Viken Mikaelian started the business in the late 1990s, back when putting planned giving online struck a lot of people in the nonprofit world as either pointless or vaguely improper. He says it wasn't exactly welcomed. The company began as VirtualGiving, built on a stubborn little premise: the gifts themselves are complicated, but the marketing doesn't have to be. Two and a half decades later the site is still here, still helping nonprofits talk about legacy giving and bequests without putting everyone to sleep.
What pulls me in isn't the nonprofit angle, though. It's that Viken is a domain believer who happened to land in philanthropy. He owns PlannedGiving.com, MajorGifts.com, Philanthropy.org. He talks about those names the way the rest of us talk about category-defining name, as authority you can't manufacture later. That's a rarer thing than it sounds. Plenty of people in a given industry own a decent name. Very few build their whole posture around the name being the asset.
He also publishes GIVING Magazine and writes about donor psychology, trust, where AI fits into all this. I don't know yet whether he sees the domains as the foundation everything else sits on or as a happy accident he backfilled a philosophy onto. That's the part I want to get at.
Mike: How did you first get involved in planned giving?
Viken: Sideways, honestly. I ran a marketing and design firm in Philadelphia — I'm the fellow who helped put Ben Franklin's statue on Locust Walk at Penn, and we were one of the major vendors on Penn's first billion-dollar campaign, working with Villanova in the same stretch. I kept noticing that the most sophisticated gifts in the nonprofit world — bequests, legacy gifts — were marketed with the least sophistication. Brilliant vehicles, terrible storytelling. That gap was the whole business. In 1998 I put planned giving online, the same year two kids named Larry and Sergey started Google, and most of the sector was certain I'd lost my mind.
Mike: When you started bringing planned giving online, what did people misunderstand about the internet?
Viken: They thought legacy giving was too intimate, too solemn, for a screen. Death and money — you do that across a desk, not on a website. Fundraisers didn't just doubt the idea; some attacked it openly. I thought the opposite: the web was the one place a 72-year-old could read about a charitable bequest at 11 p.m. without a development officer breathing on her. The misunderstanding wasn't technical — they assumed dignity and the internet were incompatible. Look at us now. You buy your groceries online and you can practically get married online. Solemnity was never the obstacle. Imagination was.
Mike: What did owning the exact domain PlannedGiving.com do for the credibility of the business?
Viken: Everything — it's authority you can't manufacture later. And let me correct a common assumption: people still picture me grabbing it for ten dollars. PlannedGiving.com took an expensive, hard-fought negotiation to pry loose in 2007 — and it irritated the major player in the field to no end. Their response was to tour the conference circuit telling people to stop saying "planned giving" altogether — quite a bet, given that to their misfortune virtually every financial advisor alive uses the term. Then they pivoted to pushing "gift planning." So I bought GiftPlanning.org too. I imagine that one landed even less well. When the category is the address bar, you don't have to explain who you are — you are the explanation.
Mike: How do you think about the value of a great domain name?
Viken: It's digital real estate, and the best of it behaves like beachfront — they're not making more of it. A category domain isn't a brand you build; it's the intersection everyone already passes through. PlannedGiving.com, MajorGifts.com, Philanthropy.org — I didn't build those names, I hold the deeds to them. What still surprises me is how often the sharp, credentialed ones are the people who miss it. I've lost count of the times someone's said, "I can't believe Philanthropy.org was available." It wasn't luck. It was conviction, early. The private sector treats obscurity as a problem. The nonprofit sector treats it as a personality trait.
Mike: Did the domains come first and the philosophy follow, or did you go looking because you already believed they mattered?
Viken: The conviction came first; the vocabulary came later. I believed the name was the asset before I could have given you a clean theory of why. I went looking for the deeds because some part of me already understood that in a sector built on trust, the most trusted-sounding address wins. The philosophy is just me catching up to an instinct.
Mike: What's the difference between building on a strong category domain and a weaker brandable name?
Viken: A brandable name asks people to take a leap of faith. A category domain meets them already believing — you stop renting attention and start owning it. With enough money you can absolutely mint a brandable name into greatness; Amazon and Google did. But that's spending hundreds of millions to arrive at the trust a category domain hands you on day one. One is a cost center. The other is a moat.
Mike: Do nonprofits understand domains and online branding as well as for-profit companies do?
Viken: No — and it's one of the more expensive blind spots in the sector. A nonprofit will spend $40,000 on a logo refresh and then send everyone to something like HarvestDubuqueMN.org — a name nobody can spell, remember, or repeat. They treat the domain as plumbing instead of the front door. I once presented at a summit hosted by Sutter Health, and one moment stayed with me: several people asked, in earnest, "well, can't your competitors just use that domain too?" Grown professionals who genuinely believed a category address was something anyone could share. That single misunderstanding is the whole argument for scarcity. The for-profit world settled this a generation ago: the name is the business. Spending a fortune on a brand and then hiding it behind an unmemorable domain is like buying a Ferrari and parking it behind a warehouse.
Mike: What made Philanthropy.org the right name for the next stage of what you're building?
Viken: Think of it this way: PlannedGiving.com is the business; Philanthropy.org is the asset. And it's a different kind of asset than most premium names. Cars.com is valuable — it changed hands in 2014 in a deal worth $2.5 billion. Hotels.com, Insurance.com, valuable too. But nobody writes to those domains asking for grants, funding, or help. Philanthropy.org is different. People assume it's a foundation, an association, a global initiative. A body, not a website. The extension reinforces it: in most fields .com is king, but here .org is the power position — mission, not margin; institution, not storefront.
Two things prove what the name signals. I receive email plainly meant for one of the country's largest foundations, because the sender simply assumed Philanthropy.org must be them. And — this one humbles me — barely a week passes without people and organizations writing in directly: nonprofits seeking grants, founders describing real hardship, people asking for help, all assuming the name belongs to an institution that can give it. I can't answer them the way they deserve, and it sits with me — but it's the clearest proof I have of what the address says before I've spoken a word. People don't write to a domain. They write to an institution.
So I treat it accordingly — carefully, not very commercially, as a global network for the field rather than a billboard. It isn't for sale, but I'm clear-eyed about its gravity: the serious players now operate at staggering scale, from the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark to the OpenAI Foundation in the States to the extraordinary rise of giving in India. You only set the tone of a name like this once.
Mike: What do fundraisers often miss about how donors actually think?
Viken: That the biggest gifts aren't transactions — they're meaning-making. Most fundraisers are deeply transactional and miss it. They chase the gift; the donor is trying to author the end of their own story. The people who fund the missions that change the world don't write checks — they write wills. There's an irony underneath it, too: much of the sector holds worldviews quietly at odds with the wealth that funds it. Giving tracks prosperity — it rises and falls with the markets like clockwork — yet many fundraisers are uneasy with the people and conditions that create it. Miss all of that, and you're optimizing a donate button while someone quietly decides what their life added up to.
Mike: Where can AI help nonprofits, and where can it hurt the relationship with donors?
Viken: AI is spectacular at everything that was always beneath the relationship — drafting, sorting, research, the first 80% of a thank-you letter. But here's what most people get backwards: AI doesn't lower the value of relationships, it raises it. Once a machine can do all of that for free, the cheap things go to zero — and the rare ones, trust, a real relationship, a name people already believe in, become the only things worth paying for. So use AI for everything beneath the relationship. Organizations that use AI to simulate relationships are playing with fire: a donor will forgive a clumsy human, never a "personal" note about her late husband that a machine wrote. AI makes the forgeable worthless and the genuine priceless. That's good news for anyone who actually does the work.
Mike: Have you ever chased a name you couldn't get, or turned down a serious offer on one you own?
Viken: I've missed a few that would have been nice to have, but I've been lucky on anything that mattered. Every domainer keeps a list of the ones that got away — it's a particular kind of heartburn. A friend of mine owns GolfClubs.com, and I've envied that clean ownership my whole career. I've also placed a few speculative bets I haven't built out yet — Giving.care, Philanthropy.care, Philanthropic.org, Bequests.com — names I believe in before I know exactly what they'll become. As for selling: I've held my best deeds through plenty of offers and tire-kickers. Philanthropy.org isn't for sale at a number most people would say out loud, and the players who'd make a name like that worth parting with haven't come knocking yet — which is exactly how I like it while I'm still building.
Mike: What's something you believe about philanthropy that many in the sector would disagree with?
Viken: That too much of the sector is comfortable being bad at marketing and treats it as a virtue. There's a quiet belief that polish is unseemly — that if you're good people doing good work, the money should simply appear. It doesn't. Good causes don't exempt anyone from the laws of marketing. The same reflex shows up in the tools: too many organizations believe that bolting on a single free online-will widget will make legacy gifts materialize, and they pour expensive institutional dollars into that fantasy. Planned giving is relationships, strategy, and patience — not a button. Donors give to organizations that make them feel something and make it easy. I've spent 26 years arguing that doing well and doing good aren't opposites — and a lot of the sector still flinches at that.