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Friday, May 30, 2008
Technology veteran McHale sees the nonprofit light at Good2Gether
By Christopher Calnan
Designing laptops for kids
Entrepreneur Greg McHale changed his business focus when things changed for most everyone — Sept. 11, 2001.
McHale, then the CEO of Boston-based Virtual Ink Corp., decided there was more to life than developing the next hot technology.
Next month, he publicly launches an advertising network for charities with his latest venture, Good2Gether Inc. The company is scheduled to place nonprofit advertisements with online publications in Boston, Atlanta and San Francisco, McHale said.
Eventually, the Cambridge-based company plans to begin linking the content of publications (mostly newspaper websites) to related charities in more than 30 U.S. markets. The links would be free, but Good2Gether would take a 35 percent cut of donations made through the online links, McHale said. By contrast, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a 2005 report that professional fundraising organizations as a whole took a slightly greater than 50 percent cut on average of money they raised for charities.
“What we’re trying to do is fairly audacious,” he said. But “it is without a doubt the coolest stuff I’ve ever done.”
McHale, who started thinking about such “stuff” in the late 1990s, was on a flight from Boston to Des Moines, Iowa, during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., and learned of the details after landing.
“It was a life-changing thing for me,” he said. Virtual Ink “was just another piece of technology. I said to myself, ‘I’m really going to do something different.’”
So in 2003, McHale launched cMarket Inc., an operator of online auctions for nonprofits and charities. He left the company in 2006, but said he’s still the company’s second-largest noninstitutional stockholder.
CMarket CFO Harrison Fishman said it’s more difficult to attract investors to companies operating in the nonprofit and educational sectors than conventional tech markets. “The key is to find someone comfortable in the space, who has (previously) had success in the space,” he said.
McHale said he raised $3 million from angel investors. Earlier this month, the Najafi Companies, a Phoenix-based private equity firm, reported that it was investing an undisclosed amount in Good2Gether.
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