It’s Good to Be Radical - An Interview With Taylor Conroy

Posted on March 3, 2014 by institute B

“Part of the reason I became a social entrepreneur was not because I wanted to improve lives, but because I was bored with my life.”

Wait a second, what?

I’m sitting with Taylor Conroy, the 30-something, charismatic founder of a social enterprise called Change Heroes, an online platform that allows individuals to gather 33 of their friends to give $3.33 per day for three months. The grand total of this formula is a cool $10,000 which is then used to build a school in a developing country; a clever idea. Best part? It’s working. Change Heroes has only been around since 2010 and this year they expect to improve the lives of over 1 million people worldwide.

“I Don’t Want To Do This Anymore”.

But helping 1 million people wasn’t the reason Taylor initially became a social entrepreneur. He begins our conversation by telling me about what would later become a major turning point in his life. His foray into entrepreneurship began when he was 25 as a newly licensed Realtor. He worked hard and ended his first year in the top 1% of realtors in North America. He was at the awards ceremony and asked another recipient of the same honour, who had been a realtor for 17 years, what his secret was to improving his sales, year after year.
“[He] responded by saying he works everyday and…he hates coming in second. I remember thinking ‘Holy cow, I have nothing in common with these people’. That was the beginning of the end,” says Taylor. We begin chatting about the cliché of a typical male (female, too?) entrepreneur’s trajectory: build a business, sell it, make money. Get bored. Do it again. And Taylor realized, even then, that he didn’t want that life. “Striving for profit in business is not satisfying…finding this out at 57 when I’m on my third marriage, and I’m driving a red Mazda Miata, and I have a ponytail,” Taylor chuckles, astonished. “That happens to men out of 30 years of actual boredom…but that’s what men do…try to get over this boredom, this lack of fulfillment.”

A Fucking Conscious Decision

So, instead, Taylor made a choice that would change his life forever, “I want to say I’m really blessed [to be a social entrepreneur] but, at the same time, transitioning to this realm was, like, the hardest thing I ever did. It was a really big decision, and it was a fucking conscious decision…but I had to do it.”
At this point in the story, Taylor could have become just another philanthropist, albeit a very young one, chasing a cause close to his heart, fundraising through typical models. But instead he started Change Heroes. He gives me an analogy for all the fundraising ‘vehicles’ out there — “Crowd funding would be a car,” he says. “Standing on a street corner with a binder, asking for money, that would be a tricycle, gala dinner fundraisers would be a train…and Change Heroes is a fucking rocket ship.”

What Makes Change Heroes So Effective?

Type ‘online fundraising’ into Google and you’ll find countless innovative applications and charities dedicated to making the world a better place. So, besides being a social enterprise, why is Change Heroes so effective at raising money for social causes? Because Change Heroes gives donors what they want, the way they want it. “What charities do, is they focus on, say, 10%-20% of the reason that people give, which is the story,” explains Taylor. Okay, we all know ‘the story’: a commercial comes on TV, a narrator introduces us to a little boy with a distended belly and his terrifying journey. Maybe we call and donate, but maybe we change the channel. “It’s all fluff in my mind,” says Taylor. “Charities focus on what produces 10%-20% of the result. But the other 80%-90%, to me, is based on human behaviour. It’s based on making the giving process super easy. It’s based on group mentality, knowing your friends are doing it. It’s based on knowing exactly where the money’s going. A tangible outcome….People want a bunch of different things. So, what Change Heroes does is dissect how people want to give and then [we] give it to them. Because what we want is not for people to be ‘storied’ into giving, or guilted into giving. We want people, when they give, to thank the fundraiser for letting them give in the first place.”

Providing Vision, Not Direction.

Taylor is clearly excited about all the possibilities. He leans back in his chair, a huge smile on his face. And I can’t blame him; as far as fundraising goes, this is a radical idea. In fact, it’s marketing at its best, and for the good of helping people. Now curious, I have to ask him: what’s it like working for Change Heroes? Who do they hire to accomplish these ambitious objectives? “The people I want to work with are insane self-starters,” he says. “They do everything basically on their own accord. So, the only people we hire are other social entrepreneurs. We don’t hire order takers or people who need a lot of direction because I don’t like giving direction. I like giving vision.”

Taylor Conroy interviewed by Oona Eager.