Grassroots.org (and Michael Mann) Help Nonprofits Till the Web

By Marshal M. Rosenthal
Contributing Writer

Michael Mann, chairman of Grassroots.org

Charitable enterprises are not new to the web, but Grassroots.org may have a unique approach to helping other non-profit organizations live out their missions online.

The organization, founded and chaired by the highly successful Internet entrepreneur Michael Mann, understands the role technological, entrepreneurial, and business expertise can play in the nonprofit marketplace.

“This unique mixture has resulted in the organization creating services and resources sorely needed by those striving to make the world a better place,” Siefer said.

Mann, also a well-known domainer, said he wanted to give something back, starting with where he made much of his wealth—online.
We sat down with Mann to gain a better understanding of Grassroots.org and its value to the nonprofit industry, if not society.
Modern Domainer (MD): What is it about your background that led you to Grassroot.org?

Michael Mann (MM): Since I was young I was always attempting to participate in different types of charitable work—just a common practice in my family and community.  So over time I did such things as working at homeless shelters, teaching kids about the environment in inner-city schools, and such. Eventually I became an Internet expert by operating Internet companies.  And as I became a more proficient businessperson, I decided that my charity work should be about the Internet. I started an Internet company in 1994 called Internet Interstate, and that grew to become a web development company and ISP service.  And in doing that we built a lot of websites for corporations and for charities.  And so we started buying domain names for our customers, just like every other web developer did.

After we sold that company in 1998 I started trading those domain names—I was no longer in the ISP web development business, I was in the domain trading business.  So while I was selling .COM names, there were huge numbers of .ORG names, great charity names, that were not being properly utilized.  People were wasting them essentially.  So I began to aggregate the .ORGs in order to build web portals—charitable web portals, which we still do to this day,  for example shelters.org which is like a national database of homeless shelters. And there are tons of other ones.  

Stephen Webb of IamDomainNames.com, bottom right, shows off his paint covered hands after participating in at a recent body painting fundraiser to benefit Grassroots.org. The TrafficZ Body Painting Content was held in August in Seattle during the Domain Roundtable conference. (Photo by Denise Borg-Douglas)

MD: So Grassroots.org is sort of an aggregation, a single portal to go from?
MM: From a charitable perspective, yeah.  We do all kinds of different business activities, but we decided to consolidate the charity work to the Internet charity work, and consolidated at the charity called GrassRoots.org.  So we incorporated a 501C3 Corporation, again to build a board of directors, write a business plan, hire employees, fund the company—or the charity, rather.  That sort of thing.

MD: What’s the mission statement for Grassroots.org as you see it?
MM: Our mission is to provide 10,000 charitable organizations with $10,000 per year worth of services—we’re currently handling 1,000—and at the same time, build a few dozen charitable portals.
MD: What kind of groups are you looking to service?
MM: The main point is groups that are involved in social actions, groups involved with disease, groups involved with voting rights, and things like that.  But we don’t do anything for religious or any political groups or religious groups.  Just for charitable stuff: poverty, disease, homelessness, democratic rights.  Any groups involved with any of that sort of stuff pass through.

MD: What do you see as Grassroots.org’s strengths?
MM: We have a lot of people that provide a lot of resources into the Grass Roots network, so I think the strength is in the breadth of the network.  And the strength of the individual tentacles of the network where we have the whole business community, our own business community, which surrounds a lot of Washington D.C. and our surrounding companies.  They all participate in GrassRoots.org, and then we build the whole charity community where there are already a thousand charities associated with GrassRoots.org.  

We have all sorts of programs. One particularly innovative program is with the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship (www.rhsmith.umd.edu/dingman).  It’s a separate kind of a center within the business school at the University of Maryland.  And what we’ve managed to do is get the MBA students to get class credit to help the charities with their business plans and business models.  So we’re providing a match making service in between MBA’s and charities for example.  So that is such a great program in that it draws interest from other charities that want to participate in our network.  

Grassroots.org is a participatory network. There’s a lot of “for profit” technology providers out there for charities and also those that are non-profits but that still charge people.  Whereas our network is 100% free, there’s no charge for anything, and it’s a broad participatory network with all sorts of partners providing us with hosting services, internet services, domains, search option optimization. And we can give away their services for free into our network because they’re all participating.  All of these charities participate, all of these businesses participate; the businesses that I’m affiliated with is about 20 technology companies under our venture capital umbrella, called WashingtonVC.  So all of the heads of all of those companies, the vast majorities of them and their staffs are all participating with GrassRoots.org in one way or the other.

MD: What kind of technologies are you using to aid those that you are working with?
MM: For one thing, we’re providing the most basic services for free that they all need, such as web hosting, domain name, email, consulting services, etc. We help them with free legal information regarding setting up a non-profit.  And a variety of other things of that nature. Then at the next level we provide things like search engine optimization.  So for example SEO.com, which is a world-class search engine optimization firm, is providing services for free to these charities so that they can get more traffic to their web sites.

MD: What do you consider some of the accomplishments that Grassroots.org has achieved?
MM: As I mentioned, our goal is 10,000 charities getting our free services, and we keep aggregating more services every day.  So as we aggregate them, we want the value of those services to reach $10,000 per year per charity.  So you have $10,000 per year, 10,000 charities, that’s $100 million per year we’re putting into the non-profit community, or we will be.  Right now though, we’re already a fraction of the way there, so we’re already providing some portion of that, and every day we sign up more people and add more services.  So we get a tiny bit closer every day.  We’re still very far away. We need a huge amount of support to get there, but the point is it’s already working, there’s already a thousand charities benefiting form the services we provide.  

MD: What about the industry - are you confidant that they’ll help out in this endeavor?
MM: I’m positive.  I work with lots of internet businessmen, CEO’s every single day, and the vast majority are interested; they’re just so busy we’re the ones that have to channel them into the right niche within.  A huge portion of the people that I run across are interested in charitable activity.  And to the extent they like GrassRoots.org, they’re into GrassRoots.org.

MD: What can our readers do to help?
MM: Go to GrassRoots.org and use the contact form to say, “Hey, I’d like to volunteer and help you,” or, “I’d like to donate,” or, “Please call me to discuss how I can help.” Or email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it