One recent weekday morning, Chase Mattison spotted an injured bird on a Magazine Street sidewalk while walking his dog. It appeared to have hurt itself after flying into a nearby window.
It didn’t feel right to just stroll by, so Mattison scooped the bird up and brought it home before calling a veterinarian friend for advice.
“I put it in a box,” Mattison said. “Then, slowly but surely, it started moving around. A while later, all of a sudden, it just took off. I opened the window, and it flew away.”
As metaphors go, the bird’s resilience isn’t a bad one to describe what’s happening with Feels, the three-year-old startup venture led by Mattison and Caitlin Knoepp, his wife and business partner.
Feels is a web app that allows companies and individuals to give other people money to make their own charitable gift. The pitch goes like this: How about this holiday season, instead of sending your Aunt Mae a $25 Starbucks gift card and hoping she still has that latte habit, send her $25 via Feels and she can choose to donate it to one of more than a million registered nonprofits?
After launching the first version of their business about a year ago, Mattison and Knoepp slammed into their own window: The physical gift card system wasn’t efficient enough, and they would need to change to survive.Â
This month, they pushed a new version of the platform, a donation-making web app, into the world, and are now hoping it will take flight.
A cure for ‘gifting fatigue’
Knoepp and Mattison dreamed up Feels from their Lower Garden District apartment during the pandemic.
Feels co-founder Caitlin Knoepp shows off one of the causes that they promote on their “givting” platform. (Photo by Chris Granger, The Times-Picayune)
Leading up to the shutdown, many of their friends had been getting married or having babies, so they were attending lots of events that required gifts. After a while, the process of choosing pots and pans from a registry started to feel rote.
The two thought of a family member who had a tradition of giving charitable donations every Christmas. For years, she’d make donations in the name of family members, then print out a receipt, roll it up, tie a bow around it and place it under the tree.
“We started thinking: What if the recipient could choose the charity?” Knoepp said.
Knoepp and Mattison began to brainstorm a platform that could help individuals and companies give gifts that had meaningful impact in their communities while letting gift recipients select the causes that matter most to them.
They think of their startup as the cure for “gifting fatigue.”
“In this world of non-stop occasions, people don’t know what to get,” Mattison said. “That’s why Visa gift cards and Starbucks gift cards are popular. And we were thinking, why can’t we push some of that money into the nonprofit space.”
How it works
The launch last year of the first iteration of Feels involved selling physical cards emblazoned with QR codes that linked to an app that then allowed users to browse charities and make a donation. But they quickly learned that the logistics and cost of distributing cards was going to make growing the business difficult.
“We had to decide if we were going to pivot quickly,” Knoepp said. “Even though it was painful, it was the best decision.”
The entrepreneurs took the idea back to the drawing board and re-launched with their new, online-only format.
Feels users can send a gift via email or text. To do so, they create an account online, decide how much they want to give, add the name and contact info for the gift recipient and choose whether to send right away or schedule for later. They can also create a personalized message and choose from a variety of digital gift card templates.
It’s a process Knoepp and Mattison call “givting.”
When recipients receive their gifts, they click into the platform to choose from roughly 1.5 million U.S. nonprofits that accept charitable donations. The organizations are vetted by Feels partner Givinga, a platform that supports workplace giving programs.
They can search for a specific organization by name or browse categories like “furry friends,” “art for all” and “save the planet.”
By default, the gifts expire after three months. If the funds are unused at that time, they go back to the sender.
“It’s zero waste in more ways than one,” Mattison said. “It’s not tangible so it’s not going into the landfill, but also there’s no wasted spend, because if you send this and nobody accepts it, then it goes back into your account for you to give to someone else or for you to give to the charity of your choice.”
Feels gift givers, whether people or companies, receive donation receipts when they make payments, so they get the tax credits. Recipients just choose where the donations go. Feels charges a 10% fee for each transaction.
It’s still early days. The Feels founders have a handful of customers signed up now and are expecting more as the holiday approaches. On Dec. 5, they’re hosting a ribbon cutting at the Common House in partnership with the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce.
‘Most traction possible’
So far, Knoepp and Mattison have self-funded the startup, which operates in the same universe as organizations like Tisbest, a Seattle-based nonprofit that offers charity gift card programs.
They have received coaching and support from the Idea Village and are participating in a year-long mentorship program run by the Tulane Innovation Institute.
They said launching Feels just before the holidays is a chance to see how early adopters use the platform. The first donations went to the Sierra Club and Zeus’ Rescues, the New Orleans animal nonprofit.
They’ve already made a few fixes, including switching out thumbnail photos from each charity listing to illustrations from a New Orleans artist.
In the new year, they plan to continue improving their product, which means making the process of choosing a charity as intuitive and fun as possible.
“We’re discovering that people already have a nonprofit in mind,” Mattison said. “People just want to type in their charity name and make sure it’s there.”
Knoepp and Mattison see an opportunity to scale their business by convincing companies to give philanthropy instead of gift baskets and other physical gifts. According to the National Philanthropic Trust, corporations gave $36.55 billion in 2023 to charity, which was 6% of the total charitable giving in the United States. Corporate gifting overall, meanwhile, is a $250 billion industry overall each year, according to Coresight Research.
“We’re going after corporate clients because of the scalability,” Mattison said. “If you give a gift to your wife, that’s one transaction, but one company is going to give Feels to a hundred recipients. We’re hoping to get the most traction possible.”