Why GivePass exists
Every shop-local promotion I watched run in my own town asked the same people to pay for it — the businesses with the least room to. Discount ten percent, hope the traffic covers it, find out in March whether it did. Meanwhile the organizations with actual community budgets were writing checks for banners.
GivePass swaps who pays. The sponsor funds the pool, residents decide where it goes, and the shops give up nothing but counter space.
GivePass is a sponsor-funded foot-traffic platform for local communities. A chamber of commerce or similar organization runs the campaign, a sponsor funds a pool of money, and residents earn that money for local causes by visiting participating local businesses — which pay no fee and offer no discount.
A different funding model
Small businesses need foot traffic, but many cannot afford to give up margin to create it. Sponsors already spend money supporting communities, local causes, and business districts. GivePass connects those budgets to a campaign that people can participate in and that local organizations can measure.
The charitable contribution is not an add-on. It gives people a reason to explore local businesses and a voice in where sponsor funds go.
How we operate
No purchase is required. People can participate, make progress, and direct funds without buying anything.
Spending more never unlocks more. Contributions do not scale with transaction amounts, and GivePass does not read what someone spent.
GivePass never holds charitable funds. Sponsors pay participating causes directly.
Participant data is not an advertising product. GivePass does not sell participant data or build cross-campaign advertising profiles.
Where GivePass is today
The product is built and it is not a prototype — a campaign runs end to end, from recruiting businesses through verified scans to settlement records. What it does not have is a completed season behind it. There are no case studies and no references, and any number on this site is an illustration rather than a customer result.
What being first is worth
The campaign structure is built around your community, not fitted to a template that later customers will inherit.
You work directly with the person who builds the product, and what you need changes what gets built next.
The reporting is designed against the questions your board actually asks, because yours are the first.
If a proven track record is what your decision needs, we are not there yet and it is better to say so now than at settlement.
Who built it
I run SKM Digital, an independent studio in Woodbury, Connecticut, and I have been building websites and web software since 2006 — for nonprofits, healthcare organizations, small companies and other agencies.
Before this I spent seven years at the National Organization for Rare Disorders, where I took rarediseases.org from 800,000 visitors a month to two million at its peak, and built their intranet and community app. GivePass is the same problem in a smaller place: the organizations that need people to show up are rarely the ones with a budget to make it happen.
Building for
Since 2006
Based in
Woodbury, Connecticut
Studio
SKM Digital
You can check all of that at skm.digital. If you are going to fund a first campaign, you should know exactly who is on the other end of it.
Have a community, sponsor, or local campaign in mind? Email hello@givepass.app or tell us a little about what you are considering.