Ready, Set, GoGood: UVA Darden Entrepreneur Builds Better Tech for Nonprofits

When Malorie Black (Class of 2027) found out the food bank in her hometown was spending $40,000 a year on software and still couldn’t figure out how many volunteers they had, she knew what she had to do with her nascent nonprofit venture, now called GoGood.

“I thought, someone’s got to do something about this,” she said. “So I did.”

Malorie Black (Class of 2027) founded GoGood, a software platform designed to simplify volunteer management for nonprofits.

For Black, the solution wasn’t to start another nonprofit. It was to build better tools for the organizations already doing the work. GoGood is a software platform designed to simplify volunteer management for nonprofits while making it easier and more rewarding for volunteers to get involved.

A Long Time Coming

Starting a business to help nonprofits didn’t come out of nowhere for Black. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, she oversaw recruiting and marketing for a student volunteer organization with around 12,000 members. That experience showed her not only the impact of volunteering on the cause being served, but also the personal benefits it offers volunteers.

“I saw how volunteering really changed mental health outcomes,” she said. “It gave the students more purpose and meaning in their lives and got them out of their own heads.”

She carried that knowledge forward and now describes GoGood’s purpose as a “two-part mission”: a tech platform that’s better to use and more financially accessible for nonprofits, and a way to make finding volunteer opportunities easier and more fun.

Family history also shaped Black’s desire to give back. Her grandmother is from Guatemala, and when Black visited her grandmother’s hometown, she was struck by the poverty she witnessed and by how different her own life turned out because of her grandmother’s decision to raise a family in the United States.

Malorie Black visiting her family in Guatemala.

“I’ve just been given so much, and not everybody has that same opportunity,” Black said. “I was determined to actually start a nonprofit because I am really passionate about helping people in generational poverty in the United States.”

The Real Need

As Black researched the nonprofit sector, though, she landed on a different insight. There were already plenty of great nonprofits out there. What they lacked was effective tools.

“I noticed this theme that the tech they worked with was just really hard to use,” she said. “It was kind of outdated, overly featured and actually quite expensive.”

So she decided to pursue better, less burdensome technology for nonprofits. After a few months researching her goal, she realized she’d need to expand her own skill set. This wasn’t Black’s first venture, but her past experience had been on a smaller scale, and she was ready to think bigger. An MBA coach suggested Darden, pointing to its proximity to Washington, D.C. and the concentration of nonprofits in the region.

The Darden Boost

Black was accepted, and receiving a Batten scholarship sealed the deal. The entrepreneurial resources available through Darden and the wider UVA and Charlottesville community have been especially valuable. Between core lessons from her Darden coursework and support from Darden’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, UVA Foundry and local nonprofits, Black has a third-place win with funding from the annual Entrepreneurship Cup competition under her belt, and has built a beta product that nonprofits are actively using — and is using their feedback to refine both the product and her approach.

Why Volunteers Matter

For resource-constrained nonprofits — which is to say, all of them — fundraising tends to eclipse everything else, including time-consuming work like managing volunteers. But strong volunteer management itself is tied to fundraising and to the mission many nonprofits exist for in the first place.

“Keeping track of the impact volunteers have can be important for grants and to generally tell their story, which will help them fundraise even more,” Black said. “Volunteering is the gateway for people to interact with their organization. And when people have a personal experience with your organization, they’re more likely to tell their friends to potentially donate in the future.”

Volunteering also shaped Black’s path to this work. Before founding GoGood, she found herself in Bentonville, Arkansas, working for a company that sold products to Walmart. The job was steady and paid well, but after a few years, her ambition to make a positive impact on the issues she cared about outweighed the benefits of staying.

“I was a little too comfortable just getting my paycheck,” she said. “I realized that I just wanted to do more good in the world.”

Part of what pushed her toward change was volunteering to teach a 12-week financial literacy course for the Marshallese population in northwest Arkansas.

“It was extremely meaningful that I was able to help teach them and to realize how much of the understanding I have of the financial system that a lot of people are just never taught.”

At Darden, she has continued volunteer work, teaching similar material to incarcerated people through Resilience Education.

“It’s also very humbling,” she said. “Darden is very hard. It was a little bit of a culture shock for me, too. It’s a lot of stress, but volunteering with PREP [Prison Reentry Education Program] helped put things in perspective for me and made my problems look a lot smaller, which was very helpful.”

Growing GoGood

Today, GoGood functions as a lightweight CRM for volunteers. It centralizes everything about each volunteer in one place: applications, completed trainings, events attended, and notes, plus in-app messaging to streamline coordination. Small and medium-sized nonprofits that have never had the budget for an enterprise system or a full-time volunteer coordinator have loved features like automated reminders, group coordination, messaging, and hour verification. The system has already saved them hours spent on back-and-forth emails, spreadsheets, and scattered PDFs.

Volunteers manage their whole journey from their phones: browsing and signing up for opportunities near them, knowing what to expect and where to go, serving alongside their groups, and getting their hours tracked automatically.

About 10 nonprofits in the Charlottesville area are currently using GoGood, and Black is encouraged by the early response. “They’re really excited about it,” she said. “It’s already saving them a lot of time.”

Looking ahead, Black plans to expand the CRM to cover not just volunteers but everyone a nonprofit needs to keep track of, including the people it serves and its donors, and to accept digital donations so that all of a nonprofit’s systems live in one place. From there, she wants to help nonprofits use technology and media to demonstrate their impact and tell their story.

This summer, she’s continuing to gather feedback from nonprofit partners while participating in Darden’s iLab Incubator. “It’s been awesome to be around the energy of entrepreneurs,” she said, citing the program’s bootcamps, weekly check-ins, and mentorship.

“I think that being an entrepreneur can be a lonely journey sometimes, especially at the beginning when you have a very small team. But it feels like I have a community right now.”