When we launched Force4Good in 2019, the mission was clear: help restaurants run better fundraisers. Automate the chaos, eliminate the paperwork, and make it easier for local businesses to give back to the schools and nonprofits in their communities. It worked. Restaurants started embracing fundraiser nights as a genuine growth lever, not just a feel-good story, but a revenue story.
We believe local nonprofits and communities are the integral foundation of what we do — and that the best solutions come from listening to everyone at the table. Through business reviews, candid conversations with our partners, and client surveys, we heard what businesses needed to manage their community giving more efficiently. And from our nonprofit partners, we heard what was making their side of the equation harder than it should be. The answer to both turned out to be the same: a platform that does more. We’re thrilled to announce the newest additions that solve for both sides at once.
From Fundraisers to the Full Picture of Community Giving
Restaurants and local businesses run fundraising events, and we’re proud that the Force4Good platform has always supported them. But they also donate school certificates for silent auctions, sponsor local 5Ks and school carnivals, and field donation requests that come in through email, voicemail, paper forms, and messages with no system to track any of it. Meanwhile, nonprofits told us they were spending hours hunting down contact information, following up on requests with no status updates, and trying to coordinate supporter invitations with nothing but a spreadsheet and hope.
So we built what they needed.
Force4Good now supports the full spectrum of community giving: fundraisers, donation requests, school certificates, and sponsorships — all managed in one place. Businesses can streamline in-store fundraisers, manage intake for donations and sponsorships, track and report on local marketing initiatives, and market their program to an active nonprofit database of 45,000+ event organizers. Nonprofits can find participating restaurants and retailers near them on a map, schedule events, request donations, and inquire about sponsorships all from a single platform. They can invite supporters with custom marketing materials and measure success with an easy-to-use dashboard.
It’s Not Just Restaurants Anymore
Another thing we heard loud and clear: this problem isn’t unique to food service. Retail stores and other local businesses face the same flood of donation requests and the same lack of infrastructure to handle them. Force4Good now works with retail partners and other business types, bringing the same operational clarity to any brand that wants to be an active community partner.
The Missing Piece: Everything in One Place
One of the most exciting additions to the platform is our new CRM. It’s a purpose-built marketing tool that helps partners manage the relationships that follow their activations. Businesses can categorize their nonprofit partners, track giving history, and see at a glance which relationships have been the most active and impactful. And because everything is organized at the store level, the relationships and contact history stay intact even when operations contacts change, so nothing gets lost in a transition and momentum keeps building.
Why This Matters
Force4Good co-founder Steven Cook has been thinking about this problem since 2014, when he and his team at digital agency VOLTAGE built the system to scale Chipotle’s fundraiser program. As a parent, he understood the demand on the nonprofit side. As an engineer, he saw the inefficiency on the business side. He realized that fundraisers are a “do good” story, but also, they’re a growth story. Force4Good was built to close that gap.
The platform has always been rooted in the belief that lifting local communities lifts everyone. These new features are the next chapter of that story: one built on feedback from the partners who trusted us first.
