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Native Knowledge • After studying engineering in college on the East Coast, Scot Chisholm moved to San Diego and honed his entrepreneurial skills at a pizza place in Ocean Beach. He used grassroots techniques to spread the word about the restaurant, even knocking on neighbors’ doors to initiate taste tests.
ALIVE
Chisholm has turned CLASSY into an unstoppable force for good, but the company didn’t become a massive champion for nonprofits overnight. Back in 2006, Chisholm and a few friends were looking to raise money for charity so they took to the streets of Pacific Beach for the ultimate fundraising activity—a charitable bar crawl. “We were trying to raise money for the local chapter of the American Cancer Society. My mom had had cancer growing up, and everyone I was living with had also had their lives affected by the disease in some way,” Chisholm explained. “When we went onto the ACS’s website, the opportunities to volunteer or to give didn’t really resonate with us. We had an idea to go rogue and create our own fundraising event and donate our money to the ACS afterwards.” This was around the time that Anchorman was popular, so naturally, Chisholm and friends christened the event “StayClassy.”
Seventy-five people showed up and raised over $1,000, but when it came time to donate, it wasn’t as simple as writing a check. “We were questioning why the process of giving back had so much friction in it. At the time we weren’t thinking about technology at all, it was really just about, how do we bring more young people into the fold? How do we get them more involved in a way
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that resonates with them?” Chisholm asked. Under Chisholm’s direction, the newly-founded company, still operating under the name StayClassy, began to organize fundraising events throughout San Diego such as fun runs, concerts and pub crawls. The fundraisers eventually got so big that Chisholm and his team knew they needed a better way to organize their efforts. “We realized we had outgrown the jerry-rigged
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“WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO DO IS BRING PHILANTHROPY INTO NEW NETWORKS. TO MAKE IT MORE CONVENIENT FOR PEOPLE TO GIVE IN THEIR EVERYDAY LIFE … TO EXPOSE THESE ORGANIZATIONS TO MORE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.” —SCOT CHISHOLM