In episode 59 of The Charity Charge Show, Stephen interviews Matthew Connelly, Chief Executive Officer at Good360 whose mission is to transform lives by providing hope, dignity, and a sense of renewed possibility to individuals, families, and communities impacted by disasters or other challenging life circumstances who, without us, would struggle to find that hope.
Matt Connelly joined Good360 as Chief Executive Officer after having served on our Board of Directors for eight years, including the last four as Co-Chairman. Matt is a transportation and supply chain industry veteran with a 32-year track record at UPS where he most recently developed the network strategy and design for the US transportation network and was responsible for the sourcing of purchased transportation.
Matt first began his UPS career as a package driver in Cambridge, MA, and progressed through a series of operations and engineering roles within UPS, including assignments in Florida, Chicago, and UPS Supply Chain Solutions. Matt played a significant role in UPS’s expansion into global markets, forwarding, and contract logistics services. In addition to his responsibilities for UPS Network Operations, Matt also served on the UPS Humanitarian Relief Program Steering Committee and oversaw UPS’s humanitarian relief transportation solutions for The UPS Foundation. Additionally, Matt represented UPS for five years on the American Red Cross Corporate Advisory Council.
Here is a snippet from Matthew Connelly on the podcast:
“We have 90,000 nonprofits in our network. As I mentioned, they go through a vetting and scrutinisation process. We have 100 of our largest nonprofits that have operating capabilities to accept full truckloads of multi-skew products, that they’re able to receive large quantities of product and have the storage space to distribute them effectively. They go through additional vetting and screening.
We’ve also invested heavily in our e-commerce website. Smaller nonprofits can have access to the product they need at the carton level. The board gets a lot of credit for building on our operating capabilities to provide some business solutions for our donor partners, as well as investing in technology. We’ve invested heavily in a CRM, specifically salesforce.com, where all of our 90,000 nonprofits are cataloged. We understand their mission, we understand their size, and their scope, which allows us to come up with the most cost-effective solution to row product, where we’re taking it less distance and keeping it as local as much as possible. It allows us to know how much quantity they can take. We don’t have a compliance issue where they might have too much product. The third is also understanding what their mission is. We’re able to get more specific as time goes on to really pinpoint the impact that the donor is looking to make. That could be homelessness for veterans, it could be Native American causes, it could be racial equality, and having those capabilities for when the pandemic hit, we have really beneficial for extreme accelerated growth last year.
To get it into context, Good360 distributed $330 million of fair market value product in 2019. And last year was well over 700 million. The reason for that double growth was that the capabilities and the structure were there to be able to deal with excess product and company supply chains, which occurred quite a bit last year due to the pandemic disruption. It could have been a winter launch that didn’t fully sell or a spring launch that never launched at all. We were able to provide the next best use for those products. It’s been exciting here. The value for the donors is three-prong, one is they get compliance, they get assurance that the product that they trust with Good360 goes to a nonprofit, that will do an impact with it. They’re eligible to get an enhanced tax write-off if that is attractive to them. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. The third is, is they get assurance that there’s not going to be brand dilution, aka winding up on a secondary market or a grey market that undercuts the normal flow of their product.”
Interested in listening to the full episode and hearing more from other nonprofits? Check out more episodes here Charity Charge Show
