Crowdfunding for Gender Affirming Surgery

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Crowdfunding for Gender Affirming Surgery

At Chuffed, we support a lot of people who are crowdfunding for gender affirming surgery. As many people reading this will be all too aware, gender affirming surgery can be difficult to access and prohibitively expensive – which is why so many people are turning to crowdfunding.

We’re launching our comprehensive fundraising guide for Transgender Awareness Week (13th-19th November). We’ve recorded the stories of inspiring campaigners who have crowdfunded for gender affirming surgery.

You can listen to their stories and find some guidance on how to crowdfund for gender-affirming surgery below. We’re grateful to our amazing partners who are helping to promote this guide. You can find more information on our partners at the bottom of this guide.

If you’re looking to start your own gender-affirming surgery campaign, start your campaign here.

Meet your peers:

These campaigners will be sharing their stories on how they managed to crowdfund for their gender-affirming surgery.

Crowdfunding for Gender-Affirming Surgery Video Training:

We’ve split this training up into several digestible chunks. Listen to these campaigners’ stories at your leisure.

Our speakers wanted to make space to acknowledge privilege. Their journeys may not be the same as everyone else’s. However we, and they, hope to share their stories to give some inspiration on how to crowdfund for your own gender-affirming surgery.

Part 1: Introductions and Finding your Crowd

Part 2: Telling your Story and Setting your Target

Part 3:  Building Momentum

Part 4: Creating a Promotion Plan 

Part 5: Gender Affirming Surgery Challenges and Navigating them

Part 6: Campaigner’s Message to People Pursuing Gender Affirming Surgery

Chuffed’s 5 Step Plan – How to prepare for a crowdfunding campaign:

These general tips are part of our tried and tested formula to help campaigners prepare and promote their campaigns . Use these steps as a baseline for your own crowdfunding campaign.

Want to draft your own campaign for gender-affirming surgery? Start making your campaign here.

 

Programme Partners

We’re grateful to our programme partners for promoting this guide. You can find more information on our partners below:

Gendered Intelligence:  Gendered Intelligence, established in 2008, is a registered charity that works to increase understandings of gender diversity and improve the lives of trans people. You can find out more about them here.

TransActual: TransActual UK was founded by a group of British trans people in 2017 as a response to increasing press hostility, transphobia and misinformation. They are run by the trans community, with the trans community, for the trans community. You can check out their website here.

New Feature: Email Journeys

Timely donor engagement is critical for a successful crowdfunding campaign. But with lots of donors coming in in real time, how do you send them the right message at the right time?

Introducing: Email Journeys

Email Journeys is our new automation tool on Chuffed.org which allows campaigners to send emails based on a number of different triggers.

Want to send a welcome email to donors after their first donation? How about an email to a fundraiser encouraging them after they start their campaign? Or an email to all your campaign managers when your campaign hits 75% of its target?

You can do all of that and more in our fully customizable email journeys (which are available free for a limited time).

Here’s how it works:

1. When creating a new campaign on Chuffed.org, heading to the Manage > Email Journeys menu item. You’ll see a new screen like this:

2. You’ll have a choice between three types of journeys: Donors, Fundraisers and Campaign:

  • Donor journeys are triggered by actions the donor does, eg. making their first or second donation
  • Fundraiser journeys are triggered by actions relating to a fundraiser on your campaign, eg. getting their first donation or signing up to a campaign
  • Campaign journeys are triggered by campaign-level actions, eg. a campaign hitting 75% of its target

To get you started we’ve added in some default emails. You can edit these or create some of your own.

3.  To create a custom journey of your own, just click on the +Add journey button, which will bring up the email editor:

All you have to do is:

  • Give your journey a name to make it easy to refer back to it later
  • Choose what trigger you want to send the email on. For this example, we’ve chosen to send the email when a donor makes their first donation to your campaign
  • Choose who you’re going to send the email to. Here, we want it to go to the donor, but we could send it to all campaign managers to tell them about the donation
  • Choose when you want the email to send. We’ve chosen to send it immediately after the trigger (the first donation to the campaign)
  • Then edit the email subject and content. You can add in pictures if you want too

If you want to really tailor the email content, we have a number of merge fields that will make the email feel even more customized.

After you’re done, send an email to yourself to test it out or view it in your browser. Then save, and switch the email on.

That’s it. Your first automated email journey created!

We’d love to hear more about how you can use Custom Email Journeys to create great donor and fundraiser experiences. Send us your ideas in the comments below.

New Feature: P2P Team Fundraising

Over the years of building Chuffed.org, one thing has become very clear. Fundraising is a team sport. Campaigns that use our team tools and have at least one other fundraiser on them, raise 2.5x more than campaigns that don’t.

We pioneered team crowdfunding early in our life, but we’re very excited to launch our biggest upgrade: 2 Level Teams.

Two Level Teams allows your supporters to both have their own fundraising page and have multiple fundraisers collectively form a team.

Here’s what it looks like on a real campaign:

We’ve designed the campaign administrator experience to be incredibly simple too. You can create fundraiser pages for your supporters, or let them create the pages themselves. You can choose what leaderboards to show and you can control which fundraisers get permission to edit their pages.

Here’s what the editor looks like:

While many of our campaigners are using 2 Level Teams for their Peer to Peer Fundraising Events (runs, cycles, marathons etc), we’ve had several leverage the new feature for their crowdfunding campaigns.

If you want to leverage these new team fundraising tools for your nonprofit, read more here: 2 Level Teams Fundraising.

We’re giving donors more choice

One of the guiding principles of Chuffed.org has always been transparency. Our model is built off ‘optional donations‘ because we wanted to make the costs associated with donating online transparent to donors.

We also wanted to make the fact that our payment processors charged fees transparent as well, so we added them to the donation page.

This week, we’re releasing a significant change to our payment processing to make the payment processing fees more transparent – and reflective of the differing fees for different payment types.

Generally speaking, it’s cheaper to process Visa/Mastercards, than it is to process American Express Cards, than it is to process PayPal transactions.

Previously, to make the donation flow simpler, we used a weighted-average blending method to charge an average rate. This is no longer possible to do due to regulation changes in Australia and the EU – we think that North America and the rest of the world will follow.

The good news is that donors who were thinking about using an American Express or PayPal can now reduce their payment processing fees by using a Visa or Mastercard.

This will generally mean that the overall payment processing fees donors will pay on average will go down. It also means that when we negotiate lower rates with our card processing partners, we can pass on individual card rates to you.

PS, we recently renegotiated our rates with Stripe, so you’ll be seeing even cheaper card processing rates with this rollout. Here’s what they look like for four major countries:

United States

  • Domestic Visa/Mastercard: 2.2% + 30c
  • Amex/International: 3.5% +30c
  • PayPal: 2.9% + 30c

Australia

  • Domestic Visa/Mastercard: 0.8% + 20c
  • Domestic American Express: 1.8% + 20c
  • International Visa/Mastercard/Amex: 2.8% + 20c
  • PayPal: 2.6% + 30c

United Kingdom

  • Domestic and EU Visa/ Mastercard: 1.2% + 20p
  • Amex/ Non-EU: 2.9% + 20p
  • PayPal: 3.4% + 20p

Canada

  • All payment types: 2.9% + 30c

Welcome to Customized Donation Forms

Today we’re announcing the release of our fully-featured customizable donation forms for your crowdfunding campaigns.

Over the last five years, we’ve optimized our donation forms on Chuffed.org for one thing – conversion. When we started, the market norm was to force potential donors to create an account and login before donating. That was terrible for converting donors, so we scrapped that.

We optimized the order of how we asked for information, the payment options including introducing one-click Apple Pay payments and numerous other tweaks to make one of the best converting donation forms out there.

But while many non-profits just want to get donors through to payment as quickly as possible, sometimes it makes more sense to collect more information.

What if you need to call donors about your work; or you noticed a donor gave for the second time and you want to post them a hand written thank you note?

That’s why we’re introducing fully customizable donation forms. Here’s what you’ll now be able to create:

1 Address and Phone Number collection

Campaigners can now collect donor addresses and phone numbers. This is useful if you need to follow up with donors or if your crowdfunding campaign is part of a regular giving funnel. All the data is broken down into individual fields to suit any CRM system.

Rest assured the form is smart enough to force collection of different fields where they’re required – eg. for tax deductible receipting in Canada, you need to collect the title of the donor; for Gift Aid in the UK, you need to collect addresses.

2 Default Donation Amounts

We’ve spent a lot of time experimenting on the optimal default donation amounts to show donors, which is how we came up with 25, 50, 100, 200 – but sometimes there’s a very good reason to switch them to something else. That’s now incredibly simple in the editor:

3 Custom questions and question types

You can now ask as many additional questions to your donors as you want. Want to know if they want to be a volunteer, or how frequently they want to hear from you or if they’re part of a cohort of your program. You can now just ask.

We give you the option of three questions types too: a free text open response, for open ended questions; an on/off toggle; and a dropdown list that donors have to choose one from.

4 Disclaimers

Whether your running a political fundraiser or charity campaign, sometimes it’s important that donors have a particular piece of information before they donate.

You can now add a disclaimer that all donors see immediately before they donate. Campaigners have already used this for legal disclaimers, to direct donors to their financial information and to tell donors about their tax deductibility status, but because it’s entirely flexible, you can use it however you want:

5 Required and optional types

Sometimes you want to give donors the option of giving their phone number, but don’t want to force them to. That’s where required fields come in. For the default set of donation fields, you can now choose whether to force donors to give you the data before they donate, or not.


All of these options are now available to all crowdfunding campaigners on Chuffed.org — for free!

Lions & Tigers: The South Sudan wheelchair basketball story

South Sudan Team and Richard

When London-based journalist and filmmaker Richard Nield first met the players of South Sudan’s national wheelchair basketball team in 2012 he was so inspired by their story that he decided to make a feature documentary about the team.

The players of South Sudan’s wheelchair basketball team

The courageous group of young people he met in South Sudan have overcome war, disability and displacement to fulfil their dreams.

In a refugee camp in Kenya more than a decade ago, the players pledged that if ever South Sudan became an independent country they would form a national wheelchair basketball team. In July 2011, South Sudan gained independence. Two weeks later, the team was formed.

Over the past six years, Richard has assembled a team of filmmakers from the UK, US and Australia. They have filmed in South Sudan three times, and when conflict forced some of the players to flee the country in 2015 Richard and his team travelled to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia to continue to film their dramatic journey.

This November, internationally-renowned wheelchair basket coach Jess Markt will travel from the US to South Sudan to train the team.

Jess, who broke his spine in a car accident when he was 19, has trained wheelchair basketball teams all over the world. His teaching is a tremendous opportunity for South Sudan’s players and a major step towards them fulfilling their next dream: to compete in their first international.

South Sudan Team and RichardRichard on court with team players Gabriel and Stephen and their friends at Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya in October 2015

Richard and his team are determined to give South Sudan’s wheelchair basketballers the global audience that their heroic achievements deserve. They are desperate not to miss this opportunity to capture such a crucial chapter in the team’s story.

So far Richard has almost entirely self-funded the film’s production. Now he has launched a campaign on Chuffed.org to raise the money he needs to complete filming and bring this incredible story to screens all over the world.

To support Richard’s campaign and give your backing to these amazing people, you can view their campaign here:

Welcome Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics to Chuffed.org

Today we’re releasing two new integrations on Chuffed.org: Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics. Here’s how you can use them to raise more funds:

Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel integration is perfect for those campaigners that are using Facebook Ads to reach new audiences and find donors. Here are two ways we recommend using the Facebook Pixel – Chuffed.org integration:

1 Tracking your campaign effectiveness

For most people running Facebook ads, they just boost a post and hope for the best. If you’re “reach” is 3,000 people, that’s good right? The problem with that is you have no real idea how many of those 3,000 people clicked through and how many of those people donated.

With the new integration, you can track exactly which of your Facebook campaigns resulted in donations – and exactly how much the donations were. That means that if you’ll be able to see exact return-on-investment results like:

  • I spent $250 on Campaign A and got $800 in donations;
  • I spent $250 on Campaign B and got $300 in donations

So, I better put more budget in Campaign A and turn off Campaign B.

2 Remarketing to visitors who didn’t turn into donors

Say you’re promoting your campaign via email, twitter, your Facebook page and other people are sharing it everywhere. Maybe 10% of the people who visit your Chuffed.org page will convert to donations. The other 90% though are the perfect audience to market to on Facebook. You can create a Facebook Ads audience out of visitors to your page that didn’t convert, and use them as to target your ads at.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to track and understand your audience. Here’s three things that you can do with the integration.

1 Watch real-time visitors to your Chuffed.org page

You can see in real-time how many visitors are on your page, where they came from and what country they’re in.

2 See where your traffic is coming from

You can set up goal funnels and see how well traffic from different sources convert. This means that you can adjust your marketing accordingly.

3 Understand the demographics of your audience

You’ll be able to see how old your visitors are and their gender, as well as interests and other demographic data that Google provides.

If you’re ready to integrate Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics with your Chuffed.org crowdfunding campaign, head to these articles below:

Facebook Pixel Crowdfunding Integration

Google Analytics Crowdfunding Integration

 

RSPCA QLD need your help to save Border Collie cross puppies!

RSPCA-QLD-Puppies

RSPCA-QLD-Puppies

RSPCA QLD need your help!
Eight Border Collie cross puppies were found abandoned

RSPCA Qld Inspectors are calling for information after eight Border Collie cross puppies were found dumped on the north side of Kev Hooper Memorial Park in Abelia Street, Inala on the evening of Wednesday August 22. They were in critical condition.

The litter was found by a member of the public and taken to the AEC 24 hour vet clinic in Wooloongabba. Sadly, it was already too late for one of the 5-week-old pups which was deceased upon arrival.

They were brought into the RSPCA Domestic Animal Hospital at Wacol yesterday for urgent treatment.

Sadly only three of the eight pups remain after four more pups succumbed to their illness yesterday.

The three remaining puppies are receiving round-the-clock care at the RSPCA. They are malnourished, suffering from hypothermia, conjunctivitis and life threatening Hookworm infestations. The next 48 hours are vital to their survival and they have an even longer fight ahead.

RSPCA Qld Lead Veterinarian Philippa Cox said, “We are hoping for the best but the sad reality is that some of the puppies may not respond to treatment. Further complications can arise which would result in emergency abdominal surgery. For now, it’s hour by hour for these six tiny babies.”

If you would like to help these puppies, please donate today.

Read more about RSPCA QLD’s work on their campaign page and make a donation here:

New Feature: Regular Giving on Chuffed.org

This month, we’re launching Regular Giving on Chuffed.org. It’s been one of the most requested features we’ve ever had, so we’re incredibly excited to be making it available for all our campaigners.

Regular giving is perfect for:

  • organisations that have regular expenses like staff, rent and programs to pay for;
  • political and advocacy organisations that collect ongoing dues or membership fees; or
  • campaigners who just want to convert some of their crowdfunding donors into longer term relationships

Here’s how it works

1. Switch on Regular Giving in the Customize section of the editor

For all our campaigners, they can just login in, edit their campaign and go to the Customize section of the editor. Down the bottom, you’ll see this toggle. Just switch it on to activate Regular Giving.

Currently, Regular Giving is connected to our debit/credit card system, so if you haven’t set up a Stripe.com account, you’ll be prompted to do so. Don’t worry, this takes less than 5 minutes.

2. Donors can choose one-off or monthly

Now that Regular Giving has been enabled on your account, donors will see the Regular Giving toggle on the donation page:

If they choose the “Monthly” option, they’ll get a clear explanation of exactly how the charging will work so there are no surprises.

They’ll make a donation straight away, and then another one on the 15th of every month, starting from the following month. That means if they donate on the 10th August, their next donation will be on the 15th September, then on the 15th October and so on.

3. Each month, their donation will get automatically transferred to you

You won’t need to do anything. On the 15th of the following month, the donor’s card will be charged, and you’ll receive your funds. Note that your campaign does not need to be “live” or in “Infinity Mode” for this to happen. Each new monthly donation will be treated like a new donation to your campaign: your total will increment, and your supporters tab will be updated. This will continue until the donor asks us to switch off the Regular Monthly donation.

Frequently asked questions

1. Does my campaign need to be live for the regular donation to process?

No. Regular Giving will process even if your campaign is completed. For example, let’s say someone decides to donate $15/month to your campaign on the 20th August. On that day, you’ll get a $15 donation to your campaign. Then, let’s say, your campaign ends on the 30th August. Although no new donors will be able to donate after the 30th August, you’ll still continue to get your Regular Giving donations. So on 15th September, you’ll get another $15 donation to your campaign and so on.

2. What happens if someone’s card expires or if someone doesn’t have enough money in their bank account for the Regular Giving donation? 

We attempt to charge Regular Giving donations on the 15th of every month. If the card charge attempt fails for whatever reason, we’ll attempt to charge it up to 3 additional times in the week following the 15th. Obviously if one of these attempts succeeds, we’ll stop any further attempts. After these 3 additional attempts, if we are unable to charge the card, we will notify you and stop charging the card. We will also notify the donor and they can update their card details with us.

3. How to donors cancel or amend their regular donation?

Donors can contact Chuffed.org Support at support@chuffed.org to amend their Regular Giving donation at any time.

Welcome to Apple Pay, Higher Conversions and More Transparency

Today we’re releasing our brand new payment experience on Chuffed.org, which we’ve been working on over the last month. It’s our biggest payment system upgrade to date – here are the three major changes:

1. Introducing Apple Pay for Crowdfunding (and Android, Google, Chrome & Microsoft Pay)

We’re now at 60% mobile and tablet traffic and so we built this upgrade from a mobile-first perspective. That means all campaigns that use our credit/debit card system, will now automatically be upgraded to allow Apple Pay payments on iOS devices which support it. Android & Microsoft fans, fear not. We’ve also included Android, Chrome and Microsoft Pay in the upgrade so all major in-built device payment methods are now supported on Chuffed.org – making us one of the few platforms in the world to provide this level of support for non-profits, charities, and social enterprises around the world.

Here’s what it looks like when you donate on an iPhone 8:

 

2. Higher Donor Conversion +16%

A few months back we ran a set of user experience tests with new donors to Chuffed.org to see how they experienced the payment page. It was good, but there were a number of things that we picked up that could be improved – mostly around the emotional stages of a donation process, the mobile donation experience and how the choice structure worked. From there, we designed a new experience with all that research built in and have been A/B testing it for a few weeks. Now, most A/B tests are successful if they get 1-2% increases in conversion rates.

Our results: the new structure and user experience got a 16% higher conversion rate. That means 16% more donors for you. We’re not resting on our laurels though – we’ve got a few more things we’re looking at building in to push this even higher for you.

3. More Transparency

One of the main parts of our social mission is to increase the level of transparency in giving. That’s why we pioneered the optional donation model – so that donors can choose exactly what they give to us, instead of being slugged with a hidden 5% fee. We want to make the way we present the optional donation model as clear as possible, so we’ve now included in the flow of the donation process, rather than behind an edit button, and we’ve dramatically simplified the explanation of what it is. We know that optional donations is still a new’ish model, but we’re seeing more and more platforms adopt it and we think the days of taking a hidden cut are numbered.

4. GDPR compliance

For our EU & UK campaigners, we’re making your GDPR compliance even easier by using default opt-outs for all extra marketing and separating out different communication channels. That means that you’ll be able to correctly import any donors’ personal information by their communication preferences – and only communicate with the people that have given the right permissions. Any campaign that’s run this year will have valid donor permission information.

What’s next?

We’ve got a few more upgrades to the payment process coming up, including improving our PayPal experience, extra GDPR support, and a few more things to make your donors’ experience the best we can make it.

– Prashan and the Chuffed.org Team