At Papilia, we have combined the proven principles of major-donor fundraising with a new generation of personalization technology. Our solutions for communications and fundraising help our clients attract new supporters, better engage their existing ones, and Treat every Donor like a Major Donor.

Our Vision & Our Mission

Papilia's vision is a world where nonprofits and supporters form enduring alliances that will bring about meaningful social change.

Our mission is to help nonprofits dramatically improve their supporters’ experience with ease, so they can raise more money and raise greater awareness to move their missions forward.

Our Story

In 2002, Papilia's CEO, Natasha Deganello Giraudie, was having coffee in San Francisco with a friend from Venezuela, where Natasha grew up. They started talking about the mudslides that hit their country in 1999 — taking the lives of about 50,000 people. Her friend told her that he had made a donation to an international children's organization that was helping the affected children. When Natasha asked him what resulted from his experience with the organization, he said that he had never donated to them again.

He related that the first newsletter he received was all about their programs in Uganda and the next was about their innovative work with the children in Nepal. Time went by and he never found out what happened to the children in Venezuela, the ones that he had wanted to help.

Until then, Natasha had worked in technology, building software for companies like Kodak and Fuji, but she had also been a volunteer for children's organizations for 15 years and had gone down on a disaster relief mission during the mudslides. Coincidentally, she had worked with the very children that had benefited from her friend's contribution.

At that moment she thought — what a shame — that this donor never heard about the tremendous impact of his contribution. And she wondered how many other donors had similar experiences, become uninspired and walked away from valuable organizations. More importantly, she started to wonder how many more children could have been helped if this organization would have been able to do a better job of bridging her experience as a field volunteer with this disconnected communication that the donors got.

This was the beginning of what would become Papilia.

Designed by Fundraisers for Fundraisers

Natasha and co-founder, Stephane, spent the next year and a half visiting Development and Communications Directors from 40 organizations with operating budgets of $1M - $650M. They discovered three main problems that nonprofits were struggling to address:

• Donor Acquisition - too costly and labor intensive
• Donor Retention & Engagement - 50-70% of people will never make a second gift to the same nonprofit
• Steep Competition - there are twice as many nonprofits today as there were just 10 years ago. Even though the global giving amount increases annually, the rate of competition is far greater, which means that the available pool of dollars for each organization shrinks every year.

At this point, the Development and Communications Directors of the nonprofits engaged in a participatory design process with Papilia, ensuring that the product directly addressed these very real problems.

The primary inspiration came from the proven practices of major donor fundraising, in which organizations work with each prospective donor to develop an understanding of the individuals' interests, and then address those interests while providing assurance to the donor that their gift is yielding results that are relevant and meaningful to the individual. While these practices are very successful, they are simply too labor intensive and too costly to offer to anyone other than major donors.

Papilia was designed to scale these practices to all donors and prospects regardless of their giving level or potential, so that nonprofit clients could attract more donors, better engage their existing ones and treat every donor like a major donor.

Our Name

"Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly."

- anonymous

Our company was founded in this spirit of hope and transformation, and was thus named Papilia, the Latin word for butterfly. We help evolve fundraising from a mere transaction into a transformational relationship - one where the momentum of the initial contact with a prospect evolves into long-term partnership.

Natasha Deganello Giraudie,
Papilia CEO