Causeway: Part stock fund + part donor-advised fund = A new bid for young donors

abcnews.go.com:

What might persuade affluent 20- and 30-somethings to give to charity

What might persuade affluent 20- and 30-somethings to give to charity?

Charity Navigator, which millions of Americans use to guide their giving, is betting it has an answer to that vexing question for nonprofits: a new online platform that promotes giving to causes, not individual organizations. The ratings giant announced Tuesday its acquisition of Causeway, the start-up company behind the platform.

Causeway, which launched only last year in a test with about 100 donors, invites the charitably minded to make monthly recurring gifts to one of its cause funds — curated bundles of nonprofits rated as highly effective. The structure mimics that of a mutual or stock exchange fund, in which investors put money into a basket of publicly traded companies rather than individual stocks.

Charity Navigator aims to expand the Causeway model and boost giving, particularly among younger Americans, says CEO Michael Thatcher. Millennials and members of Generation X are often eager to, say, bring clean water to developing countries, Thatcher says. But they don’t care who gets it done. “They’re impatient with the brand and identity of individual organizations. They’re really just looking for results.”

Causeway co-founders Ben Horwitz and Reed Rosenbluth — tech entrepreneurs in their late 20s — created the platform after they saw many of their high-income friends sitting on idle donor-advised funds, paralyzed about how to give effectively. Others were “firing from the hip,” Horwitz says, without a plan or research.

Causeway, Horwitz says, seeks to simplify and spur giving. Its online format aims to replicate the digital experience of managing finances or stocks. “My