Sevenly—Using Social Media for Charity

Sevenly has its roots in the severe dichotomy Partridge and his busi­ness part­ner per­ceived between the peo­ple who have money and those in dire need—and the appar­ent lack of flow from one to the other. “My busi­ness part­ner, Aaron Chavez, and I had a con­ver­sa­tion about the com­plex global issues of poverty,” Partridge told Organic Connections. “We had a light bulb turn on: we real­ized the prob­lem wasn’t them. It’s not the bil­lions of poverty-stricken peo­ple across the globe; it’s the bil­lions of peo­ple that for­got how to care and for­got how to give.

“We wanted to build a model that took peo­ple through the road of gen­eros­ity: from get­ting them to donate a tweet or a ‘like’ on social media to hav­ing them buy a prod­uct that gave to a char­ity. It would move them toward the greater mis­sion of generosity—getting them next to make stand-alone dona­tions, and ulti­mately hav­ing them become life­long givers and sup­port­ers of causes.”

Sevenly is based on a simple—yet powerful—model. Every week of the year, the com­pany part­ners with a dif­fer­ent char­ity. A unique and fash­ion­able T-shirt, pro­mot­ing that par­tic­u­lar char­ity, is offered for sale through the Sevenly web­site. For every T-shirt sold, Sevenly gives $7 to that char­ity. At the end of the 7-day cam­paign, the char­ity is sent a check for the money raised.

It’s one thing to for­mu­late such a worth­while goal, but it’s another to actu­ally be clever enough to reach it. It was def­i­nitely cleverness—in this case with social media—that ele­vated Sevenly so quickly. “When Aaron Chavez and I got together, we had some influ­en­tial social media followings—a few mil­lion fans com­bined,” Partridge recounted. “That is how we started, and we are unlike any other com­pany. We don’t do print adver­tis­ing, radio or TV; we barely even do Google ads. It’s almost entirely social media. Nearly all our rev­enue and our giv­ing are dri­ven from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest. I’d rank us as prob­a­bly in the top ten cur­rent com­pa­nies in the world as far as social media suc­cess is con­cerned. Our mar­ket­ing model doesn’t exist else­where; it’s com­pletely inno­v­a­tive and cus­tomized for us. It’s scal­able, it’s low over­head, it’s high return on invest­ment, and it also ful­fills our mis­sion in spread­ing the words that we need spread about our com­pany. It’s a very good bal­ance and it’s extremely powerful.”

Partridge and Chavez have built social media communities—many of which have fol­low­ers in the millions—around top­ics such as inspi­ra­tion, com­edy, doing good, fash­ion, art and faith. “We build these really big com­mu­ni­ties, and then we just plug Sevenly into them,” Partridge explained. “They then fun­nel down into Sevenly’s core com­mu­nity, where we have maybe 50,000, and it just keeps grow­ing and growing.”

Another vital aspect of the busi­ness is the selec­tion of char­i­ties. “We have an inter­est­ing vet­ting process that we work through,” said Partridge. “We typ­i­cally try to pick out causes that we really believe in and that we have heard about or have been brought to our atten­tion. We do a lot of vet­ting in terms of the cam­paign direc­tion. We make sure that we sign an agree­ment that the money must be used for exactly what the cam­paign is sup­posed to be used for. It can’t go to oper­at­ing expenses; if we raise $10,000 for Darfur, $10,000 is going to Darfur—not $8,000 of it and $2,000 for oper­a­tions or whatever.

“We don’t pick based off of size or influ­ence; we really pick based off of impact. Sometimes a smaller char­ity can make a heck of a lot more impact than a big­ger charity—they might be faster and more agile. We do work with a lot of big char­i­ties, but there are some small ones in there. It really just depends on the issue that we’re work­ing with.”

Are the char­i­ties actu­ally uti­liz­ing the money for what it was intended for? Partridge also makes sure of that. “We’re now mak­ing it a part of the char­ity com­mit­ment that we get follow-ups through­out the year,” Partridge explained. “Like, ‘Hey, thank you. Here are some pho­tos from what you guys have done.’ We have a four-week update for every­body that pur­chased a prod­uct. We send them an e-mail update with pho­tos, how it has changed people’s lives, and maybe a story or two from that vil­lage or that area of the world.”

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In hear­ing back about how their dona­tions are put to work, Partridge gets some incred­i­ble accounts, and he shared one with us. “Mercy Ships is a char­ity that takes cruise ships and turns them into med­ical ships,” Partridge related. “They go to third-world coun­tries and offer free med­ical care and surg­eries. Well, they had to shut down a sur­gi­cal cen­ter on one of their ships because they didn’t have enough peo­ple to donate their time. That meant that peo­ple with tumors the size of base­balls on their faces who had been out­cast from their soci­eties in places like Sierra Leone, or peo­ple who’d had cleft lips until they were 25, or peo­ple who had cataracts, were not able to be cured because the ship was lack­ing employ­ees and vol­un­teers. They sent us a let­ter say­ing that, through our cam­paign for them, they ended up hav­ing six peo­ple who were already either physi­cians or nurses apply to be on the ship. They took four of them and actu­ally opened back up the sur­gi­cal center.”

Partridge is very happy with Sevenly and plans to con­tinue and expand it. He feels he has learned some extremely valu­able lessons about help­ing peo­ple to con­tribute. “I think if peo­ple know and are edu­cated on the issues, they’re much more likely to give,” he con­cluded. “If you can con­nect the cause with peo­ple in a way that is prac­ti­cal and quantified—meaning like $7 pro­vides 35 meals, or $7 pro­vides a fam­ily with clean water in Peru for a year—that’s a real return on invest­ment to some­body. When peo­ple under­stand how it works, I think there’s a lot of value in terms of indi­vid­u­als open­ing their hearts and their wal­lets. They also get a great prod­uct in return, and we like to think of the prod­uct itself as a way to spread and share the mis­sion. They get a reminder when they put their shirt on that ‘I did some­thing for some­body else; this prob­lem still exists and these peo­ple need me.’”

Visit the web­site at www.sevenly.org.

Check out the Sevenly Facebook page at www.facebook.com/sevenly.org.