October 2017 – Page 2 – The Chuffed Academy

October 19, 2017

Save Hollygrove Market & Farm!

“Established in 2008, Hollygrove Market & Farm (HMF) was begun by several nonprofit organizations to bring fresh produce to the underserved Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. HMF is a unique model of local food sourcing, distribution and production. We are located on one acre of ground comprised of a retail market, community garden space, and two commercial urban farm plots. We are open daily and, in addition to produce, we sell dairy and eggs, meats, breads and baked goods, pantry items, prepared foods, and more – all locally sourced. We also offer home delivery and wholesale to local restaurants and organizations.

By sourcing solely from a network of over 100 small, family farms and food businesses located within 200 miles of New Orleans, we support our local agricultural system. We connect residents to the producers of the food they are consuming while creating jobs and strengthening the local economy. While we aim to increase fresh food access to all of New Orleans, we strive to increase access to low income, food insecure households by offering discounts and utilizing other outreach methods.

Our farm consists of plots maintained by community growers from the Hollygrove neighborhood and beyond, fruit and vegetable demonstration beds, and two large plots farmed by experienced, commercial (mentor) growers. Our farmers grow for home consumption and to sell at the market. The farm also serves as a demonstration site for visitors interested in adopting environmentally sustainable practices. We host workshops on topics such as home vegetable gardening, composting, raising chickens, bee keeping, food preparation and cooking, and more! We serve brunch every Sunday and conduct individual, group, and school tours and a “bioblitz” (Urban Ecology Exploration). Our outdoor space is available for parties and special events. Visitors are always welcome.”

Check out the Hollygrove Market & Farm crowdfunding campaign page below to support this awesome cause:

October 16, 2017November 23, 2017

Welcome to Chuffed.org Teams

So you’ve got a social cause you’d like to take action on.

You’ve followed our tips on the Crowdfunding Academy, you’ve gathered your crowd of supporters, and now you’re ready to take action!

How can you make your campaign even more successful?

Create a Team!

To help your crowdfunding campaign reach its full potential, building a team is the single most effective thing you can do.

We analysed over 5,000 campaigns on Chuffed.org and found that the standout factor that determined whether you were likely to be successful or not was whether you had more than one team member.

So today, we’re introducing the new, upgraded Chuffed Team Tools.

Think about the group of supporters you already have behind you. You might have:

Close family members, friends, partners or colleagues who are personally motivated to see you succeed
A public figure, celebrity or well-known individual in the field who supports you
Key volunteers who are helping you with the campaign
Organisational / Group / Board Members that back you

Now instead of all sharing an account, or having them hidden behind the campaign, you can make them visible on your campaign page and give them specific roles to help you edit your campaign.

For the super committed, you can now give each team member their own fundraising page and fundraising target

This way, you can enable people who support your campaign to also raise their own funds! They can then share a unique, personal page with their networks and make better use of their social connections. This will give them a higher sense of accountability for helping your campaign reach its target.

If a team member has little time to spare, you can simply set up their page for them and give them a link to share on social media.

The new leaderboard feature helps you keep track of who’s doing well and who needs some help:

Having a team is a great way to show the faces behind your story and personalise your message, and donors will be more likely to trust your project when they see you’ve got support behind you to help you roll it out!

Want to know more about specific team roles. Read the Three ways you can now build your online team on Chuffed.org.

Where to from here? Take these steps to build your team today!

Head to chuffed.org/start and begin your campaigning (for free!)
Navigate to the Team section
Create Team Members (all you need is their name)
Choose their Role in the Campaign!
Optimise Editors & Fundraisers

October 12, 2017

Brighton Syrian Musicians: Vinyl Record & Community Support

“Best Foot Music is a UK based ‘non profit’ organisation, working with musicians and communities who have come to live here, from elsewhere in the World.

Our work includes making music recordings, organising events and supporting artists in whichever creative projects they wish to pursue. We aim to challenge negative stories around migration and support diversity in the community.

The first people we started recording with were from Poland, living in Brighton and London. Over the years we’ve become good friends.

Initially, we just made music recordings, but then realised we needed to give something back to the people we worked with. Many wanted us to help them with promotions and organising gigs. Often those who have only recently arrived in the UK, do not have access to the networks and resources available to those long established in the UK music industry.

I get really excited every time the musicians we work with performing at a concert. Music genuinely helps break down social barriers and is a great way to bring people together.

The war in Syria has resulted in many people having to leave the country, some of who have settled in Sussex. Many have arrived with only a few belongings, and need support. The Sussex Syrian Community Group was set up by people from the local Syrian community, and the Hardship fund is administered by the community. It pays for English lessons, day to day support and social events, which help people build friendships and community networks.

We’re excited about the record for a number of reasons. Firstly, it will enable people to support the community and show support for those people who have sort refuge in the UK.

Secondly, we hope the record will form an enriching and permanent document of some of the musical cultures that people bring to life in the UK, wherever they travel from and under whatever circumstances.”

Learn more about the awesome Best Foot Music cause on their crowdfunding campaign page and video below!

October 12, 2017

Kimbourne Park: Building community & growing local food with a permaculture garden!

“Moving from the country to Toronto, I found the concrete, congestion, and visible disparities between rich and poor overwhelming. I desperately missed the feeling of being rooted in a community, so I soothed my feelings of disconnect by putting down roots—literally.

I had gotten interested in food justice because it encompasses all the causes I care about most: poverty, environmental restoration, health through access to good food, even policy-making around our food systems. In 2014 I worked up the courage to attend a food justice event downtown by myself. That’s where I heard the word “permaculture” for the first time, and I discovered that people around the world were already growing food in ways that made the earth and their communities healthier. That we could turn farms into ecosystems instead of machines. That people could be a part of the living ecosystem and not its enemies. That making enough healthy soil—something incredibly easy to start doing—could even pull us back from the tipping point of climate change.

I devoured every book, video, and podcast I could get my hands on. I started volunteering with a local group called Permaculture GTA. And when I found out the church I’d recently started attending had a big, unused lawn, I screwed up my courage once again and asked if I could use it for a secular community garden—something that was connected to but separate from the church so that anyone, regardless of faith, would feel welcome to join. The church was incredibly supportive, and some of its members helped form the initial committee that planned the goals of what became Garden@Kimbourne Community Permaculture Project: to grow food and community using permaculture principles, to spread food education through free workshops and events, and to donate at last half of the year’s harvest to a local food bank.

Today, members of the community make up half of Garden@Kimbourne’s leadership and most of our members. Most people come to us with no gardening experience, but they are eager for the same feeling of rootedness that I craved for myself. One of my most rewarding moments was putting a packet of seeds in the hands of a young woman who, a year before, was completely inexperienced and terrified of doing something wrong. “Check the directions and plant them over there,” I told her. She grinned and walked confidently away.”
Erin Alladin
Coordinator, Garden@Kimbourne

Learn more about this awesome cause on Garden@Kimbourne’s crowdfunding campaign page and video below!

October 12, 2017

Compelled by Love – Changing lives and alleviating poverty!

“In 2010, my uncle made the huge decision to move with his family to Rwanda to train local NGO’s in a trauma rehabilitation program called Empower. In 1994, genocide took place in Rwanda in which over 1 million people were killed in the space of just 100 days. The horror that people experienced is beyond words. Even now, 23 years on, many Rwandans re-live what they went through during the genocide on a daily basis, completely crippled by their trauma. Today in Rwanda, victims and perpetrators of the genocide are living side by side in the same communities – so there is a huge amount of fear and suspicion that hangs over people. Many live in isolation and suffer from chronic pain and headaches, nightmares, flashbacks, inability to sleep, hopelessness, lack of purpose, plotting revenge, plotting suicide, lacking the will to live.

When my uncle decided to move across the world to Africa – with four kids – I was so inspired by his courage and desire to share the resources he had to make an impact. I became a supporter of him in his journey and what he was doing – and along the way, as I learnt more and more about Rwanda, my heart was moved by not only the devastating stories, but by the resilience, determination and strength of the Rwandan people. I saw huge change in people’s lives through the Empower program and got involved as a volunteer to raise funds and awareness for this important work. As support grew, and the work expanded, I joined with my uncle and a number of others to establish a not-for-profit organisation in Australia called Compelled By Love, to advocate for the need and raise funds to continue this work. I now have the privilege of working for this organisation.

I love this work in Rwanda because it is so unique. In general, we don’t build anything or make anything – you can’t ‘go and see’ a structure that shows what we do. The change that’s taking place is internal – amazing testimonies of people sleeping through the night for the first time since the genocide, of crying for the first time, of sharing their story with another person for the first time, of having relief from chronic pain. People sharing about forgiveness and reconciliation; about recovering meaning and purpose in life, and the will to live – and then combining this hope with the skills and resources they have to start addressing poverty for themselves.

We aim to support our partners in Rwanda to run Empower monthly – each program has 36 participants who’s lives begin a process of amazing transformation in just seven days. ”

To find out more about Compelled By Love, visit http://www.compelledbylove.org.au/ or check out their awesome crowdfunding campaigns below!

October 6, 2017

Help Emma unlock young refugees’ potential with Unicef UK

“My name is Emma Sinclair. I’m a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of alumni software company EnterpriseAlumni.

I spend a great deal of my time fielding questions from people about their careers and business: how to get ahead, how to secure a promotion, how to move industries. My best piece of advice is that it doesn’t always need to be all about the career ladder you’re currently on. In fact, on the contrary, my advice is it may be far more valuable to get a side gig.

My various side gigs have done many things for me. They’ve given me an increasingly powerful voice at many tables, from media to business and government. They’ve exposed me to people, places and experiences I might otherwise never have met. They have given me rich life experiences that make me a better employer, friend, corporate citizen and colleague. And hopefully they’ve encouraged other people I know to get a side gig too.

It was in pursuing one of these side gigs that I was able to visit Zambia with Unicef in September 2014 to front a programme providing financial, enterprise and employability skills to young people in communities where opportunities are limited. This visit made me a better, more informed person on youth unemployment and, more broadly, how to assist young people seeking a better future through access to opportunity. More than one billion adolescents stand at the crossroads between childhood and adulthood, 200 million of whom are in Africa, where they are almost three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. And I saw that first hand.

Following this experience, I wanted to find a way to bring my tribe of entrepreneurs, innovators and business people together to invest in and support a particularly at risk next generation of thinkers and innovators. Two weeks ago I launched Unicef Uk’s first crowd fund to roll out Innovation Labs in Azraq Refugee Camp, Jordan. 50 million children have been uprooted from their homes and face unimaginable hardships. Many have lost their family, their friends, their chance to go to school – a privilege most of us enjoyed. The roll out of these Innovation Labs, which this crowd fund is seeking to fund, will give young people support, seed funding and training in highly-sought-after digital skills, including coding and engineering.

It is in this way that I hope my own side gig will not only enrich my experiences but can help unlock the potential of younger generations of entrepreneurs.”

To learn more about Emma and join her in unlocking the potential of these vulnerable young people, check out her Chuffed.org crowdfunding campaign page below:

October 6, 2017November 23, 2017

Welcome to Chuffed.org Teams

What do you think makes the most difference to your chances of success on a crowdfunding campaign? The Video? The Perks? The Target?

Turns out it’s none of those.

We analysed over 5,000 campaigns on Chuffed.org and found that the standout factor that determined whether you were likely to be successful or not was whether you had a team member.

So, we decided to make working with teams much simpler.

Here are the three ways you can now do it on Chuffed.org:

1. The Advocate Team

In lots of situations, one person gets the responsibility to make sure their crowdfunding page looks perfect and their main job is to put all the content up and then give the rest of the team a link to the campaign page. Everyone else needs to be acknowledged on the page, but they don’t need to edit it.

We’ve made it super simple to add team members names and profile photos directly in the campaign editor and then like magic, they’ll appear on your page.

2. The Collaborative Team

What about if more than one person needs to edit the campaign? Then it becomes a collaborative effort.

All you need to do in this case, is to add the person’s name and email and invite them to become an Editor. They’ll then get sent an email invitation with login details to edit the campaign.

This is great for the situation when you’re co-founders or a campaign team or someone has the bank account details and you need to share the campaign with them.

3. The Fundraiser Team

The deepest level of team is when people agree to fundraise for you. They need their own Individual page that’s connected to the main campaign.

All you need to do is to add in the person’s name and then switch on their individual fundraiser page. If they need to edit the page too, just invite them to edit it. Note that they’ll only be able to edit their individual fundraiser page unless you give them “Editor” access to the main page.

This is great for: when you’ve got team members with their own networks; or if you’re running a fundraising challenge event; or if you want to create a bit of competition amongst the team.

Where to from here?
Whether you’re an Individual, or representing an organisation, it’s easy to build a team!

Here are the first steps:

Head to chuffed.org/start and begin your campaigning (for free!)
Navigate to the Team section
Create Team Members (all you need is their name)
Choose their Role in the Campaign!
Optimize Editors & Fundraisers