Sure, the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across 11 major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. Read our round-up of D.C.’s rising startups from last quarter here.
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Annual reports help nonprofits show donors, board members and volunteers their spending breakdowns and how much of a positive impact they’re having on communities. From design to web hosting and printing, these reports can take months to create and end up being pretty pricey. It’s also often hard to track the return on investment of annual reports because nonprofits typically can’t tell who’s reading them and if it’s resulting in donations.
Fed up with how much time and money went into making annual reports, Josh Kligman decided to create a solution to help nonprofits streamline and cut costs. He co-founded Yearly, a SaaS platform that allows nonprofits to digitally host annual, impact, board and event recap reports for a small subscription fee.
“Nonprofit budgets are tight but even when the economy bounces back, there is no reason to spend $500 or $5,000 on printing when 99 percent of their donor base would be fine with, and appreciate, an annual report that lives on a website,” Kligman, CEO of Yearly, told Built In via email. “From there, nonprofits can track metrics on their annual report within Yearly, such as unique views, and if they embed the report on their website, marketers can use Google Analytics to track time spent reading the report as well as other key metrics to show their return on their investment.”
“Nonprofits can track metrics on their annual report within Yearly, such as unique views, and if they embed the report on their website, marketers can use Google Analytics to track time spent reading the report as well as other key metrics to show their return on their investment.”
Since its launch in 2019, Yearly has grown from 15 customers to approximately 2,300, including some big names like the World Wide Fund for Nature, Teach for America and The Forbes Funds, among others. That growth is due in part to Yearly’s clever strategy during the slump of 2020, when nonprofits were squeezed particularly tight because of the pandemic.
“When the pandemic came, there was no one answering the phone when we ran sales calls, so we didn’t even try. I wasn’t going to email nonprofits with bleeding budgets asking if they want to see a new technology tool at that time, either. So we gave it away for free. About 1,500 nonprofits signed up and many of them are still active users today,” Kligman said.
Yearly still offers a free trial and last year launched its subscription model, which starts at $75 a month. It hopes to continue growing its platform as well as its team. Currently, the company is looking for a product engineer with front-end experience.
