MGMT Boston - W4, Q4 23 - Givzey // Luciana Marzilli Lord, Repsly
Givzey // Luciana Marzilli Lord, Repsly
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 650 of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Givzey - a software platform for nonprofit fundraising serving institutional giving and large non-profit organizations
Thanks to Matt S. for the intro to Givzey
Luciana Marzilli Lord, Senior Director of Marketing @ Repsly - a hospitality trained marketing leader who takes an “over the top” approach to surprise and delight customers and prospects
Thanks to Danielle P. for the intro to Luc
🔥 Upcoming November Event: Boston Tech Breakfast Club - 11/7 @ 9am - co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups & Citizens Bank🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed software operating leaders, founders & investors to join for a Breakfast Club series I’m co-hosting alongside Morgan Barrett, Tech Breakfast Club / Kylie Bourjaily, InnoCrew / Jay Parekh, Fifth Down Capital / Kristen Craft, Fidelity for Startups / Robert Hughes III, Citizens
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Startups Highlighted: Procurement Sciences AI, HYCU
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Danielle Pedra // Delegate, Natalie Cantave // Estateably
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q3 Startups & Operators Highlighted
Givzey
Founder: Adam Martel
Founding: 2021
Mission: Empower fundraisers to easily and immediately formalize and book pledges of all sizes by scaling multi-year giving strategies to all levels of giving
Employees: 10 & 60% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $2.1M raised
Investors: York IE, members of Tiger 21, Orr Group, members of Launchpad Venture Group, and Various Angels
Key Customers: Bucknell University, College of Charleston, William & Mary, U.C. Davis
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Givzey is a “software platform for nonprofit fundraising” serving institutional giving and large non-profit organizations. Founder & CEO Adam Martel has been in institutional gift giving for more than a decade, working for higher education institutions like Emmanuel College and Babson.
From Babson, Adam co-founded Gravyty, a Boston-based software company building AI tools using natural language processing to aid frontline fundraisers. They built productivity tools to help with customized donor messaging and helped store donor information more securely. Gravyty was one of the first AI companies in the non-profit space, received a majority investment from private equity firm K-1 in 2020, and was merged with Graduway in 2021 after raising $25M from investors. When the deal closed, Adam was ready for his next act and launched Givzey the next day.
The original premise of the business was to create a “give now, pay later” concept similar to the popular B.N.P.L. (buy now pay later) movement popularized by Affirm or Klarna, so donors could split their gifts. Givzey soon evolved to become a gift agreement & donor retention platform. Then things took off.
With such deep experience in the institutional giving space, Adam and the Givzey team are uniquely positioned to build fundraising tech for fundraisers. Pretend your alma mater reaches out to you. They might say “Hey Van, you attended Coolidge College for 7 years. How would you like to support us for the next 7 years?” Then they might send over a PDF for you to fill out with your credit card information or a mailing address where you can drop a check in the mail. Growth PMs reading this are cringing. Imagine the conversion dropoff!
Givzey streamlines this whole process for institutions and donors. They send donors an email with a link, outlining the agreement and dollar amounts over the mutually agreed upon timeline. Donors simply need one click to confirm pledges or pay gifts. Givzey built out a full invoicing platform to hold donors accountable, send reminders, and empower organizations to collect payment on multi-year agreements after that initial pledge agreement. In summary, Givezy is a combination of DocuSign and Quickbooks for nonprofits, helping to create a new category in the nonprofit fundraising sector by taking a solutions based approach and gift fundraisers better tools.
Givezy services three main verticals - higher education, large non-profits, and hospitals & healthcare systems. Their data shows that there are roughly 1.5M non-profits in the U.S. and their platform is a fit for the “enterprise” bucket of this market. Approximately 21,000 large organizations nationwide have fully staffed fundraising departments which can support enterprise contracts.
Their delivery model is an annual SaaS subscription and they do not charge donors or institutions at the individual transaction level. Similar to DocuSign, they generate the gift contracts and then handle fulfillment all the way through invoicing from agreement to cash receipt, displacing the paper process that makes donors wary and limits a nonprofit’s ability to manage multi-year giving at scale.
William & Mary, a liberal arts college in Virginia, secured $500k in gifts in under 3 months using Givzey’s platform by leveraging its seamless onboarding and multi-year commitment product. They secured average gifts of $2,500 across a number of campus organizations and, to date have even received multiple $100k gifts through the platform. Another regional non-profit was able to secure $200k in 30 minutes after transitioning their pledges from an internal system to Givzey.
Givezy is currently growing revenue 500% quarter over quarter, with a goal to become the first $100M non-profit focused enterprise company in the next 3-4 years. They aim to reach 100+ enterprise customers by the end of the year and recently closed their $2.1m Seed fundraise with participation from York IE, members of Launchpad Venture Group and Tiger 21, the Orr Group, and various Angels. Givzey might also be one of the fastest growing non-profit focused startups..ever?
The team is made up of 10 employees and plans to grow to 30 in the next 18-24 months. They’re hiring pretty aggressively across Sales & Engineering roles to make sure they can support their expanding roadmap and fulfill all qualified demos on the GTM end. Culturally, many of them come from a gift giving background and the company exists to make sure they can take care of their team and do great work, helping drive institutional giving to another level empowering the organizations and donors of tomorrow.
Operators to Know:
Chris Campbell, VP of Sales
Emily Groccia, VP of Customer Success
Jon Jaszek, VP of Engineering
Kevin Leahy, CMO
Adam Martel, Founder & CEO
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Givzey team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key product & company milestones for the next 12 months?
Which product features are most requested to help unlock larger potential customers?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team to 25 employees?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Givzey you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more institutional giving into the digital age. All donors applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Luciana Marzilli Lord, Senior Director of Marketing @ Repsly
Luciana Marzilli Lord, better known to her colleagues as “Luc”, is a hospitality trained marketing leader who takes an “over the top” approach to surprise and delight customers and prospects. Creating personalized campaigns & experiences across industries, she serves as the Senior Director of Marketing at Repsly, returning to her retail roots to help CPG field reps deliver better in-store customer experiences.
Luc grew up just outside of Boston, one of three children from an Italian family with a strong heritage. Mr. Marzilli immigrated to the Boston area from Italy at 21, washing dishes and working at a local hotel as he paid his way into Northeastern on a path to a better life for himself and his future family. Studying engineering, today he owns a thriving home services business. Luciana’s mom is also Italian, and worked hard at a bank & then later as a high school culinary art teacher, growing up in Maine.
Luc and her siblings learned early (and often) to pull their own weight. Knowing their family’s origin story and how their parents supported them was an inspiration. Unsurprisingly, both Marzilli parents are still working. And all three Marzilli children are thriving professionally.
As a teenager, Luciana began waitressing at a local Italian restaurant. She was able to provide for herself and put the work ethic her parents had instilled in her to good use. Working at a restaurant, particularly this restaurant, made an impression. They preached the power of “over the top” hospitality and the rewards that come with putting in extra effort to serve customers and make them happy. They had a “never no” mentality and always talked about going above and beyond. The experience stuck with her. Perhaps she had a career in events and hospitality management ahead of her.
Luciana headed off to Northeastern like her dad, drawn to their co-op program. Enrolling with hospitality ambitions, she discovered marketing through a few amazing professors who helped her refocus to winning the hearts and minds of people through advertising and branded experiences.
At Northeastern she was lucky enough to land two prestigious 6 month internships at TJX and never left. She worked at TJX part time until she graduated, structuring her classes to fit her work schedule. Luciana felt really lucky to work at TJX, balancing early career imposter syndrome and vacuuming up learnings alongside world class marketing colleagues who managed big brand agencies and significant corporate resources.
She worked on photoshoots, prepped for TV commercials, and even helped market radio ads. Luciana was Associate of the Quarter in 2012, her first year out of school. She helped customize media, creative, and event campaigns for over 100 grand store openings along with international marketing campaigns, seasonal campaigns, and other in store initiatives. A pretty awesome start to any career in marketing she readily admits.
After nearly 5 years at the company, 3 of which came after graduation, the Boston tech & startup scene called to her. She found a role at athenahealth where she spent the next 6 years, building an amazing personal and professional network beyond her wildest dreams, influencing where she is today.
At athenahealth Luc held roles that spanned all types of demand generation - sponsorships, events, email, etc. in priority markets all through the lens of improving healthcare. She even owned their employer brand responsibilities during a time of rapid growth. Coordinating with their Brand team, HR, CMO and CHRO, she built out a new Employer Brand function presiding over 27 Employer of Choice awards. It was a successful initiative that brought her very close to the brand’s identity and athenahealth’s leadership team.
As she grew her skills, she was determined to try out an earlier stage startup. She took a chance on a relatively small company called Robin, a workplace software experience company, in early 2021 during the pandemic. Luc met their co-founder and CRO and instantly knew it would be a perfect fit.
At Robin, Luc started the Demand Generation team on a 4 person Marketing team. She loved every second of the opportunity to reimagine their demand generation engine, influencing and reinvigorating their marketing strategy. She worked tirelessly as their marketing team grew past 10 team members during her tenure there.
In 2022, Luc reconnected with a former athenahealth leader & colleague who had become Repsly’s CMO. Luc was excited about the work they are doing to support CPG brands of all sizes and she has embraced the opportunity to return to her Retail roots. She currently leads all demand generation, brand, social, and content strategy for Repsly as they help CPG brands and their field reps sell more at retail locations.
Marketing is Hospitality
When Luciana was just a teenager, she experienced the power of “over the top” hospitality. You don’t just meet customers' needs, you surprise & delight them. You make them feel good. One time when she was waitressing and a customer asked for Kool Aid for their toddler, she was encouraged to run across the street to a local convenience store to grab some.
As she became a marketer and progressed through her career serving businesses and consumers, she leverages that early experience to meet people where their needs are..and go past them.
Whether it’s taking someone’s dinner order or understanding your buyer in a large, multi billion dollar global market, solving their pain (or thirst?) where they are is paramount. Whether you are a waiter or a marketer, being able to surprise & delight prospects and customers by crafting personalized campaigns to address their needs in an “over the top” way is the key to breaking through. From experiences to taglines to creative, Luciana has learned to flex different muscles in an effort to help make customers smile through personalization. It makes a world of difference.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Finding Balance - “You can’t give 120% to every aspect of your life all at the same time. Learning how to balance the professional with the personal - and everything in between - is critical to ensure you are the best version of yourself every time you show up for your team and your company.”
If It’s Hard, Do It Again - “If something is hard, but worth it… don’t shy away from it. Keep doing it over it and over and over again until it’s easy, that’s how you grow.”
Build Your Relationships - “Relationships are everything. If you show up to work every day being the best version of yourself, treating people with respect, you’re building your network. If you don’t take the time to build them, you won’t go far.”
Luciana loves startups and aspires to be a Head of Marketing someday. Maybe even a CMO. The key right now is building out her arsenal or skills, learning and making mistakes but adding value all the while. She feels lucky to be in constant “learning mode” under a really smart mentor & leader, Repsly’s CMO, Caitlin Will.
If you want to learn more about Luciana, you can find her running Marketing at Repsly, building her new home just to the West of Boston, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing Luc. Excited to see all the above & beyond marketing experiences you design in the years ahead!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt