: the philanthropic discovery gap. It's not new, and it's not complicated. The largest organizations get the most attention, the most donors, the most funding. Organizations closer to the ground rely on word of mouth, volunteers, and stopgap measures. Small nonprofits don't need better internal tools. They need better visibility.

The numbers make this concrete. Very small nonprofits, those operating on budgets under $50,000, represent roughly 60% of all U.S. nonprofit organizations. Between 2019 and 2023, they received just 0.4% of tracked philanthropic funding. The top 0.3% of individual donors account for 45% of all individual charitable dollars. Giving flows through networks, and the organizations without access to those networks stay invisible.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the donors exist. Research consistently shows that Millennial household giving grew 40% between 2016 and 2022. Gen Z and Millennial donors increasingly prioritize issues and impact over institutional name recognition. They want to know their money is doing something real. They just can't find the organizations doing it.

Philanthropy has built strong infrastructure for transactions and for evaluating organizations after they've been found. What it hasn't built is a discovery layer. Something that helps an everyday donor find a grassroots organization in their own community, doing work they actually care about, without a marketing budget being the deciding factor.

That's the gap give GroundUp is built to close. Using advances in data and personalized matching, and built on a commitment to ethical AI, we're focused on the moment before transactions and evaluations happen: helping donors discover organizations they would never otherwise encounter. Not to make the existing system more efficient. To change who benefits from it.

The discovery gap isn't inevitable. It's a structural problem. And structural problems can be fixed.