Vance Roush: Redesigning Philanthropy for the 21st Century
Vance Roush makes it easy for a new generation of donors to give. All images courtesy of Overflow.
Vance Roush spent years as a product manager at Google before becoming a Pastor and starting Vive, “Silicon Valley’s Hippest Church.” Half a decade later, Roush has found a new calling, which merges his passions for tech, philanthropy, and community into one with Overflow, the PayPal of stock donations.
Since soft launching in July 2020, Overflow has already signed up more than 130 of the top nonprofits in the world to use its platform, including Meals on Wheels, Golden State Warriors Foundation, and more. With Overflow, Roush set out to square two realities: The U.S. is in the process of the largest wealth transfer in history on the level of $20 trillion going from Boomers to Millennials. And yet, Millennials who have benefited from the recent stock market boom and want to donate their stocks to charity have no easy way to do it. (It typically involved faxes.) Overflow’s digital transfers put that all to rest.
As Gen Z hopes to reshape the market with a clear eye for social impact—and apps like Robinhood and StockX have revolutionized how we build wealth––it’s become more clear that the way we give back is stuck in the 20th century. Here Roush and Daniel Kuh, Head of Design and Product at Overflow, discuss how they are shaping modern philanthropy, reducing friction to make it easier for a new generation of donors to give, and why gifting stock benefits charities more than cash.
Overflow's brand illustrates the important role that good design can play in amplifying important causes’ reach and impact—and with making complicated ideas seem more accessible to all.
What problem have you set out to solve?
Vance Roush: We saw a whitespace in the donation market. It started in my church community when people who worked for companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook asked me how they could donate some of their stock. I didn’t know, so I went to Fidelity, opened up a brokerage account and gave the account details to these donors. Then I would never hear from them.
Finally, one of the donors reached out and told me that to donate stock they had to download an authorization form, fill it out physically and fax it in. And if you tell a Millenial to fax in anything, it’s just not going to happen. That was the epiphany moment where we saw we could make this frictionless and fun.
How long does it now take to make a stock donation using Overflow?
Vance Roush: Two minutes to fulfill the transaction completely online through our platform.
This feels like something the big financial institutions could have spotted and done. What do you think they overlooked or missed?
Vance Roush: Ultimately, what it comes down to is that brokerage houses are not incentivized to make stock donations easier. There’s no specific business model for them to help a specific account holder on their brokerage account to give away stock. Because they're trying to manage more stock. Fundamentally, there's no incentive, no innovation. We are aligning our economics with our ability to unlock unprecedented amounts of generosity. We are incentivized to innovate in this space.
If you look at the national average for online giving right through a platform like PayPal, it's $128. Our stock average is $6,031. I think this is for a number of reasons. When you're giving from your stock portfolio, you're giving from truly your overflow account, your abundance account. This is not where you're paying rent or food. There is a different mentality.
Overflow is betting that their fresh design and approachable voice will set them apart in the nonprofit space, and inspire a new generation of philanthropists who have been donating more in the past year than ever before.
How have you designed the site for something that everyone knows, but with a new viewpoint?
Daniel Kuh: It does not look like other philanthropy sites and that is intentional. The user experience in the non-profit can feel transactional. We're trying to elevate that experience so it's not transactional, but it feels more like a celebration. We want to make a splash, and we worked with Alright Studios to get this message across. For example, our main color is red to stand out, to let people know that we're flipping the script.
What have you learned from this experience so far?
Daniel Kuh: Insecurity is real. You’ve got to be not afraid to fail. And everyone has an opinion.
What are the tax benefits to donating stock?
Vance Roush: This is a very, very important piece of our business and why people will use Overflow instead of donating cash. Donating stock is the most tax efficient way to give.
Let's say you have a position in Apple over the last several years and its grown by $10,000. You have $10,000 in gains. Depending on your tax implications, you could owe up to 40% in capital gains tax and that is before President Biden's potential increase of capital gains tax.
This means if you sell those shares, you’ll only be giving $6,000 of the gains to charity. If you use Overflow and donate the shares to a charity, the charity will get the entire $10,000 in gains if they sell the stock because they are a 501c3 tax exempt organization. And you get the tax deduction on the fair market value of your shares at time of transfer. There are huge tax efficiency implications by donating stocks.
If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor, check out Morten Bonde’s story about working as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight and how the first family of micro-mobility is redesigning the city car in Switzerland.
