Why We Merged: Samahope and the Case for Nonprofit M&A

Yesterday I did my first-ever solo Facebook Live on a topic close to my heart: non-profit mergers & acquisitions.

Last year, Shivani Patel and I made the decision to combine our crowdfunding site Samahope with Johnson & Johnson’s CaringCrowd platform. It was a tough call — we founded Samahope in 2011 as the first site of its kind to fund critical medical treatments for women and children in need. Over the years, we treated over 16,000 patients with funds from over 5,000 donors, many of whom gave whatever they could in tiny increments. Here’s a full list of outcomes:

We executed the combination for two main reasons:

1. Brand. We raised over $1M and had celebrity endorsements from the likes of Olivia Wilde, but felt that we weren’t generating enough buzz. After interviewing many donors, we learned that the Sama brand was strongly associated with giving work to end poverty (the mission of Samasource and Samaschool, our two other programs), and medical crowdfunding was getting buried in the mix.
2. Efficiency. We realized that a platform backed by a large global health organization like J&J would have a lot more leverage than a site started by a bunch of techies with few connections to the global health community. Marketing the site to J&J’s staff alone would generate millions more in donations than we’d been able to raise in a few years.

Even though it made sense, giving up a labor of love like Samahope is tough. The decision brought up a range of founder emotions: nostalgia for the early days and our team, fear that the impact will never be the same post-combination, and regret about what could have been.

In the nonprofit world, there are few incentives for founders to consider an exit via M&A. If you merge with another organization, you don’t get a personal payout and you lose visibility and your leadership position. The only incentive is greater good.

Despite all of this, after evaluating our options and modeling our impact into the future, we knew it was the right thing to do to combine our platform with CaringCrowd. Our donors agreed, and so did the doctors we supported.

What do you think of this decision? And of non-profit M&A in general? Please let us know your comments below.

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