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
$100M+
Raised by nonprofits through the platform during my tenure
Context
Give Lively is a nonprofit technology company built around a clear mission: free fundraising tools for nonprofits. Co-founded by Jennifer Allan Soros, it operated with the kind of mission clarity that comes from not needing to turn a profit. As the sole content hire from 2017 to 2019, I was responsible for writing or reviewing 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 how the product worked, how it fit into the suite, and the possibilities it opened for nonprofits who couldn't previously afford tools like these.
Every product launched free. Nonprofits were skeptical — if it's free, what's the catch? The content had to make the commitment feel real.
Give Lively's nonprofit audience ranged from small community groups to large national foundations, all with different levels of technical sophistication and fundraising experience. Writing had to be accessible to both audiences, and everyone in between.
Five products, five content builds
Each product launch required building the full content layer: UX copy inside the product, help documentation, promotional blog posts, email campaigns, and external-facing marketing materials. The five products launched during my tenure:
Imagine hearing about how a nonprofit changed someone's life, and then having the ability to donate on the spot and see your name appear on a screen in front of the whole room in real time. That's the experience Text-to-Donate and the Live Fundraising Display created together — and what the content around these products had to convey.
DC SCORES event
They set a goal. The room helped them blow past it.
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 could work together.
Content suite
The work spanned so many disciplines it's easier to show than list. A sample of assets produced during this period:
Tutorials, UX & product launches
Blog · Product tutorial
How to build a campaign page
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.
Structured resource hub guiding nonprofits through setup, configuration, and best practices for Text-to-Donate — part of the help documentation and onboarding layer built for the product.
Product introduction video for Give Lively's peer-to-peer fundraising tool, aimed at nonprofits evaluating whether the format was right for their campaigns.
Launch announcement for Give Lively's free event ticketing platform, framed around what the product made newly possible for nonprofits running ticketed events.
Case study video featuring the Malala Fund, one of Give Lively's highest-profile nonprofit partners, anchored around their use of the platform for a major fundraising campaign.
How the US Luge Foundation Gave Donors a Reason to Give
Customer testimonial feature on the US Luge Foundation's #GivingTuesday campaign, showing how a niche sports nonprofit used Give Lively to run a focused, high-impact day-of-giving push.
Being the sole content person at a product company meant context-switching constantly. UX copy demanded precision; a testimonial video script demanded warmth; help documentation demanded patience; a launch post demanded momentum. The mix of disciplines 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 was my first startup job, and the mission genuinely motivated me to get good at everything fast. These were organizations doing real work for real people, and I wanted every piece of content to actually work — the UX copy, the video scripts, the help docs, the launch posts, all of it. That drive to learn across formats and channels rather than just stick to comfortable ones has carried through every role since.
It also meant writing for an audience that wasn't buying anything. Give Lively's products were free, which meant the persuasion task was getting nonprofit staff to invest time in a new tool — and to trust that the freeness wasn't a catch. That turned out to be harder than selling. Trust had to come from clarity, examples, and documentation that actually worked.
