Social Impact Heroes: Why & How John Bromley Of Charitable Impact Is Helping To Change Our World

An Interview With Maria Angelova

Learn to love feedback, even the type that is structured to purposefully hurt you.

As part of my series about “individuals and organizations making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing John Bromley.

John Bromley is the Founder and CEO of Charitable Impact, Canada’s first fully online donor-advised fund (DAF), and the fastest to surpass $1 billion in total donations. After a decade of working in corporate finance and with charity lawyers, John founded Charitable Impact to transform how Canadians experience giving. John is a two-time TEDx speaker, BIV Magazine “Forty Under 40,” winner, and a proud father of two kids.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path and point in your life?

I played ultimate frisbee at a pretty high level when I was younger. In one match I caught a pass in the endzone — just like in football, but without all the padding — and for some reason I had this ah-ha moment. I realized it wasn’t just the catch that made me feel so joyful. Rather, it had just as much to do with the teamwork and community that put me in the position to score, the celebration with my teammates afterwards, and the competitive fun I was having playing my chosen sport. In short, I realized that the catch was part of a bigger picture.

That realization stuck with me, and a few years later, while I was working with my father — who is one of the world’s foremost experts in charity law — that moment on the ultimate pitch illuminated the work I was doing, work that ultimately (no pun intended) led to my founding of Charitable Impact. The joy of being charitable isn’t just about making a donation. Rather, it’s a combination of factors: being part of a community that cares about creating change in the world, having the freedom and confidence to choose the causes that mean the most to you, participating in the work to create change, and learning from the hardships and celebrating the wins along the way.

Empowering donors in these ways is what Charitable Impact is all about. Like a bank account for charitable giving, our Impact Account is a web-based tool that enables donors to make, view and manage donations, regardless of which charities they want to support. Because the Impact Account is a DAF, donors can give first, receive a tax receipt, then separately make decisions about how they want to use their donations. This gives donors the time and space to confidently create the most impact. Our platform helps them learn more about charities that match their interests, making them more confident in their decisions. They can also use it to send charitable dollars to friends and family for them to give away, which engages others in the experience of giving. Along the way, donors can receive expert support online, over the phone, or via a first-of-its-kind mobile app.

In short, by improving the giving experience, Charitable Impact is helping more people re-engage with giving. A big part of improving the donor experience was building a donor-centric tool and providing access to cause-neutral advice to help donors navigate their own giving journeys. Charitable Impact is much more analogous to a “charity bank” than it is to a fundraising platform.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?

There’s this interesting thing that keeps happening to me. People pat me on the back and say something like, “what a good guy you are for helping charities.” But the truth of the matter is, I’m not that guy. I’m actually more of a banker who just happens to be very fluent in and experienced with solving problems and creating opportunities related to charitable giving. (Fwiw, I certainly want people to think I’m a good guy, but not just because I work in the charity sector!)

I got good jobs in the financial services industry right out of university, and I loved learning about corporate finance. Trouble was, I didn’t have the same passion about applying what I was learning. So I left that field, went back to school, studied art history, and got involved in filmmaking and other artistic endeavours. Soon enough, I started thinking about finding my way back to the business world to combine my creative interests with my financial experience. That’s when I started working with my dad, which added a lot of knowledge about charity structures, law, and raising money to the mix. Pretty soon I became what I like to call being a “charity banker.”

I’m still very much a “banker”, but I’m doing it through a charitable lens. I’m not saying I’m not passionate about charity. I am. But if you ask my wife, who has known me since university, she’ll tell you that while I have always been a charitable person, having grown up with it, my passion for charity is based on solving the existential problem facing the charitable sector: Every year people give less to charity, and they give less often.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Two years before founding Charitable Impact I launched Peer Giving Solutions, which essentially provided crowdfunding tools, like GoFundMe, that any charity could easily host on their own website.

The most effective crowdfunding campaigns rely on having what I call a “champion” — an individual who starts, pushes and promotes them. As I engaged with more champions it became clear that most of them didn’t know much about the charities they were supporting, and that their support for a given charity tended to be driven by having an online tool that engaged them.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. It produces engaging narratives and raises much-needed money for the charities with the right tools. Trouble is, it didn’t always educate or empower donors on how to go about achieving their personal giving or causal missions. Rather, it engaged the charities with the champions, in the same way that traditional fundraising engages people with a charity-based sales mechanism that also doesn’t necessarily increase donor education. This is a fundamental flaw in this giving model because learning how to live a charitable lifestyle, and supporting the causes you choose in a way that works best for you, can be life-changing.

There was one instance where I was asked to help a charity engage a celebrity champion to lead a campaign that revolved around a tattoo of a killer whale the celebrity had on his biceps. Both the tattoo and the biceps were impressive, to be sure, but I failed to see how either would help anyone become an engaged, confident and knowledgeable supporter of charities that help protect marine habitats. Today, as a “charity banker,” I would help this celebrity use his time, talent and money to advance whatever charitable cause he was into. All my experience would go into helping the champion optimize the change they want to achieve in the world, as opposed to being limited to only helping charities that licence a product I had built. Today, I’m all about donor empowerment and education. I want to see donor fluency and confidence increase because I believe it will lead to more joy and engagement.

Not too long after the “tattoo incident,” I slowly started shutting Peer Giving down, and put all my resources into Charitable Impact.

Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?

Charitable Impact’s online Giving Groups are crowdfunding tools that bring people together to support one or more charities, and one that has really caught my eye since Russian forces invaded Ukraine is the “Ukraine Humanitarian Group — Red Cross” Giving Group. As of Jan. 7, 2023, it has raised more than $96,000 (Canadian). The gentleman who started it, Kyle Gruen, shared that his grandfather had fled Austria in the late 1930s after the Nazis had risen to power, and he wanted to do something to help families fleeing Ukraine.

This shows that when you engage our natural generosity with causes that are personal to and chosen by donors, giving is sure to follow. Charitable Impact has taken a tool, the DAF, that was previously available only to the wealthiest — requiring thousands of dollars as a minimum contribution — and made it accessible to anyone. By allowing donations of as little as $5, we are increasingly creating opportunities for people to incorporate giving into their lives in a meaningful way. By moving the entire platform online, automating its administration and making it smartphone-friendly, we are making sure everyone has access to these resources, no matter how much they give or who they give to or how experienced they are with charitable giving.

Our centre of gravity is the donor, and our work revolves around the donor’s needs and interests. We are working to ensure that our platform and tools are better understood by donors so that they can be as responsive as they want to be to giving opportunities like raising support for Ukraine, and that all giving is filled with intention and joy.

Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?

The first is that the Canadian federal government needs to start caring about chronically declining rates of charitable giving. The government can provide support to people and organizations working to develop and educate donors, instead of just providing funding directly to certain charities carrying out governmental programmatic needs.

The second thing is that people need to take it upon themselves to improve their communities, and not depend on government to do it for them.

The third thing is that we need school systems and other community organizations to do more to educate students about being charitable. Charitable Impact has started doing this with our Charitable Allowance Program, which raises money from donors and then provides thousands of schoolchildren with a monthly $10 allowance to give to charity. By making the decision about which charities will benefit, the kids get to learn about and experience charitable giving, something we know to be key to learning.

Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? How do you think this might help people?

Our Charitable Investment Program (CIP) is really taking off among financial advisors who are trusted by their clients and expected to help them navigate all sorts of financial matters. We know these advisors can add a ton of value to the charity sector by helping their clients plan and carry out charitable donations, and those with investment credentials can help manage the donated assets. Using public securities to donate to charity is the most tax effective form of giving because of how the capital gains on appreciated stocks are exempted from tax, so investment managers are a key audience for our CIP. We also work with accountants, life insurance advisors, and tax professionals.

In 2018 we worked with a handful of financial advisors. Five years later, we are supporting 147 advisor teams, with total donations through CIP topping $327 million. Charitable Impact has proved so popular with the financial community that the Charitable Impact Awards were launched in August of 2022 to recognize our most active wealth management teams. The “Team of the Year,” Stenner Wealth Partners+, enabled more than $80 million in gifts for its clients in 2021.

By making it easy for advisors to help their clients with giving, our CIP is a really important and growing program.

What you are doing is not easy. What inspires you to keep moving forward?

I feel like I was put on this Earth to solve the very specific problem of declining engagement with charitable giving. Having the professional work experience and skill set that I do gives me the confidence that I can make a big contribution. If not for my father, I wouldn’t have the level of charity literacy that I do. If I didn’t start my career in investment banking, I would lack the expertise to grapple with the transactional reality of the charity sector. And if I hadn’t spent so much time in the arts, I wouldn’t value creative thinking and innovation the way I do.

At the same time, it’s fun to work with super-talented people who are working together to overcome this problem. For me, providing leadership and vision that has the potential to make the world a better place is about as good as it gets.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.

1. You know you are under-communicating when no one is making fun of you for saying the same thing repeatedly.
2. Spend more time educating your team members so they can educate your customers.
3. Be selfish about working on the things that bring out the best of your knowledge, experience, and passions. Working smarter is more important than working harder.
4. With charity literacy being almost non-existent, meeting people where they are at is the best way to start affecting change.
5. Learn to love feedback, even the type that is structured to purposefully hurt you.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

This is not a “would” or “could” answer. At Charitable Impact, much of what we do really is about inspiring people to voluntarily donate cash and non-cash assets to causes that are creating positive change in the world. And we’re doing this by empowering people with the knowledge and confidence to give the way they want to give, and to get better at it, and to be more comfortable with it over time.

Regardless of how much you can give or where you are in your giving journey, Charitable Impact is designed to help you act confidently and impactfully on your generosity. Our platform empowers anyone and everyone to create change on their own scale and at their own pace, and in the process become better donors.

So as simple as it sounds, the movement towards donor empowerment and engagement is what I hope to inspire.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Michael Jordan: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

As I’ve already shared, I’ve made plenty of mistakes on the journey that has led me to where I am today. I’ve failed many times. But mistakes and failures are not definitive. In order to move forward, we must accept the possibility of failure. And once we’ve achieved our goals, nothing is more satisfying than looking back at the mistakes and the failures we overcame to get there.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Mackenzie Scott: I’d love to learn from and help others learn from her style of and approach to giving. “Trust-based giving” is a really important concept and lifestyle that can lead to increased donor joy and charity effectiveness.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

@wearecharitable on social media and at www.charitableimpact.com

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!

About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.