Business Spotlight: Textbook Ingenuity

Ideas come at any time. Chad Boyd was sitting in church last year when he had a business epiphany.

“They were passing around the bucket to take offerings, and I was thinking how outdated and old school that was to have somebody drop money in a basket,” says Boyd, owner and founder of Web and software developer Genuity Technology Services. “We live in a digital age now. Most of the younger generation doesn’t carry cash. They use credit or debit cards, so I thought it’d be great to donate to the church from anywhere, anytime.”

In late 2012, he launched a new product called Txt2Give, allowing organizations to accept monetary donations via text messaging.

The path of travel
Before starting Genuity Tech, Boyd learned the software development ropes working for Springfield-based dot-coms TravelNow and Interactive Hotel Solutions.

TravelNow.com is perhaps best known as the first travel website allowing consumers to make wireless hotel reservations in 1995 and for the $47 million it fetched in a January 2001 buyout by Dallas-based Hotel Reservations Network, which promptly folded the site into Hotels.com.

“That’s where I got a lot of my experience as a developer,” Boyd says of his three-year stint 1998–2001 in Java programming at TravelNow, followed by the five years developing at IHS, another online travel-booking site, started by TravelNow colleague Doug Lurvey.

In between full-time gigs, Boyd would consult on contract work through St. Louis firm Ciber. He’d get assigned short- and long-term projects for such clients as Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, jobs that inspired him to break out on his own.

“I liked being a consultant, so I wanted to go out and do it independently,” he recalls. “That’s how Genuity got started.”

Genuity Tech handles website design and maintenance, custom application development and manual process automation for programs such as spreadsheets. Boyd works with Ruby and Rails open-source Web development framework, and contracts continue to stay close to the travel sector, with such clients as iSeatz.

Through Genuity Tech, Boyd also has completed contract jobs for Bust Out Solutions, Elevation Church, Merchant Data Solutions, Noble Communications and Webficient.

Dial-a-donation
The focus these days is on Txt2Give, which is run by Boyd’s wife, Leann.

Nonprofits and churches that use the service pay a $100 monthly fee, plus 2 percent per donation, according to Txt2Give.co. Since Txt2Give’s launch, the service has brought in $85,000 in donations, Boyd says, declining to disclose company revenues.

Among the users of the service are North Point Church – where the idea was hatched – Victory Mission and the Simple Church.

Using a phone number unique to the charitable organization, donors text the word “Give” with a dollar amount – “Give 50” for a $50 contribution that draws straight from the donor’s debit or credit card on file. The funds are transferred to the recipient within seven days.

“A lot of organizations think that donations collected through the cell phone carrier is the only way you can go, and that’s not true. We’re not that way,” Boyd says, pointing to American Red Cross and other large organizations with donation services that charge donors’ phone bills.

“Through the phone bills, they can only give a $5 or $10 amount, so it’s capped. With a debit or credit card, you can give as high as the limit is on your card.”

While one in 10 adults have made a mobile text message donation, according to the Pew Research Center, the trend hit a high point with relief for Haiti following the January 2010 earthquake. According to the Real Time Charitable Giving report by Pew Internet and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, Haitian relief donations totaled an estimated $43 million from text messaging.

Of the 863 individuals surveyed who contributed to the national Text for Haiti campaign, 80 percent donated using a cell phone. Three out of four were first time givers, and the report said 56 percent donated to another organization within the year.

Frequency is a feature Boyd built into the Txt2Give product. A donor making a contribution at noon on Friday will receive notification with options to make another donation.

“A week from that time, it will send them a text message saying it’s ready to process the weekly donation. The donor has choices,” Boyd says, noting recurring donations are set weekly or monthly. “They can either continue with that amount, they can edit the amount, they can skip it for that week if their finances are low or they can cancel it completely.”

No cash, no worry
An upside for client North Point Church is Txt2Give’s integration with church management software Fellowship One, which tracks attendance, events, volunteers and offerings.

Mark Walker, the church’s communications director and online pastor, says Txt2Give eases staff efforts.

“When people give, it automatically goes into Fellowship and records their giving so we don’t have to track that. (With) someone writing a check, we have to manually go in and take that check, enter the amount and attach it to that person,” Walker says. “In the congregation, the moment we talk about offering and the bucket goes by, there’s people who pull out their phone and text Txt2Give right there before the offering is even over.”

North Point Church and other participating organizations receive a weekly report of their Txt2Give usage.

Churches and organizations across borders and seas will soon be able to use the service. Already available in Canada, Europe is the next territory marked for expansion.

“We have started making changes to support Canadian organizations,” Boyd says, noting Txt2give uses San Francisco-based Stripe for third-party processing and Twilio as its text message service provider. “We’re not quite in the United Kingdom yet, but we’re making strides.”[[In-content Ad]]