Philly grandpa scores Super Bowl tickets thanks to a local startup that raises money for nonprofits

The mass of Philadelphians descending on New Orleans for Super Bowl LIX includes two lifelong fans who scored the trip thanks to a local startup — and a very generous friend-of-a-friend. 

Tix For Good, a nonprofit fundraising tool that pools donations by offering big prizes, gave away a $16,000 prize package for two last week to Manayunk resident Reagan Lawler. The 26-year-old promptly paid it forward, spreading the good deed even further.

Lawler turned around and gave the tickets to his girlfriend’s father and grandfather, scoring huge points with the two die-hard Eagles fans. 

“His future father-in-law doesn’t show much emotion,” said Marco Carolla, executive director for fundraising at Tix For Good, recounting what Lawler told him. “And the guy almost shed a tear.”

All it took Lawler to score the tix and gain that? A charitable donation, Carolla explained.  

The company works by getting corporate sponsors behind a massive prize package, which nonprofits can then market to bring in donations.The four-person org, founded in 2022 by Tim Chew, reported helping more than 100 nonprofits raise over $165,000 in fundraising dollars in 2023. 

“We give our nonprofit partners the ability to market these prizes to their donors through email, text message, social media, newsletters, website,” Carolla said, “and anytime that their donors use the dedicated links that the nonprofits send out to them, the donors [are] entered in to win.”

For the big Super Bowl prize, five companies came together to pool the funds: OPS Security Group, Cloudline Physical Therapy, communications consulting firm Prelude Solutions, Medi-Solutions Insurance Company and Giordano Recycling. 

For the fourth year in a row, Tix For Good is also putting together a giveaway to send two people to the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Past prizes have included tickets to Jingle Ball at the Wells Fargo Center and a Taylor Swift concert in Miami, Florida. 

Carolla, right after treating the winners to a $150 shopping spree for Eagles gear to wear at the big game, told Technical.ly how Tix For Good came to be, the company’s path to profitability, and who he’s really rooting for on Sunday. 

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. 

Where did this business idea come from?

When this idea came about, I was a high school history teacher, and I was also the head baseball coach at Rowan College of South Jersey down in Vineland, New Jersey, and I had to fundraise for everything that I did for my baseball team. 

I would go to Tim’s house, he was living in Vineland at the time, and he would start bouncing these ideas off me. He said, “What if there was a platform that offered your organization the opportunity to use really high-end tickets to encourage donations, and it was all done online? And you didn’t have to run a golf tournament, and you didn’t have to run a beef and beer, and it was basically turnkey.”

I said, “Heck yeah, man, let’s go.” So, I gathered my baseball team in a room, and I said, “Hey guys, each of you has to send out 15 links to people.” It took about 40 minutes, and we did $5,000. 

Fast forward about six months, and Tim was like, “I really want to press this. I really want to put the pedal down on this idea. I want you to come work for me.”

And I said, sure. My mother thought I was crazy. I gave up a teaching job and a coaching job at a college with a pension and benefits and I branched out into this world of nonprofit fundraising, and here we are.

How does the fundraising model work?

Tim, I believe, has come up with a very unique model where we are able to purchase these tickets upfront through sponsors. The value that we provide to our sponsors is we give them what we have termed cause-driven marketing. 

We can then get brand exposure across a lot of different digital and in-person platforms. Our website gets the traffic of over 300 nonprofits where their logo is prominently placed. 

We have a contract with iHeart Radio, where we’re able to give our sponsors ad read on radio stations, we do a lot of in-person events throughout the year, which include golf tournaments and tailgates and watch parties and networking events. 

We have the ability to put together very unique marketing packages for our sponsors. But on the philanthropic side, we’re able to give our sponsors the ability to obtain a wholesale nonprofit sponsorship. With one check, they’re able to support over 300 nonprofits at one time.

How does your company make money off of it?

There’s a revenue share with every donation made to the nonprofits. The nonprofits get 72% of everything. We really take home about 21%. Seven percent goes to other fees and services that we need to use in order to carry out these fundraisers. 

Up front, we pay for the project through our sponsors, and then on the back end, we take our revenue share. Hopefully, the plan during the long run is that we build a base of enough nonprofits where our deliverable audience becomes very attractive to for-profit sponsors, and our sponsorship money is enough where we can drive that percentage up to as close to 100% back to the nonprofit as possible.

How has being based in Philly helped boost your business?

There’s such a great nonprofit community in this area. From a business perspective, there are just so many potential partners for us to work with that it is almost overwhelming how many people we can talk to in a day. This is really an awesome area for charity work.

We’d love to shout out Little Smile Pennsylvania. They’re an awesome group that delivers fun food, not junk food, to Shriners Children’s Philadelphia and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. I have gone on these fun food runs with them before, and the kids are so grateful to just take an hour or two to be a kid and watch a funny movie and eat popcorn or candy and pizza and play bingo. They’re doing great work.

Soooo…are you rooting for the Eagles this weekend? 

My entire family is from New York, so I am a Giants fan, and it’s been heart-wrenching to watch our former best player be the best player in the world. But I have many friends who are Eagles fans. I guess I can begrudgingly say, I am happy that they’re happy. 

Tim is the big Eagles fan, and many of our nonprofits in this area are huge supporters. My father would be very upset with me if I gave my outright support, which I can’t do. I apologize. But I hope everyone has fun next Sunday.

I am really excited for a lot of my friends and a lot of people that are close to me, that are happy. So, I just sit back and I watch quietly and hope that we can raise a lot of money for nonprofits using Philly projects.