Non-Profits Telling Stories Through Technology
Brandon Hance, Founder and CEO of Los Angeles based GoodThreads, went through college as a student athlete playing football for USC while studying business. Soon into college he realized that a career as a professional athlete is not what he wanted and instead quickly caught the entrepreneur/startup bug. That little bug took Brandon for an exciting ride in the world of business.
After college Brandon put forth his knowledge of business to work and built his first company and the platform for his future business venutres, Audiolife – a direct-to-consumer eCommerce company. Audiolife was built on a framework to handle all the back-end work through store fronts allowing musicians to focus on what they do best. Currently Audiolife is at 250,000 members and growing. They now represent those from small garage bands to today’s most popular artists including Paul McCartney, Eminem, and Rihanna.
GoodThreads Is Born
After starting Audiolife, Brandon discovered a passion for helping others to engage supporters through the telling of stories and social awareness. The fuel and passion behind GoodThreads came from the unfortunate lost of a family member to breast cancer. Soon after, while his girlfriend and mother were participating in a walk to support breast cancer research and honoring their lost, Brandon noticed the many personalized t-shirts that were promoting the same idea – telling ones story in support of a cause.
Seeing all the different t-shirts at the walk, and knowing the hassle put into each one from creation to design and distribution, Brandon saw an opportunity. An opportunity to funnel what he had done with Audiolife into the nonprofit sector. Loaded with his technology and merchandise background, GoodThreads was born.
The Way It Works
When raising money for a cause you want to focus on spreading awareness and supporting, figuring out where to make merchandise or profit margins, etc. just defer you from the overall goal. GoodThreads is there to help put you back in focus of the goals and allows them to take on everything else. Non-profits are able to create an account and personalized t-shirts to tell their story with ease. The platform provides non-profits the ability to also create a basic storefront for supporters to purchase their merchandise or donate to the cause. Again all while GoodThreads handles all the heavy lifting. When something is purchased from the storefront a portion of that money is put towards the fundraising efforts while the other is used for the cost of the actual t-shirts.
GoodThreads goes the extra step with the ability to integrate product purchases on event registration and fund raising pages. They’ve setup easy to embed code snippets for connecting visitors with a sellers t-shirts, along with API developments for major internet websites. Giving non-profits opportunities to socially engage and share information with their supporters. Brandon and his team are always continuing to build and develop key partnerships with heavier and customized integrations.
Online Awareness
We’re beginning to see more efforts like these having a greater online presence and helping spread awareness and support than ever before. Last month we saw examples of this with breast cancer awareness month and Hello Bar. As our social lives grow online and people like Brandon Hance continue to emerge we’ll hopefully begin to see a day where all are aware and all support each other.
