MARCH 31, 2024

Goodman Philanthropies Awards $500,000 Grant to Saverlife to enable 1 million first-time investors in the U.S.

San Francisco, CA — Goodman Philanthropies is pleased to announce a $500,000 grant to Saverlife to continue to grow and scale its technology platform (app) that helps low-income Americans achieve greater savings and overall be financially healthier. Opening up pathways to wealth requires both well-designed financial products to support individual action combined with strategic policy work to reduce systemic barriers. It is at this intersection—of the individual and the systemic—where SaverLife is achieving powerful change.

What is Saverlife?

SaverLife.org is a nonprofit organization that helps low-to-moderate-income individuals and families build financial security through savings. SaverLife is a technology platform / app with nearly 600,000 active users. The target user is people living with low-incomes seeking to improve their financial health. SaverLife helps Americans find support, resources, advice, incentives, and rewards to help them begin to save more. At the same time, SaverLife listens to members—through personal stories, research, and financial data—to better understand the systemic challenges they face and identify participant-informed solutions.

Why did Goodman Philanthropies invest?

Goodman Philanthropies believes strongly in Saverlife’s underlying thesis: Wealth building starts with savings. When we begin to stash just a few dollars in a savings account regularly, we’re better prepared to survive a financial emergency, from a flat tire to a sudden loss of income. And once we have the cash saved to get through these kinds of disruptions without taking on debt, we can start to build wealth— the kind of wealth that enables us to get a better job, send our kids to college, purchase a home, and plan for retirement.

SaverLife members, the majority of whom are women of color and parents, work hard yet struggle to get ahead due to insufficient and inconsistent incomes, high daily living costs, inadequate financial services, and high-cost consumer debt. Despite the availability of many well-meaning programs and services, the truth remains that financial products and systems are not inclusive of all and do not adequately serve people living with low-incomes in building long-term financial stability and wealth.

Opening up pathways to wealth requires both well-designed financial products to support individual action combined with strategic policy work to reduce systemic barriers. It is at this intersection—of the individual and the systemic—where SaverLife is achieving powerful change.

What impact are we hoping to achieve?

The overall impact goal is for Saverlife to achieve growth / scale of their app. Specifically, with the philanthropic support of us and others, Saverlife plans to double its membership over the next three years to 1.2M members - growing on average by 200K members per year, a 141% increase from their historical average yearly growth—and develop the pathway to sustain this growth momentum for years beyond. To achieve this growth, Saverlife’s team will:

• Continuously improve the SaverLife product to provide a member experience that is personalized to a member’s motivations and goals, and furthers Saverlife’s members ability to achieve financial health.

• Lower member acquisition costs from $8 to $3, compared to industry standard of $10-$20.

• Develop an affiliate revenue model to provide more flexible revenue streams to cover the costs to scale, while providing members with trusted products and services.

• Deepen Saverlife’s ability to produce high-quality and reputable research and identify member-informed policy priorities to drive systemic change.

• Launch targeted regional and demographic campaigns to serve specific audiences and deepen Saverlife’s understanding of different state and regional policies and policies that impact specific demographic groups, giving us the ability to compare systemic conditions across communities and identify interventions.

Saverlife’s sustainability plan recognizes their strength as a nonprofit to leverage the role of philanthropy, while focusing on building earned revenue strategies that empower us to scale sustainably. They will expand the revenue and financial model of SaverLife, creating clear growth pathways through affiliate fees and revenue strategies that leverage our research capabilities. This revenue strategy will both provide SaverLife the confidence to accelerate our growth while engaging philanthropy for its highest use - innovation, place-based and demographic work, and systems change.

About Goodman Philanthropies

Goodman Philanthropies supports innovative, evidence-based solutions that expand economic mobility across the United States. We prioritize approaches that combine rigor, innovation, and scale to move the needle on poverty and opportunity. Our work is generously funded by Bennett & Meg Goodman, who are committed to dismantling barriers to upward mobility through strategic, impact-driven philanthropy. This grant is part of our broader wealth-building strategy, which aims to fund new and innovative tools, policies, and ideas that enable more low to moderate-income Americans to participate in asset-building as a mechanism for sustained, intergenerational economic mobility.

To learn more about our work and our portfolio of grants, visit www.goodmanphilanthropies.org.