Seventeen can be a weird age. On one hand, you’re expected to act like some semblance of an adult with a basic plan for your future. On the other, half your “grownup” interactions contort into figments that resemble the beginning of a Twisted Sister music video.
With one foot nearly in adulthood’s doorway and the other foot dragging behind like it’s still going through growing pains, you get the feeling you’re a completely different person but still somehow underappreciated.
Being a 17-year-old company is surprisingly not much of an exception. Whether it’s a lack of cash flow, market needs, or product offerings, the struggle is very real for businesses out there. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that only one in four firms could even survive this long. On a similar note, less than 30 percent of registered nonprofits make it past the first decade.
Well, if that’s true, you can count us in the minority — and darn proud to be a part of it.
We’ve joked before that Click & Pledge is an overnight success story 17 years in the making. We started as a side project for Blacksburg, Virginia’s local United Way to take online donations. Today we support over 20,000 nonprofits’ online fundraising presences worldwide. And to think it seems like it was just yesterday that we were holding our first keyboard!
We cannot say “thank you” enough to the Causes we’ve worked with over the last 17 years. We wouldn’t be here without you, and those wonderful relationships are only tantamount to our successes. But let’s take a trip down Memory Lane for a bit, shall we?
On this day in history…
It’s pretty obvious that a lot has changed since May 30, 2000. Wars were fought. iPhones were released. Pluto was still a full-fledged planet. We even put a robotic dune buggy on Mars. So we took a look back at what was going on that fateful day 17 years ago, and here’s what we (re)learned.
