19
VICTORIA — The six-figure income, the prestigious job at Apple, the status of being a teenage Internet whiz kid and the endless good times wore thin and wore out Victoria-born Tom Williams.
He was 25 years old and having an early midlife crisis.
Meaning had been sucked from his life, says Mr. Williams, so he dumped his job, salary and lifestyle and started selling philanthropy online to make his world real again.
But he couldn't bury his entrepreneurial gifts and quickly discovered his keen marketing skills are handy tools when it comes to the charity game - a business, he believes, badly in need of a shake-up.
Tom Williams, CEO, GiveMeaning.com, seen in this undated handout photo. The six-figure income, the prestigious job at Apple, the status of being a teenage whiz kid and the endless good times wore thin and wore out Victoria-born Tom Williams. He was 25 years old and having an early mid-life crisis. Meaning had been sucked from his life, says Williams, so he dumped his job, salary and lifestyle and started selling philanthropy online. (THE CANADIAN PRESS)
"Absolutely, and it's high time," Mr. Williams said recently in Victoria. "Frankly, the issues are that we don't know where our money is going.
"The big charities are continuing to get a disproportionately large amount of donor dollars and the smaller organizations who are sometimes doing grassroots work in communities across the country, and other ones, are starved for cash, having to literally consider shutting down their operations," he said.
In 2004, Mr. Williams returned to British Columbia and launched GiveMeaning.com. He is the chief executive officer.
He believes his online charity can change the charity industry, change lives. It changed his.
"Never had I had more energy or passion," Mr. Williams said.
Now 28, Mr. Williams smiles knowingly as he explained that giving - even small amounts, well directed - can change the world.
"It used to be all about the money," Mr. Williams told a recent meeting of business executives at the Union Club.
"But you know what I found out is, money is the most useless scorecard because there's always a guy who has way more money, who is far less intelligent, who is far less moral or ethical, and yet he has more money."
At 12 years old, Mr. Williams started his first computer-gaming company. By 15, he'd left Victoria for Silicon Valley, working for Apple and helping pioneer the Internet music industry.
He went on to provide corporate and online strategy advice to Intel, Hilton Hotels and other Fortune 500 companies. He even worked for junk-bond king Michael Milken.
"It was frustrating," Mr. Williams said. "I was pulling my hair out. Now, I can say my measurement of my success is around how much meaning I've made.
"If somebody is making more meaning than me, all can say is, 'Man, I admire you.' As opposed to 'I envy you.' "
The GiveMeaning website gets about one million hits a month and includes about 1,500 projects.
"What we're doing is we're saying it's not about one donor giving a big amount," he said. "It's about every one of us giving what we can and when those donations are pooled together they become meaningful amounts of money."
B.C. Hydro, British Columbia's public power utility, is part of an elementary school and community centre fundraising initiative, but many of the other projects are individual or small-group efforts, Mr. Williams said.
Two Victoria women who supply meals and blankets to the city's homeless every Friday night were in danger of running out of money this winter, but after posting their needs on the GiveMeaning website, they raised the $3,000 needed to keep going, he said.
Schoolchildren raised money to build soccer fields in Ecuador and a grandmother who originally wanted to raise $10,000 for the Stephen Lewis Foundation has already raised $70,000.
"At GiveMeaning everything is a specific project," Mr. Williams said.
"If a project is $5,000, that's how much they raise. What you know is 100 cents from that dollar goes out to build those projects."
People can track projects online, he said.
Mr. Williams believes GiveMeaning allows individuals to target their donations.
He said it has caught the attention of traditional charitable organizations - some who still door-knock to solicit donations - and he has visions of it becoming like Google, where advertisers keep the service running.
"Our intention in the long term is to convince advertisers that their money is better spent at a website where people are coming back and back again to look rather than the one-time golf tournament, the one-time dinner party," he said.
Mr. Williams said individuals and corporations should demand high returns for the money they donate to charity.
"I call it [a] return on generosity," he said. "You certainly are not going to invest in a stock that's performing poorly or whose performance you can't measure.
"Similarly, you don't want to invest in a charity or a charitable donation where you don't know how the money's being used."
Mr. Williams offered the Victoria business crowd help with charitable projects. He said corporations have the power to change the world with charity.
One business leader told him she was moved to tears upon learning about the strength of his community projects. But others suggested all charities - including large, well-established organizations - are always striving to reduce overhead costs and offer transparency to people who want to make donations.
For every $1 raised in Victoria, the B.C. Cancer Foundation receives $3 in research grants, said Laura Walsh, the foundation's Vancouver Island director of development.
"Certainly, the B.C. Cancer Foundation, and many other reputable charities, we consider ourselves very transparent," she said.
"We keep our administration costs very low. We're very accountable to donors, particularly on Vancouver Island. They can come right into the cancer research centre and the cancer clinic and meet the doctors and find out where the money's going."
Ms. Walsh said she was impressed with Mr. Williams's "incredible grassroots charity work."
A spokeswoman for the Land Conservancy of B.C. said its donors are able to target their money to particular projects.
The Land Conservancy regularly mounts campaigns to purchase and protect areas that are available for purchase or slated for development.
"There are people who know what really makes their heart go pitter-patter," said Carla Funk, the land conservancy's donation spokeswoman.
"Then there are other people who say, 'I want to have the option to change my mind.' "
She said potential donors who are flexible with where their money goes should consider an online charity, but the conservancy usually attracts donors who are passionate about one of their projects.
Mr. Williams said he wants everybody to feel they received the most for the money they donated.
"It's not about building a better mousetrap," he said. "It's about every single human being in the world being potentially touched by this service. That's better than a bigger mousetrap."
