Senior Contributor
I write about innovative founding CEOs.
Feb 19, 2024,08:00am EST
Michael Focareto was looking for direction and purpose in his life following a divorce and locked in to a job he no longer found fully rewarding. He decided to take a self-help course that would set him on a journey to the creation of the Veteran Tickets Foundation and the gratification of knowing he and his organization is helping those who served the country.
One of the course assignments was to create a project that would benefit his community while also enlisting others to be involved. “So we created a project to take a bunch of vets to a baseball game, and the Diamondbacks were actually our first donors in 2008, for the organization,” says Focareto of the start of the foundation.
Focareto, himself a veteran having served in the Navy during the Gulf War, asked several of his fellow veterans to join him from the Tempe, Arizona community where he lived for the project. While attending the 2008 Super Bowl with tickets provided by a veteran friend, he noticed that seats around him were empty the entire game.
“So, I looked over at him. And I said, ‘Hey, you know, that project that I’m working on? So, what about maybe taking this thing to the next level, and creating a national nonprofit, where people, individuals and organizations could donate their tickets that aren’t being used?,’’ says Focareto.
Nearly twenty years after Focareto began working on his project, Vet Tix today has some 25 employees serving 2.1 million active users in the system, donating 12,200 to 13,300 tickets a day for events across the US. According to Focareto, the foundation is on pace to grow 40% this year with nearly 7 million tickets given away.
Debbie Castaldo, Senior Vice President of Corporate and Community Impact at the Arizona Diamondbacks further reflects on the relationship with Vet Tix and its growth, said in an interview, “They had a genuine interest in just helping make sure that veterans had opportunities.” Though initially skeptical of the new foundation, the Diamondbacks now donate 25,000 tickets a year to Vet Tix.”
Building on the early success with the Diamondbacks, Focareto points to the foundation’s partnerships with almost every Major League Baseball team, 90% of NHL and NBA teams, college athletic conferences, concert promoter Live Nation, Ticketmaster and more.
While building relationships with sponsors and event partners is key, Focareto also believes that his home built software provides the necessary platform for the foundation’s premise to work. “I often say that we are more of a software company than a charity company because of how integrated we are in the technology side and every piece of software that we have from our website to the back end to all our systems talking to each other,” says Focareto.
With a Masters in Computers and years working in IT, Focareto created his website and commerce software to integrate with all the software systems from Ticketmaster, Live Nations and other ticketing platforms to make it easy for the donors to donate.
“How can we make it easy for those that are on our website? To get those tickets? And then how do we make the donors feel appreciated, and that’s where at the end, we collect the testimonials, saying what the tickets meant, and give those back to the donors for them to use for their marketing materials and stuff like that,” says Focareto.
The “gamification” of the participation process is a big part of why the Vet Tix Foundation works. Requests for tickets go through a vetting system to ensure participants are indeed vets or first responders. Ticket request then go into a lottery system, but participants can improve their odds by earning virtual “coins” by getting other people to sign up or to post their appreciation to sponsors. As a result, they have over 1.5 million testimonials that encourage sponsors and ticket donors to continue contributing to the program.
“And the other thing that we wanted to do is create an organization that is highly valued as far as what it means to the community of veterans because a lot of people think a lot of veteran charities are scams,” says Focareto.
According to the foundation-provided statistics, 95% of every dollar received goes back into free event tickets. They do charge a minimal delivery fee which pays for the organization’s administration and staff. For example, Super Bowl tickets had a face value of $7,500 with Vet Tix charging $14 for delivery.
There are hundreds of veteran and first responder charities, but Focareto believes his specialized service works to complement not compete with them. The foundation is a certified 501(c)(3) charitable organization and is highly rated by independent rating organizations like Great Nonprofits.
Focareto grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, in a household that both served in the military and worked in the family machine shop for several generations. After he graduated high school, he joined the Navy and became a nuclear engineer serving during the Gulf War. He later moved to Arizona and went to Arizona State University where he earned his bachelor’s in 1998 and later his Master’s degrees in computer science in 2009. He worked for Infor as a computer engineer for some twenty years before deciding to devote himself full-time to Vet Tix.
“I’ve always been interested in business and I tried to start a couple of businesses, but of course, as most people know, when you try and start businesses, you usually get overwhelmed and get down in the weeds, and try and do too much on your own,” says Focareto.
Vet Tix worked because he brought in a team of like-minded people to help make it a reality. “I got other people involved day one where someone had marketing backgrounds, someone had better coding experience than I did, someone had money. And it immediately formed as a working organization compared to all the hard work that I would have done on my own,” says Focareto.
As for the future? “Our next big challenge that we’re working on is to become the ‘Goodwill of tickets’, where we have the ability for season ticket holders to donate their tickets, instead of selling them, using Vet Tix,” concludes Focareto.
Bruce Rogers Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn.
I am a Senior Contributor after spending most of my career at Forbes as Chief Brand Officer, Chief Insights Officer, founder of Forbes Insights and the Forbes CMO Practice and Staff writer. I am the co-author of “Profitable Brilliance: How Professional Services Firms Become Thought Leaders” now available on Amazon. http://amzn.to/OETmMz.