In June 2011, Insight Labs partnered with the School of Visual Arts in New York to consider whether there might be a better model for supporting working artists. The Lab yielded many ideas, but the one that stuck was a concept called “mass patronage.” The idea turns on the observation that what most fine art buyers want is not so much a physical object but a relationship with the artist. “Mass patronage” would use the Internet to enable various ways of forming those relationships, then using them to fund artists as a supplement or alternative to selling work in galleries.

Can it be done? We have no doubt, but the planned creation of relationships in the online space is a delicate business. In order to test our idea, Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson spoke to Desiree Vargas Wrigley, CEO and co-founder of GiveForward. GiveForward is a site that enables the friends and families of those facing a medical crisis or other serious need to pool resources and raise funds on the person’s behalf. As might be expected of a site that addresses the needs of people in such a vulnerable space, the relationships formed on GiveForward go well beyond the transactional – a fact of which Wrigley and her team are well aware. In the following interview, she shares the story of GiveForward, explains how what the site’s leadership has learned about its users over the past few years, then considers how those lessons might translate into the area of arts funding.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: So to me the existence of your site to me opens all sorts of interesting questions about social networking and social entrepreneurship. But as a person interested in ideas, I have to start by asking – how the heck did you come up with this?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: The idea came in waves. It started post-Hurricane Katrina. I was working at the Kauffman Foundation, helping to fund entrepreneurship initiatives. We had this pool of money that Ewing Kauffman left for a specific purpose: to promote entrepreneurship and education. Every day, we were looking at the most strategic ways to spend that money, how we could get the biggest impact, and how we could invest that money so it is there in perpetuity.

After Katrina, the foundation was trying to get 100 percent participation in donations to the Red Cross. But a number of us on the staff were saying that it felt hypocritical to be forced to give to the Red Cross, where we had no idea where our money was going, when every day our job at the foundation was to think carefully about how to spend someone else’s money. It felt like that was the wrong kind of incentive for me as an individual donor. And when you look at the role that small-scale donors play in American philanthropy, we really are the backbone – we give the majority of what goes into church funding and the larger non-profits. Large foundations play a huge role, but the impact of individual donors collectively is enormous. The fact that we don’t have much of a say in where that money is going seems ridiculous to me.

So at the time I was thinking there should be a way for individuals to give directly to those who were helping to rebuild after Katrina. I looked around online and found a number of people with blogs or PayPal accounts, but it seemed a little sketchy. It ended up being very sketchy in many cases. So that just planted the seed in my mind.

When I was 25 I moved to Chicago to have a somewhat bigger life experience. I wanted to feel passionate about my life, and started thinking, “What do I like about my job? What do I not like about my job?” I thought that there should be some sort of adult internship program that would help people transition from one career path to another. I wondered how I would fund the concept. I knew that friends and family were how most entrepreneurs get started. I didn’t have a ton of friends or family in Chicago, so I thought about how I could raise the money online. That was the lightbulb.

In early 2007, there really was no satisfactory way to raise money like that online if you were not a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit. There were a few sites like ChipIn and Fundable, then blogs with PayPal buttons. DonorsChoose existed, but they were somewhat limited in their ability to bring in donors at the time. Change.org launched shortly thereafter, which seemed like it might be what I was thinking of, but it quickly turned more to political or social action.

Later in 2007 I met Andrew Mason, the founder of Groupon. He was at the time launching The Point, which was a site designed to get enough people together to make some sort of action happen. I told him about my idea and he said, “I think we might be competitors.” But he already had a million dollars. So I thought I would just let The Point happen and see if that was what I wanted my idea to be. Six months later, it was up and running, and it wasn’t.

That was when I finally had the “a-ha” moment. I was in Costa Rica thinking about the idea for the site and all the different ways people could use it, whether it could be for a church project or classroom supplies or something else – medical expenses was just one part of that. This little voice woke me up in the middle of the night and told me I had to get started. So I got on my computer, wrote up a three-page business plan, came back to the U.S. early, and registered my company, GiveForward, two weeks later. It felt like divine intervention.

ABN: So I see that you had the idea of the platform in place. But when did that intersect with the idea of out-of-pocket medical expenses in particular? That seems really important for the identity of the site.

DVW: Right after I had the initial idea, about a month later, I walked into a convenience store and saw a change jar for a baby that needed a heart transplant. They were trying to raise $300,000. And I thought, “There is no way this woman is going to raise $300,000 one quarter at a time, even if they have these jars in every convenience store in the city.” That was when I knew medical expenses could be a part of the site. But even six months into launching GiveForward, I didn’t know that was where we would be headed.

ABN: How did you reach that decision? 

DVW: My business partner Ethan came on in May of ’08, right before we launched the site. We were trying to figure out which markets we were going to start with. He had experience with marathon runners, so we thought we would start with them, and that opened us up to cancer non-profits and similar organizations. But it was really serendipity. In March of ’09, Ethan and I were about to run out of the money we had put into the company to pay for rent. We were just scraping by – we weren’t paying ourselves, of course.

Then two sisters joined the site. They were a 23-year-old and a 25-year-old. The younger sister was raising money so she could give the older sister one of her kidneys. They had insurance, but their transplant coverage was maxed out, because the older sister had a heart transplant when she was 10. It was the medication from that experience that had destroyed her kidneys. It’s such an injustice – she did everything right, but here she was, 25 years old, on dialysis indefinitely. She had a donor but no way of doing the procedure.

The two of them raised $30,000 on our site in 30 days, almost entirely through their Facebook networks. It showed the power of social media to bring people together to help someone in need. We didn’t immediately realize at that moment that everything we do should be medical, but we knew this was a way of empowering people to assist with a problem that another individual person was having. We knew that was important to us.

When GiveForward turned one, we had raised $185,000 total on the site. It kept the lights on, but it wasn’t massive growth. We realized we were spreading ourselves too thin. We were trying to be in fraternities and sororities. We were trying to work with small non-profits. And we were trying to be in this medical space that we knew nothing about. But we decided to pivot and make medical what all of our branding and marketing would be about.

That was when we did the research that helped us realize the size of the problem. Americans spend more than $363 billion a year on out-of-pocket medical expenses. That is an enormous sum of money. When you look at a recently diagnosed cancer patient, they are looking at a minimum of $8,500 in out-of-pocket expenses over the first year regardless of insurance. The median income in this country is $46,000 for a family of four. That’s 20 percent going to expenses that most people just haven’t prepared for. That’s why now we’re thinking of ourselves not so much as a charity site but as a site that family and friends can use to come together and fill that common gap. Bankruptcy is huge among cancer patients. Cancer survivors are five times more likely to declare bankruptcy in the first fives years of remission than the general population. That’s adding insult to injury – you’ve just survived the most difficult thing in your life and you’re left penniless. You’re hard to insure. You’re hard to employ. It’s an incredible situation.

ABN: It’s funny,  your story as you tell it seems really different from the way entrepreneurial stories are often told. The story you usually hear is about how people believed in their big idea and worked and worked and worked until they made it a reality. But it seems to me that what you were doing was carrying your idea through the world like a magnet, picking up the people and the ideas that naturally fit with it, rather than just gathering a bunch of resources with the idea remaining the same. How do you think you cultivate that kind of open-mindedness?

DVW: I think that came from a lot of training I didn’t know I was experiencing at the time. In the non-profit world they talk about founder’s syndrome – many groups are so intertwined with their founders that they cannot survive if the person leaves. I also knew that entrepreneurs often times limited their opportunities to grow because they were so committed to their original vision and they can’t see new opportunities. That’s why it took me a year to put GiveForward together. The original kernel of the idea didn’t seem strong enough. I had to keep answering all these “why not?” questions, but when I had answered them, I felt confident enough to move forward.

Admittedly, my partner Ethan was the one who wanted to switch to medical expenses, and I was the one who was apprehensive. I thought we didn’t know how big the problem was and that we might be pigeon-holing ourselves. Why couldn’t we be the biggest name in fund-raising, period? So we compromised – everything that is public-facing is now medical, but people can still use our site for other things if they want to. Slowly over the past few years we have developed more categories – memorial funds are becoming more popular, for instance. “Pet medical” started out as an experiment – we knew we didn’t want listing for dogs with cancer next to people with cancer – so we broke it out as a separate category, and now we’re the number one site for that, even though it’s not a large driver in terms of revenue. It’s more important in terms of building a sense of community.

We think what we really are is a site that is about coming together to help a loved one in need. People experience our platform to fulfill one need and then find that they want to come back and use it for other things, like starting a 529 fund for college when a baby is born. We want to be there for happy events in people’s lives as well as difficult ones.

ABN: I’m interested in companies that invent platforms rather than products. The standard model for a company is something like, “We’ll go find out what people want and then give it to them.” But when you invent a platform, you’re generally creating a space for behaviors that don’t even exist yet. If you ask people what they want, they may very well suggest something totally different from your platform, because they haven’t experienced it yet.

My guess is that to implement something like mass patronage of the arts, we’d need to commit similar acts of behavioral engineering. Based on your experience, what is your advice to someone who is inventing that kind of platform for new behaviors?

DVW: It’s really hard to be first. It’s really expensive and it’s really hard. An awareness campaign can cost millions or billions of dollars – that’s where the big non-profits spend a lot of their money. We are lucky that there were some predecessors in the crowdsourcing or crowdfunding space. Kiva did a lot for our industry, even though they do micro-finance, which is not what we do. But they helped people to understand that this small amount of money sent across the world could have a huge impact on people’s lives. There are also models like Prosper.com which, though not as well known, helped us talk to investors and explain what we were doing. So you can look at people who are not directly in your market but who have tackled similar problems in another space – that’s a great way to start thinking about behavior change.

I also think you have to keep your message on point every time you talk to people. I don’t think we realized at first that our role at GiveForward was to change the way people give money to each other. It seems like it shouldn’t be that hard – people give each other money for weddings, for a baby being born, for turning 15, for graduation. But then the most financially devastating thing of your life happens – you get cancer or you get in a car accident – and no one thinks to give money.

Right now we’re facing that stigma – how do you change it from “charity” to an answer to the question “what can I do to help?” I don’t have a silver bullet answer, but I know that every time I talk to the press I need to lead with that message and help create a community that believes in the same thing. We’ve been working on creating a Seth Godin “tribe” of people who believe that giving money is not about charity, but coming into a friend’s life and being part of their journey. You have to take care of that community and help them feel empowered. That’s one of the reasons why I think our platform has been so successful – the integration with Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) helps people show others in their network that this is what they care about and reinforces that sense of community and purpose.

ABN: For the way I understand the platforms, Facebook seems far more useful for what you’re doing than Twitter anyway. There is an underlying form for both your site and Facebook where you reach out to another person in a very public way and say, “This person, out of all the millions of people on here, is mine, and I will take care of them.”

DVW: Right. You wouldn’t send an e-mail out to all of your friends saying, “Look at the charitable work I accomplished today.” But if it becomes part of your status update or news feed, it kind of minimizes the bragging component. It’s a more passive way to share information you are proud of.

That’s is one of the great things about online fundraising, whether you are doing it for the arts or for a charity – no one has to respond. It’s far different from sitting across the table from someone and asking them to help with your medical bills. People are too humble to do that. It is far easier to have a friend send out an e-mail or make a post on your behalf. It also makes it easier to give larger dollar amounts. Most people are not going to sit with your friend and write out a check for $500. But when you are sitting and reading their story, maybe thinking about how someone in your family had the same time of cancer and remembering what that was like, you can make a decision to put $500 on your credit card.

ABN: So when you’re managing this kind of venture, how do you deal with emergent behaviors? Surely over time there are people doing new things with your site that you want them to do, but others who are doing things you don’t understand or that could actually harm your project.

DVW: There was a point where we decided to move away from working with non-profits as beneficiaries. It made us very unpopular among people who were trying to use the site that way. There are laws in each state around fundraising professionals that can make it extremely difficult to do what we do. A lot of our industry has kind of flown under the radar for the last several years, because we’re not soliciting on behalf of non-profits – we are really just a conduit. We hold money in escrow until a fundraiser is complete.

So under a lot of states’ laws, we were considered fundraising professionals when we raised money for non-profits. The administrative requirements for doing that were just too onerous for us to keep going. It was a relatively small market for us, and there were so many players coming into the field – Active, FirstGiving, Crowdrise – there are probably 100 sites out there now that are in some way or another helping non-profits raise money. So we decided that to really be true to our brand and what we care about, we had to focus on direct, people-to-people giving, and not non-profits. Yes, it’s a foreign experience to most people, but we think it can also be more rewarding.

We are different from a lot of other crowdfunding sites in that we offer one-on-one fundraising coaching to individuals. We integrate that coaching into our process with things like weekly tips and checklists to help people do it successfully.

And we’re very focused on people. When we lose someone who has been raising money through the site, our entire staff signs a sympathy card with personal messages that we send to the organizer or their survivor. You don’t see that from a lot of sites. A lot of them are just transaction-based.

ABN: That seems like a good example of a property that emerges from this further actualization of your person-to-person brand – I don’t know that you would think to do that if your site also included fundraising for non-profits and ten other things. But when you “know,” or your system “knows,” each person as an individual, then it makes more sense to develop practices that treat them as individuals.

DVW: This also benefits the friends and families of patients, who are some of the people who are often ignored in our health care system. They feel very helpless through the whole process. GiveForward is one way to help them feel empowered. We’re very much about helping them feel that they have partners in this process. We reinforce that in our team meetings – each person is supposed to bring in a favorite fundraiser of the week, then we vote and do a write-up about one of them.

ABN: So I understand why you make this strategic decision in regards to the non-profits. But could you tell me about a time when  you had to evaluate and respond to an emergent behavior among the type of users you have now?

DVW: In large part the idea of us being a tool to help friends and family came about because of our users. We had a story early on of a man who passed away from prostate cancer. He had worked at Johnson & Johnson for more than 25 years. He knew he was dying, and his friends knew they wanted to do something for his children. They raised about $23,000, and there were more than 300 messages from people he had worked with saying how much he had meant to them, what a wonderful person he was, and memories of his life that were really designed for the family that survived him, not the site. We realized we were not just a transaction-based site at that point. We realized that what we were really about was helping this family deal with a really tough experience in life. It changed the way we talk about our brand, leading us to talk more about giving a gift to friends and family rather than donations.

Related to that was one of the first people we lost on the site. She was battling cancer for the second time and was a very active community member. She died after a few thousand dollars had been raised for her. We got a call from one of her friends that said, “We can’t tell you how important this site was for helping all of us heal” because she had died so unexpectedly. She said, “That was the role you really play.”

ABN: What qualities of your leadership or practices within your company do you think help you to be open to these new kinds of user behaviors?

DVW: I have a really amazing business partner, Ethan, who is really empathetic to the users. We have each lost close family members to cancer, so we know how that process is for a family. But I think that since both of us had never done a startup before, we had a kind of unrecognized naiveté. We knew we didn’t have all the answers, so we looked to others for answers. I can’t say that’s gotten us into trouble yet. Of course, we can’t go with every suggestion users send us. If anything, I tend to lean to the side of adding too many features to the site, then Ethan has to kind of reel me back in.

One feature we’re working on right now is matching donations. Our users have seen great success doing that, but we’ve never automated the process. We didn’t think there was enough of a need for it, though it is very common in the foundation world or the non-profit world. So we’re creating that capability in our platform now. But it took us about six months to evaluate the opportunity for how much money people can raise for this, how much revenue it could drive for us, what’s the opportunity cost of doing this versus something else, etc.

It’s not accidental when we decide to make a change like this. We have a spreadsheet where we track each user response, suggestion, or complaint. If it sounds like something else, we put a tick make next to it, and whichever one is sitting at the top with the most tick marks guides our next move. At the beginning, when users had problems on the site, we would complain about user errors and say, “Ugh, they don’t get it. How can they not see that giant orange button?” But when you get multiple people telling you the same thing, there is something wrong with your user experience, even if you think it’s super-intuitive.

You know, we’re in a really emotional space for people that doesn’t happen very much on the Internet.

ABN: Right, it’s not happening on Facebook. Actually, I’m sure intense emotion happens a lot on Facebook, but Facebook does not seem designed with it in mind.

DVW: And we’re at the intersection of emotion and financial transactions in a way that very few sites are. Most e-commerce sites are trying to be.

ABN: I’m glad you brought up e-commerce, because it seems to me that even though you’re working in a charitable space, the dynamics of the system you’re creating are ultimately going to have to be studied with the sociological and economic tools we use to understand markets. How do you think we can develop that understanding given the fairly rigid categories we have right now of “non-profit” and “for-profit”?

DVW: In the beginning, we launched as GiveForward.org, not .com. We thought we would be targeting smaller non-profits and that the .org would be a more comfortable URL for them. After we switched to our current model, it took us almost another year to switch to .com, mostly because we were afraid of giving the little SEO we had built at that point. But what we found was that when we were a .org, we were always apologizing for being a private company instead of a non-profit.

I love non-profits and I think their impact is incredible. I am proud of the work the non-profit sector does and I am proud of this country for having such a strong sector. But at the same time, when you are looking at spending 40 to 50 percent of your overhead and effort just to raise funds, that means you are only spending 60 or 50 percent of your effort and energy on what you are actually meant to do. As a for-profit, you get to spend all of your time focusing on the work that is most important. So from the beginning, I knew I wanted GiveForward to have a for-profit structure.

I think we have a great argument for why for-profit companies should be in the social space and can do more good. We have more energy going into “How can we make this better?” all the time rather than “How do we stay afloat?” or “How do we find the next big donor?” I don’t apologize anymore for it.

ABN: I’ve had a theory that I’ve been batting around for a while that these bureaucratic structures like “company” and “non-profit” should actually be based on projected rates of growth rather than moral intent.

DVW: If you’re looking at motivation or where goodness lies, a successful, strong company that employs hundreds of people, that allows them to be the next generation of growth for their family – how is that not a positive impact for society? There may be some where it comes at an unacceptable cost…

ABN: Arms dealers, say.

DVW: Sure. But most entrepreneurs don’t go into the world saying, “I want to squeeze every penny out of every opportunity.” They want to add something to the world, and when they do that, they create a circle of economic growth around them. I think that that’s what people should be focusing on, not the legal structure. And I think investors should be more willing to take risks on entrepreneurs who are driving social change, all of the major ways people are trying to improve the world using for-profits.

ABN: So now I’d like to ask you to put your knowledge and experience to work for us. What do you make of this idea of mass patronage of the arts?

DVW: I love the idea. When someone is an artist, what they typically do is they fund everything. They buy their own paint and their own canvases and whatever, then all they can do is pray that someone is going to take it into their gallery and sell it, then they’ll get a piece of that sale price, and that’s how they’ll make a living. And that’s how it works ideally for a few people. Then for some their name becomes so recognized that more people would want their work.

ABN: …years and years in the future.

DVW: Or maybe after they’re gone. They’re going to be living this fabulous, posthumous life.

But what’s happening now with sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo is that people are banking on the fact that friends and family will care enough to help them through the early phases of their development in business and the arts. The concept of the starting artist doesn’t have to happen anymore.

Over time, mass patronage of the arts wouldn’t just mean getting together and pre-buying somebody’s work. It would mean a recognition through society – you know, most of the people working at Starbucks or as waiters have something else going on in their life. A lot of them are artists. People are working their butts off to do something they love. We as a society should support that. We shouldn’t view them as living some alternate lifestyle from the rest of us. I don’t know if that means tipping your waitress more or creating a system in which we provide insurance and social structures that allow people to pursue their passions.

ABN: I admire how noble your expression of the idea is. To be honest, I don’t necessarily think of it that way. To me, the most important fact is that the art market as it exists today is built on an economic error. People are buying objects when what they really want is relationships. They would be more satisfied if there were a way for the relationship to be commodified.

DVW: I think that’s what’s happening on Kickstarter. It’s not well-known artists, but when they promote to the general public or to their family and they raise $30,000, they are also getting a sense of notoriety and publicity that they never would have gotten from appearing at their local gallery. When you publicly spend $50 on a documentary or $200 on a print, you are saying to your friends and family that it is valuable. You get a social recognition of your purchase – which, I think, is one of the reasons why people buy big, expensive art. So being able to do that on a smaller scale could democratize that process and let anyone get that sense of ownership and relationship.

At the same time, would an actual, serious investor in art do it that way?

ABN: That’s one of the questions we’re considering. Art as it exists now is a pretty reliable investment vehicle. You know the value of a well-known painting is probably going to go up. So my hope would be that through mass patronage we would somehow be giving people an even greater investment opportunity: to buy into the next Picasso before that painting even exists. You could imagine that strategy spread out over a large portfolio of artists and ties of art.

DVW: But if an artist is really that brilliant, are they going to be on Kickstarter at all? I don’t know.

ABN: Here’s where I would view this system being different from Kickstarter. It really would be based around the buying and selling of the relationship. Kickstarter is still centered on the individual project. In a mass patronage system, the money really would buy access to the relationship. The art would almost be a side effect of that.

DVW: I have heard of companies that essentially allow you to invest in people’s future salaries. You help to fund their college education and then you pay them some percentage of their salaries over the rest of their lives.

ABN: It’s what the State of Illinois considered doing with scholarships and community colleges, in a roundabout way.

DVW: You’d be banking on the same kind of future value in your system. But as an investor, you’d have to know that you’d break even or lose money on most of your investments.

ABN: It could be a high-risk investment.

DVW: But I think that one of the unique things about the arts is that there are a lot of people who don’t mind giving money, even if it’s not a great piece. There are many people who may be investing in someone who is doing what they wish they had done with their life. There’s a different kind of relationship in that transaction. There’s the case where your nephew might be putting up some kind of gigantic multi-media installation that you would never want displayed in your home, but your support him because you never got to pursue your career in singing.

ABN: On your site, you have seen relationships like that emerge. And what’s interesting to me is that you’ve invented your own version of the relationship that the company participates in – things like the sympathy cards. But it’s a very delicate notion, cultivating these kinds of relationships and offering them as your product. How do you think you strike that balance between getting into the fray and encouraging new kinds of relationships without simply being mercenary or vulturish?

DVW: We had a piece about us go up on TechCruch, and afterwards we were completely attacked by random readers. They said, “This is a sad day for the Internet. I can’t believe this company is benefiting off of the misfortunes of Americans.” We had a few people come to our defense, pointing out that we offer a service that no one else provides, that the seven percent we charge is pennies compared to the tens of thousands of dollars someone can raise, that it is much less than what the person would have paid if they had put that kind of money on a credit card. It is definitely a balance. It is all about how you relate to your users. What we’ve learned is that if you can help create a community of people who think you are helping them do what they want to do and to pursue their goals. Then any transactions that go to support the company are looked upon as the same kind of support the patient is getting – without the support, the company wouldn’t survive and these people wouldn’t be able to do what they are doing. So it’s about creating that new mindset and ignoring the naysayers.

There will always be naysayers. I had someone stand up at a conference the other day and say, “Well, isn’t GiveForward just a Band-Aid on the health care crisis?” I thought, “There are tens of millions of people suffering from all sorts of problems in this country!” There is no way one startup is coming in to fix all that. And you guys wouldn’t have to fix everything in the arts. You just have to solve one specific problem in a way that your community will appreciate and continue to support financially.

ABN: You seem to be a person who knows very well the distance between the idea for such a community and the point of success.

DVW: It’s very large. We’re not there yet. I think we’re successful for the people we help, but there is so much room. And there will be a lot of room for the arts.

You know, when I was at Kaufmann there was a lot of interest in teaching artists how to be entrepreneurial with their work. I think that’s an important aspect of this. Artists would not be able to be passive anymore. They could not just say, “I’m brilliant, now come buy my work if you want to.” That’s not how our economy works – you have to consistently demonstrate your value in any medium. And I think a mass patronage system that would not also force artists to be more responsible for the value of their work won’t work.

ABN: Well, you folks have an educational component. You teach people how to ask more effectively, which is a kind of value proposition. What do you think you have learned from putting that together that could help in the implementation of mass patronage of the arts?

DVW: Part of it is about being pleasantly persistent. That sounds like a hokey non-profit term. But even the people who care about you or like what you’re doing need to be reminded about you. People need to be reminded to buy and to be reminded to give. So it would not be enough to show one piece of art and then expect people to participate. The artists will need to play that role and tell their stories in a compelling way, whether it is through the art itself or their descriptions of the art or their appeals to users.

ABN: One of the things you seem to have done effectively, particularly when you made that turn away from the non-profits and toward the individual givers, was figuring out how to tap into people who only want to spend small amounts of money and helping them do good. Right now, 99 percent of people can’t buy art or participate in the art market in a meaningful way. What do you think are some of challenges one can expect when you enter that arena where your power comes from large numbers of donors with small amounts?

DVW: I think one thing you can do is not look at people’s ability to contribute to the community as only financial. Something we added to GiveForward is the ability to give a “virtual hug.” If you don’t have money,  you can write some comments. But to do that, you have to post it to Facebook or invite people to give to that fundraiser. So you are exchanging that social impact for the luxury of being able to post. I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution, but if you can get 1,000 people to look at a piece of work, even if you can’t contribute any money to it, there ought to be some reward for that. The reality is that people need to feel some sort of reward and impact, whether you do that through stars or flashing lights or some kind of badge.

ABN: So the idea of mass patronage of the arts came out of a room of people saying, “The existing system is broken, let’s go invent a new paradigm.” But your experience seems to be nearly the opposite – you never sat down and said, “Okay, here’s our plan to change the health care system.” What do you think some of the challenges for mass patronage might be given these radically different origin stories?

DVW: I think that when you look at how big a problem is, you start to see all the different facets of the problem. You feel compelled to solve them all. I think that any problem can be too big for one solution. So I think you need to look at which specific aspect of the arts problem you want to solve. Maybe it will be young artists. Maybe it’s going to be artists in a certain medium. Maybe it’s going to be people who are changing artistic careers. But you can’t be everything for all artists. I think that’s a lesson that’s worth its weight in gold, because you could chase all those different avenues forever and never succeed.

I think a groundswell of early support is also essential for success in this type of project. Our earliest users on the site were very forgiving of problems with the site, even when things happened like a check being sent to the wrong address. They forgave us because we talked with them all the time about what we were trying to do and where we were trying to go. I think that’s one thing you have to do when you’re tackling a problem this big, because it’s your market that is going to help you determine which part of the problem you are going to solve first. The better you can solve that one problem, the more respected you will be in the space, and the more opportunities you will have to go solve other problems.

Whoever they are – early adopters, people who like to see the next big trend, people who care about promoting the arts – whoever those people are, you’ve got to find them and bring them in. With enough money you can bring them in quickly, but most startups take longer. When we got started, I had heard it takes three years to break even on a startup, but I thought, “Oh, we’re going to be so viral that it could never take us that long.” The reality is that we’re turning three now, and we’re just getting to the point where we really feel like people know what we’re about and we can pay our staff. So be ready for a long road, but an exciting road. Be ready for that and don’t give up.