Never Settle: An Interview with Michelle Rittenhouse, Co-Founder of ALMA
Happy Sunday, everyone!
I am really excited to share a special profile of a New Happy exemplar with you today.
A few months ago, I heard about a new app called ALMA on Twitter. Their Twitter bio described them as “an optimistic community of philanthropists and changemakers” which obviously piqued my interest immediately. I discovered ALMA is a new technology platform for supporting important causes, and they’re offering a completely innovative way to donate to non-profits.
Our whole thing at The New Happy is the science-backed belief that giving is the path to changing the world and to living a personally happy life. Any new technology that helps us to do that is incredibly exciting, and something that I want to share with you all!
I interviewed one of ALMA’s co-founders, Michelle Rittenhouse, who alongside her co-founder Dan Hill is determined to turn every person into a philanthropist. She is today’s New Happy exemplar because she is using her skills to make the world a better place, and she’s also making it easier for others to do so; a double whammy of goodness! Michelle is incredibly purposeful about making giving easier, and I think you’ll be inspired to hear how she turned that purpose into a reality.
What does the research tell us about giving and well-being?
fMRI imaging shows that giving money to charity leads to brain activity in the regions that control pleasure and rewards, suggesting that giving to others is personally rewarding
A study across 136 countries found that spending money on others is consistently associated with greater happiness
Volunteering and giving increases life satisfaction
Altruistic financial giving (like donating to charity) leads to a greater promotion of happiness over personal spending
I’m really excited to share Michelle’s story with you today, and to invite you to learn more about ALMA and how it might help you integrate giving into your life in an easy, compelling, and meaningful way.
Dan and Michelle, cofounders of ALMA
Here are the top three things I learned from Michelle:
The main barrier to people giving is some sort of friction, and by eliminating it, we can activate people’s naturally generous selves
Bringing together a community of people who each give a little bit can lead to a lot of impact for the beneficiary.
Choose to never settle for how things are - you can always fight to make them better.
Hi Michelle! It’s so amazing to have you here with us today. I can’t wait to learn more about your product, ALMA, that you and your team have created that is changing the way that millennials give to nonprofits and charity. Could you tell me a bit about how you came up with the idea for ALMA?
It’s a two part story. It started with a very tangible moment in time: the 2017 wildfires in the Bay Area. After the fires in Sonoma, dark smoke filled the city, and I had friends who lost their houses. It was a very tangible, real problem.
My friends and colleagues wanted to help the situation and give back, but there was a disconnect between people's desire to do good and their actual ability to do so. Friends didn’t know what organizations to support or how to help. One friend drove to Sonoma to donate blankets and the nonprofits said, “Well, that’s great, but we have tons of blankets and we don't need any more. What we need most is cash."
There's this huge gap between people wanting to do good and actually what the nonprofit needs. That moment showed me there’s an opportunity to connect the two sides of the market.
The second part of the story arose as I’ve always been pretty involved with nonprofits. I was on the board of a nonprofit, a fantastic organization called Back On My Feet. The San Francisco chapter launched in 2016 and we wanted to grow, so we were constantly thinking about how to get more members and more engagement in the SF community. I noticed that the way that the nonprofits thought about growth was incredibly different than the way that my team at Airbnb (which happened to be the growth team) thought about growth. We had trackable marketing budgets and sophisticated tools and metrics in place that a nonprofit usually doesn’t have access to. That spurred the other insight for me: how might nonprofits start to think about growth the way a company like Airbnb does?
So, I started thinking about creating ALMA to be a marketplace that connects donors and nonprofits.
What happened after you had the initial inspirations?
In February of last year, my cofounder Dan and I left Airbnb to start ALMA. Our first couple weeks were spent in local coffee shops talking to people about their charitable giving habits - if they give, how they give, why they give, what they like about it, and what they don’t like about it. People were really open with us.
Our first major learning was that it is really easy for people to identify causes that they care about. It’s a question that people find easy to answer: “I care about early childhood education”, “I care about protecting the environment”, or “I care about women's rights”. But when you ask them which organizations they support, people often struggle to come up with answers. Either they used to support one, but then they moved to a new city; or maybe they volunteered once somewhere, but weren’t sure if the organization was still around.
Picking a cause is easy but picking a nonprofit felt hard. It felt like work, and at the end of the day, that creates friction in giving.
Through those conversations, we had a breakthrough: what if we make it possible for people to donate to causes rather than directly to a single nonprofit?
What if we did all the work to verify and curate the nonprofits by cause, so that we could allow people to focus on the giving?
What was something you learned about people giving?
People are surprisingly generous and we really think that there is an opportunity to unlock more opportunities for people who want to give but just aren't doing it today. About 56% of American households donate to charity. The median donation is around $800 per household. So it's actually quite high, higher than I realized when we started this whole process.
Hearing you say that give me goosebumps. It can be so easy to feel down about the state of the world, but when you hear about how regular people truly embed generosity into their day, it makes me feel so hopeful. Was there anything else that surprised you?
Another interesting learning was that people don’t know how much to give. Many people said they don’t know what’s socially acceptable, they’re not sure what’s financially comfortable for them, or they don’t know what’s impactful for the nonprofit.
When you’re buying a product at a Nike or a Sephora, you know exactly the value you're getting for every purchase. But when you're donating to a nonprofit, it's a different type of communication of value. People aren't sure how much to give. That's been a really fun user challenge to think through.
Currently, ALMA is live in San Francisco. Where do you see the organization growing to next?
We really want ALMA to be our generation's way to give back. We are starting right now with a pretty narrow view in terms of providing financial support to a subset of nonprofits. There are so many ways to expand that.
For example, if you care about the environment, in addition to making a financial donation to the nonprofits, how can we facilitate volunteering? How can we facilitate joining their board? How can we facilitate adding your voice on petitions and in local politics? There is so much room to grow beyond the charitable giving space.
That’s so exciting. That reminds me of something we recently launched at LinkedIn called The Plus One Pledge, where you commit to going outside of your traditional network to help someone. I’ve been connecting with many people to give them advice, and it’s made me realize how there’s a major opportunity to better unlock giving of oneself in some way that eliminates the friction, the way you have for financial giving. Can you please invent something for this?!
Absolutely, I think skill based volunteerism is really big opportunity. While some nonprofits seek general volunteers for thinks like beach cleanups, many nonprofits really need an engineer to lend a hand, or someone to give marketing advice, or someone to write press releases. That specificity could be so valuable to the nonprofit.
What’s a story from one of your users or your partners that have shown you the impact of ALMA upon them?
After the 2018 California wildfires started, we launched a fund for ALMA to support the relief efforts. As a huge natural disaster in California, we really wanted to support it, and as I mentioned, people weren’t sure who to support or help.
After sending a recent donation to one of the featured nonprofits in that fund, we got a reply back saying, "Wow, this is amazing. That money helped 56 families who were displaced by the fires. It helped them get food, clothes, find accommodations for the time being."
It made it so real. Even though almost all of our donors are giving under a hundred dollars, it adds up to real, meaningful impact. I was proud ALMA could provide significant impact for local nonprofits who can deploy that capital incredibly well.
That is so incredible. What a fantastic way to unlock your own passion and to give at the same time. My conversations have shown me that many of our generation [millennials] are really inspired to do this.
I think it's really easy for our generation to not feel burned out, but when you take a look at what millennials have done - Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, etc - you see that it is really possible use technology to drive change. And we are not a generation that sits back and watches. We can really drive change. As we're coming into our own, we're realizing that we're the next generation to lead the country. It's our time to make a bigger impact and not settle.
That is so exciting. I’d love to learn a little bit on how this connects with your personal perspective on happiness and living a good life.
I do really feel like it is deeply ingrained in us as humans to want to give back and to get joy from giving back. A recent example for me is volunteering with Back on My Feet, an organization where volunteers go running three mornings a week with people who are experiencing homelessness. At 5:45am, there are three teams around San Francisco doing these morning runs. When I first joined, it was a completely new experience, and I wasn’t sure what to expect; by the end, I felt like I was friends with both the volunteers and the members. A part of Back on My Feet which I love is you can't even tell who's a volunteer and who’s a member of the program. When it’s 5:45 in the morning and you’re tired and you’re running and your clothes are all sweaty, you’re just all people. You’re all human.
If you could tell or invite the people of the world to do one thing, what would that be?
Never settle.
That can show up in so many different formats. When I was in college I did an alternative spring break trip volunteering after Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi. While I was there, my dad sent me a postcard with a quote from Margaret Meade on it, saying "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." It's one of those quotes that just sticks with me.
If you believe in something, you have to fight for it and you cannot ever settle for the status quo.
Thank you so much Michelle!
Want to use ALMA to become a philanthropist?
I’d love to invite you to check out ALMA’s website here and follow them on Instagram here.
Using ALMA is a fantastic way to contribute to the causes you care about and to support non-profits who are doing so much good in their communities. I really hope that their platform helps you to bring more New Happiness into your life!