Fundraising products launched with full content support
2 yrs
Sole content hire across the entire organization
Free
Platform model: every product launched at no cost to nonprofits
0 → 1
Built the content function from the ground up
Context
Give Lively was a nonprofit technology company with a clear mission: build free fundraising tools for nonprofits. As the sole content hire from 2017 to 2019, I was responsible for every word the company published — UX copy, help documentation, product tutorials, video scripts, testimonial content, blog posts, and GTM materials — across five product launches over two years.
The products were genuinely new to the market. Text-to-Donate, peer-to-peer fundraising, event ticketing, live fundraising displays, and campaign pages didn't have established playbooks in the nonprofit tech space. Each launch required explaining not just how the product worked, but why it mattered and what it made possible for organizations that had never had access to tools like these before.
Every product launched free. The content had to make that feel like a meaningful commitment, not a marketing line.
Give Lively's nonprofit audience added another wrinkle: organizations ranging from small community groups to large national foundations, all with varying levels of technical sophistication and fundraising experience. Writing that worked had to be accessible to both.
Five products, five content builds
Each product launch meant building the full content layer: the UX copy inside the product, the help documentation, the promotional blog posts, the email campaigns, and the external-facing marketing materials. The five products launched during my tenure:
Text-to-Donate became the most visible product externally — it appeared in live fundraising events, on stage, and in testimonials from nonprofits that had seen real-time results with it. The live display integration made it particularly demonstrable: donors would text a keyword, a confirmation would appear on a display visible to everyone in the room, and the total would update in real time. Making that tangible in written content was half the job.
Text-to-Donate in action
DC SCORES, a nonprofit that uses soccer and poetry to support kids in underserved communities, used Give Lively's Text-to-Donate and Live Display together at a fundraising event. The live display showed real-time donation totals on a screen visible to the entire room — donors texted in, totals climbed, and the energy in the room responded to every update.
DC SCORES event
$13,136 raised. Goal: $10,000. 65 donors.
Give Lively's Live Display showed real-time totals to everyone in the room as donors texted to give. This is the product doing exactly what it was designed to do — making collective generosity visible in the moment it's happening.
I wrote the case study and testimonial content around this event, using DC SCORES as the lead example for how Text-to-Donate and the Live Display worked together.
Content suite
The work spanned enough disciplines that it's easier to show than to list. A sample of assets produced during this period:
Video · B2B testimonial
Text-to-Donate testimonial video
Scripted and produced a B2B testimonial video showing how nonprofits used Text-to-Donate at live events. Also owned all UX copy and help documentation for the product from launch.
Produced a case study video featuring the Malala Fund, one of Give Lively's highest-profile nonprofit partners. Anchored around their use of Give Lively's platform for a major fundraising campaign.
Scripted and produced a product introduction video for Give Lively's peer-to-peer fundraising tool, aimed at nonprofits evaluating whether the format was right for their campaigns.
A step-by-step video tutorial showing nonprofit staff how to set up and launch a campaign page. Part of a broader content layer that included UX copy and help documentation across all five products.
Launch announcement for Give Lively's free event ticketing platform — one of five product launches I owned content for during my tenure. Framed around what the product made newly possible for nonprofits running ticketed events.
A customer testimonial feature on DC SCORES, showing how the organization used Text-to-Donate and the Live Display together at a live poetry and soccer fundraising event to exceed their goal in real time.
A structured resource hub on the Give Lively website guiding nonprofits through setup, configuration, and best practices for Text-to-Donate — part of the broader help documentation and onboarding layer built for the product.
Being the sole content person at a product company means context-switching constantly. UX copy demands precision; a testimonial video script demands warmth; help documentation demands patience; a launch post demands momentum. The discipline mix looked something like this:
Product writing
UX copy and microcopy
Onboarding flows
Error states and empty states
Help documentation
Product tutorials
Marketing content
Product launch blog posts
Email campaigns
GTM materials
Website copy
Resource hubs
Video and storytelling
B2B testimonial scripts
Product intro scripts
Case study production
Customer feature articles
What this work demonstrates
Give Lively is where the breadth of the content toolkit got built. Being the only writer at a company shipping five products means there's no one to hand off the hard formats to. You write the UX copy and the fundraising video script and the help doc and the launch post, and you figure out how to switch registers between them. That pattern has carried through every role since.
It also meant writing for an audience that wasn't buying anything — Give Lively's products were free. The persuasion task was getting nonprofit staff to invest time in a new tool, not money, which turns out to be harder in some ways. Trust had to come from clarity, examples, and documentation that actually worked.
