Australia, lets get this done.

A little over a year ago, in the middle of the Australian bush, I stood amongst all the people in the world that I love the most, and married my wonderful wife, Mel.

Mel is white, I’m not – which should be totally irrelevant.

Except that, not that long ago, it wasn’t.

Sixty years ago, in Australia, had Mel been Indigenous, we would have had to beg for legal permission to get married. In many US states at the same time, we could’ve been arrested for living together.

It was a combination of brave people putting their love first, campaigning, voting and parliamentary courage that moved history forward and overturned those unjust laws.

Today, just like then, we have the opportunity to move history forward. As the country of the fair go for all, it’s time our LGBTI friends, colleagues and loved ones had the same rights to marry as the rest of us.

Leaving aside the inherent unfairness of the rights of the few again being decided by the will of the many, we have a unique opportunity to be our best selves, to do what’s right and to vote Yes.

In sixty years time, our grand kids will look back at the bans on marriage equality, the same way we look at the bans on interracial marriage and think to themselves, how was that ever a thing?

Personally, I look forward to being able to look them in the eye and tell them I helped end that injustice. I hope you’ll be able to do the same.
If you want to help, here are three things you can do (aside from voting Yes):

Prashan Paramanathan
CEO, Chuffed.org 

5 Team Crowdfunding Campaigns That Blasted Through Their Targets

Crowdfunding is a team sport. Our new Team Crowdfunding feature takes it that extra step further.

A whole new way to crowdfund!

Each of your champions (the core bunch of people most passionate about your project) can take their passion for your cause that extra mile by creating their own crowdfunding page that’s connected with your main campaign page. The team pages inherit any perks from the main campaign and can be customised by each champion.

Check out some of our top picks for campaigns that have taken their crowdfunding to the next level by joining forces with their champions and setting individual targets.

1. Great Ocean Walk with PROJECT FUTURES



2. Small Change Big Impact



3. Climate for Change



4. Toss the Boss 2.0



5. Macquarie Mad Dash



We’re always on the lookout for new ways we can support campaigns in raising more funds, and this feature will do just this.

This is how: Team Crowdfunding lets you set up a normal crowdfunding campaign with several sub-campaigns for each of your team members below it. Everyone on the team gets their own page, which all sum up to the total on the main page.

We think Team Crowdfunding’s perfect for not-for-profits and social enterprises who:

  • Are worried that they don’t have a big enough audience to launch a crowdfunding campaign
  • Want to leverage their supporters’ audiences to get noticed
  • Are keen to be innovative with their fundraising

Interested in reaping the benefits of Team Crowdfunding? Just start drafting a campaign here.

We’re hiring: Customer Support Advocate (London)

Chuffed.org Workshops

Customer Support Advocate (London)

The very brief version

Customer Support role in rapidly-growing, VC-funded, social-cause tech startup, changing the world.

Who is Chuffed.org?

We’re a purpose-led company that’s transforming how people think about charities around the world. Instead of thinking of the charity muggers harassing you on your way to work, we’re making the face of charity awesome, exciting projects that people want to be part of.

Since launching in October 2013, we’ve raised over £9M for close to 5,000 projects in 20 countries. We’ve reunited a Somali refugee mother with her son that she hadn’t seen in 23 years; we’ve helped legalise medicinal marijuana for the terminally ill; we’ve transformed how the Vanuatu Government does disaster relief… and a lot more.

What you’ll be doing?

You’ll be joining our London-based team as we grow to get our product from thousands of campaigners to hundreds of thousands. You’ll be responsible for:

  • Support (80%): You’ll be providing email support to our amazing social cause campaigners and donors. This will be both technical support (how to use the platform) and crowdfunding strategy support (how to run a crowdfunding campaign). Campaigners love the real human connection they get with Chuffed.org, so being empathetic while communicating clearly in writing is important.
  • Coaching (15%): You’ll become a coach to potential campaigners on how to succeed in their crowdfunding campaigns. Don’t worry, we’ll train you on what works from our experience with over 5,000 campaigners. This will be both in person and on Skype
  • Advocating (5%): As you’re the closest person to our customers, you’ll be reporting back to the team on what customers find exciting and confusing about the platform so that we can build an even better product.

In addition, as you get more familiar with Chuffed.org and our customers, we expect everyone in the team to contribute their ideas and opinions on how we can support more organisations better. You might be involved in brainstorms, feedback sessions and customer interviews.

 

What we’re looking for

Culture

  • You’re empathetic: we’re looking for someone with an ability to understand what the world looks like from their point of view. When they’re confused and frustrated, you’ll need to be understanding and helpful
  • You care: we’re a purpose-led company and we love working with people who care about the world around them
  • You learn: there’s a lot to learn about how Chuffed.org and crowdfunding works – and it changes all the time. You’ll need to be curious and have the willingness to be over the small details as well big things
  • You’re independent: we’re a small team distributed across London, Sydney and Melbourne. You’ll be part of an office of 3-4 people, but we generally work at high pace, in different locations and timezones and often quite independently. We’ll give you a lot of flexibility on where and how you work, as long as you get your work done.
  • You play nice: because we all love coming to work and we want you to too

Experience

  • 2 years experience in a customer service or support role or other relevant experience

Bonus points

  • You like building systems that make your job easier – and that make it easier to train others on what you do
  • You like and want to learn more about tech and startup world
  • You’ve worked with the non-profit/charity/advocacy sector before

The details

  • Based in WeWork London Field (E8 4RU)
  • £22-25k salary + 0.1-0.5% equity
  • You’ll report to the CEO (London), and work closely with our Growth Manager (London)

 

Why work for us

People come for the social mission, they stay for the team. We’re a fast-growing social enterprise, that’s backed by some amazing tech investors (Blackbird VC and Bevan Clark) but retains our social mission at our core. We even created our own legal structure over in Australia – the Social Benefit Company – to let us do that. We’ve worked in the social sector for years and changing how it raises money for the amazing work that it does is something that we deeply care about. We’re the place where you can do work that you care about and be part of a fast-moving company at the same time. We also allow for flexible, distributed working to cater for parents.

You can read more here:

 

How to apply

Send us an email to careers@chuffed.org with your CV and a cover letter talking about who you are and what you care about.

Applications close 30 April, or when we find the right person.

The future of regular giving is rockbands

After delivering a pretty good social cause event in Brighton (if I do say so myself), we were approached by a guest who was quite concerned about this whole “crowdfunding” thing.

“Crowdfunding is all well and good,” he said, “but nonprofits should really be focusing on more regular forms of income, like regular giving. It gives them certainty, rather than just fundraising for projects.”

In the first evolution of charity crowdfunding, this was a fair criticism. But in the current state of play, some innovative campaigners are using crowdfunding to create an even better version of regular giving. First, while regular giving is often seen as a goldmine for charities, it’s normally an average experience for donors. You’re ‘acquired’ by street fundraisers, door knockers, telemarketers; sent your welcome pack and signed up to the newsletter until you make the new year’s resolution of inbox zero and choose to unsubscribe or cancel over the phone and are then passed on to the recovery team.

The main complaint that donors have isn’t the sales tactics, it’s the lack of clarity they have around how their particular donation is being used.

Compare that to what one of our campaigners does.

Forever Friends Animal Rescue has a queue of animals who’ve come into their care that they feature on Chuffed.org. On 9th April 2016, it was Jacko, the sweet Jack Russell Terrier who had sadly been hit by a car. They needed to raise $2,800 for Jacko’s surgery: everyone could see exactly how much they’d raised at any point in time, how much they needed to raise, and who else has donated. In less than a month, twenty-two supporters came together and funded the surgery.

On 29th May, Shannon from Forever Friends reported back about the surgery to all the donors.

Image Update

Then on 5th July, donors received this update. Jack found a forever home!

The forever home

For the next month, Forever Friends introduced us to the sweet two year old Staffy mix named Nugget. Once again donors raised the funds because they knew that their donations were going to have an impact.

This kind of transparency is infinitely more inspiring than X% of my donation going to the cause and that’s what keeps them coming back to give again and again and again.

Now of course, it’s not the exact same individuals funding each campaign – donors dip in and out. Rather than causing ‘donor fatigue’, it has the opposite effect, with every cycle the donor base grows. The fanbase expands as supporters share the campaign and refer their friends – I like to think of it like a rock band.

Rock bands put on a concert and their fans turn up. But then their fans go away and tell their friends about how great a band this is, so next time there’s a concert, they bring their friends, and the band’s fanbase grows. Of course, not every fan comes to every show, but overtime, they build a following that gives them a regular income.

That’s what the future of regular giving looks like – a rock band.

We’re hiring: Front-End Developer (Sydney)

Chuffed.org Workshops

Front-end Developer (Sydney)

tl;dr

Front-end developer job in rapidly-growing, VC-funded, social-cause startup, changing the world.

Who is Chuffed.org?

We’re a purpose-led company that’s transforming how people think about charities around the world. Instead of thinking of the charity muggers harassing you on your way to work, we’re making the face of charity awesome, exciting projects that people want to be part of.

Since launching in October 2013, we’ve raised over $13M for 4,500 projects in 20 countries. We’ve reunited a Somali refugee mother with her son that she hadn’t seen in 23 years; we’ve helped legalise medicinal marijuana for the terminally ill; we’ve transformed how the Vanuatu Government does disaster relief… and a lot more.

What you’ll be doing?

You’ll be joining our Sydney-based team as we grow to get our product from thousands of campaigners to hundreds of thousands. You’ll be responsible for:

  • working with the engineering team to build new ways for social cause campaigners to build communities and raise funds and new personalised experiences for donors
  • implementing the experiments and new products that the Growth team wants to test – this will be a mixture of front-end/design work as well as building back end features:
    • Possible activities include: creating landing pages, changing user flows, improving email designs, improving tracking, creating adaptive education in our campaign editor and more
  • instrumenting our app to collect the right data to measure the impact of experiments, gain deeper insights on how users are engaging with our product and where they’re leaking out. We use Segment, Mixpanel and Google Analytics, but are open to others
  • working with the engineering team to ship code every day

As you get more familiar with the product and our customers, you’ll be providing input on what growth initiatives we should pursue too.

 

What we’re looking for

Culture

  • You care: we’re a purpose-led company and we love working with people who care about the world around them
  • You learn: because there’s always another JS framework around the corner and a better way of making our customers happy
  • You play nice: because we all love coming to work and we want you to too

Technical

  • Experience in JS/HTML/CSS (mid-level, about 3 years)
  • Familiarity with PHP (we use Laravel) or a willingness to learn
  • Experience with Angular, React or other modern JS frameworks

Bonus points

  • You’re data driven, curious about what customers value and why they behave in certain ways
  • You’ve worked with the non-profit/charity/advocacy sector before

The details

  • Based in Darlinghurst, Sydney
  • Competitive salary package: we’ll normally pay a mix of cash salary and equity
  • You’ll report to the CEO (London), and work closely with our engineering and growth teams in Sydney, Melbourne and London

 

Why work for us

People come for the social mission, they stay for the team. We’re a fast-growing social enterprise, that’s backed by some amazing tech investors (Blackbird VC and Bevan Clark) but retains our social mission at our core. We even created our own legal structure over in Australia – the Social Benefit Company – to let us do that. We’ve worked in the social sector for years and changing how it raises money for the amazing work that it does is something that we deeply care about. We’re the place where you can do work that you care about and be part of a fast-moving company at the same time.

You can read more here:

 

How to apply

Send us an email to careers@chuffed.org with your CV or any links you have to apps you’ve built, github repos, portfolios. We love getting applications that talk about what you’ve built and why you care.

Applications close when we find the right person.

Architects of Hope

Following the US Executive Order halting refugees and migrants at the end of January, I sent this email to the Chuffed.org Team:

Team,

As you all would know, two weekends ago in the US, President Trump issued an executive order to halt all US refugee intake for 120 days, bar Syrian refugees from the US indefinitely and severely restrict travel to the US of citizens (including dual nationals) of seven majority-Muslim countries.

Upon hearing this order and reflecting on its effects, I spent much of that weekend buried under the weight of fear. It wasn’t just the act of turning our backs on people in their hour of need that triggered this, or the fact that green card permanent residents were no longer able to return home to their families, but the built in ideology that foreigners, and in particular Muslims, should be judged a threat until proven otherwise.

As a perpetual foreigner, that ideology terrifies me.

The fear that I felt in response to this policy pales in comparison to the fear felt by people fleeing for their lives. It is wrong to arbitrarily deny them the hope that a life in our countries brings, especially after years of vetting, waiting and despair. To then treat them as a threat is undeniably callous.

__

In the year I was born, race riots ravaged Sri Lanka. People of one race judged another to be a threat and burned them on the streets. That’s what happens when a Government implicitly or explicitly sanctions fear of a particular group.

In a more welcoming time, we were lucky to immigrate to Australia, which took pride in its multicultural identity. To be sure, it wasn’t perfect; it did debate each wave of migration but it didn’t define its national conversation around deciding who they let into the country and the circumstances in which they came.

As an immigrant, that generosity that Australia showed – that idea that I was welcome and not a threat – created a sense of hope. Hope that I would be treated fairly. Hope that people cared about me. Hope that even though we didn’t know each other, we were on the same side. Hope as an immigrant is a powerful emotion. It’s the thing that gives you the ability to contribute, to integrate, to learn and to create.

Chuffed.org was born out of hope.

And immigrants.

The majority of the Chuffed.org team live in a country that they weren’t born in. For those who were, everyone has at least one parent that wasn’t born in that country. We’re a team of immigrants, who work every day to make the countries we call home better for everyone.

As immigrants, we have to ask ourselves, how do we respond to what’s happening in the US – with hope or with fear?

It’s easy to let fear guide us. It is fear that guides our urge to shout at people who we disagree with. It is fear that guides our desire to flee to the comfort of our social media echo chamber. Fighting fear with fear is momentarily satisfying but that’s about it.

The only way to overcome fear in the long term is to consciously create a world of hope for everyone. Especially for our fellow citizens whom we don’t see eye-to-eye with. That’s why we need to build a community that supports and encourages people who bring hope to the world – particularly to those who need it the most.

The Anne Moon‘s who bring hope to refugees imprisoned on Manus Island and Nauru, the Phili and Rob’s who bring hope to the homeless freezing on London’s streets, and the Jeanna’s who bring hope to the women of Alaska so that their rights will be protected. These amazing people, and thousands more like them, are our architects of hope.

If we can design the world with their plans to guide us, we’ll create a fear-proof world,  one that can’t burn down.

Prashan Paramanathan, CEO Chuffed.org

Hey Australia, we’re getting your donations to you faster

There’s nothing like the feeling of seeing your campaign funds hit your bank account. And we want you to have that feeling even faster than before.

To date, when supporters donated via credit and debit cards to your campaign, you had to wait 5-15 days after your campaign ended before you got your funds. That’s changing today for all new campaigns.

So what’s changing, exactly?

For all new campaign that start from today, donations made via credit and debit cards to Australian campaigns will be transferred to your nominated bank account in 2-day rolling cycles. That means all the donations made to you today, will be sent to you in 2-days time – with the exception of weekends and public/bank holidays. If that’s too frequent for you, you can change this to weekly or monthly.

How do the changes work?

In order to make this happen, we’ve partnered with Stripe – a global payments platform. We’ve actually been using Stripe in the background for all our credit and debit card payments for a number of years already.

Going forward, when you start a campaign in Australia and choose credit/debit card payments, you’ll now need to create and connect an account with Stripe. It’s a <5 minute process and is integrated into our system, so you’ll barely notice.

Then, everything works as normal. Someone donates to your campaign. That donation gets transferred to your Stripe account and then Stripe transfers the donations to your bank account automatically in 2-day rolling cycles.

No more waiting around until after your campaign ends to get your money.

Magic!

 

Some FAQs

1. What if I’ve got a campaign running in Australia already?

For existing campaigns, you’ll still receive your credit/debit card donations 5-15 days after your campaign ends. When you create your next campaign, you’ll be on the new system and need to connect a Stripe account so that we can send your funds to you more frequently.

2. Will this effect non-Australian campaigns?

No. Full steam ahead for campaigns in all our other supported countries. This brings Australia in line with what we’ve been doing everywhere else for a while.

3. Who are Stripe?

Stripe are a global payments system that handles billions of dollars of payments every year around the world. They’re also incredibly reliable and lovely people. You can read more about Chuffed + Stripe here: Stripe leaves Aussie Non-Profit Platform Chuffed.

4. How do I get my donations less frequently?

Sometimes getting transactions into your bank account every day can get really messy – particularly for the accountants – and you’ll want to receive funds less frequently. To do that, you’ll need to:

– Log into your Stripe.com account (www.stripe.com)

  • Click on your name in the top right
  • Click on ‘Account Settings’
  • Click on ‘Transfers’
  • In the ‘Transfer Schedule’ click on ‘Change Schedule’
  • Choose the frequency you want and click on ‘Save Schedule’

All future transfers will then be on the new schedule that you chose.

2016 on Chuffed.org

As 2016 came to an end, all my social media feeds were flooded with doom. Status updates breathed a heavy sighs of relief, ‘Thank God 2016 is over’. The posts pointed to Trump, Brexit, David Bowie, Carrie Fischer, George Michael, Prince… as a sort of doomsday list, dredging out a feeling of hopelessness.

But those lists miss a lot of amazing things that happened in 2016. They skip over the people who witnessed misfortunes and still had the courage to act. They miss the people who did the right thing, even when the odds were stacked against them. You weren’t on those list.

2016 was a huge year of hope on Chuffed.org. It was a year where communities banded together and started to build the foundations for a society that we can be.

In 2016, you supported these wonderful women

You created the first Aboriginal women’s health retreat based on Indigenous medicineYou supported our best female scientists to become our future leaders in Antarctica

In 2016, you supported refugees stuck in the crisis

In 2016, you supported the lives of our animal friends

In 2016, you supported 2,600 campaigns

And that’s not even scratching the bottom of the barrel! In 2016 you supported nearly 2,600 campaigns because they appealed to your sense of justice and vision for a better world.

It is with absolute certainty that I predict (I admit, that’s a bit of an oxymoron) that this community, our community, will make 2017 a year in which the world moves forward in the right direction.

Because we know, that whatever happens, you’ll band together as a community and help each other.

We’re hiring: Front-End Developer (Growth Team, London)

Chuffed.org Workshops

Front-end Developer (Growth Team, London)

tl;dr

Front-end developer job in rapidly-growing, funded, social-cause startup, changing the world.

Who is Chuffed.org?

We’re a purpose-led company that’s transforming how people think about charities around the world. Instead of thinking of the charity muggers harassing you on your way to work, we’re making the face of charity awesome, exciting projects that people want to be part of.

Since launching in October 2013, we’ve raised over $10M/£6M for 3,000 projects in 20 countries. We’ve reunited a Somali refugee mother with her son that she hadn’t seen in 23 years; we’ve helped legalise medicinal marijuana for the terminally ill; we’ve transformed how the Vanuatu Government does disaster relief… and a lot more.

What you’ll be doing?

You’ll be joining our new Growth team in London whose main goal is to get our product from thousands of campaigners to hundreds of thousands. You’ll be responsible for:

  • implementing the experiments and new products that the Growth team wants to test – this will be a mixture of front-end/design work as well as building back end features:
    • Possible activities include: creating landing pages, changing user flows, improving email designs, improving tracking, creating adaptive education in our campaign editor and more
  • instrumenting our app to collect the right data to measure the impact of experiments, gain deeper insights on how users are engaging with our product and where they’re leaking out. We use Segment, Mixpanel and Google Analytics, but are open to others
  • working with the engineering team to ship code every day

As you get more familiar with the product and our customers, you’ll be providing input on what growth initiatives we should pursue too.

In addition to this, we expect the entire team to do customer support at different periods of the year as we believe that this is the best way to understand the needs of our customers and the issues that they have in their lives.

What we’re looking for

Culture

  • You care: we’re a purpose-led company and we love working with people who care about the world around them
  • You learn: because there’s always another JS framework around the corner and a better way of creative value for our customers
  • You play nice: because we all love coming to work and we want you to too

Technical

  • Expert knowledge of JS/HTML/CSS (5 years+), and be familiar with PHP (Laravel)
  • Experience with Angular, React or other modern JS frameworks
  • Design and UX sensibilities and can play around in Photoshop
  • Awareness of cross-browser compatibility issues and client-side performance considerations

Bonus points

  • You’re data driven, curious about what customers value and why they behave in certain ways
  • You understand A/B testing, cohort analysis, AARRR, high tempo testing and have implemented them previously
  • You’ve worked with the non-profit/charity/advocacy sector before

The details

  • Based in London, UK: Shoreditch or Hackney area
  • Competitive salary package: we’ll normally pay a mix of cash salary and equity
  • You’ll report to the CEO (London), and work closely with our Growth Marketer (London) and Customer Advocate (Melbourne). You’ll also interface in with the Engineering Team (Melbourne, Sydney).

 

Why work for us

People come for the social mission, they stay for the team. We’re a fast-growing social enterprise, that’s backed by some amazing tech investors (Blackbird VC and Bevan Clark) but retains our social mission at our core. We even created our own legal structure over in Australia – the Social Benefit Company – to let us do that. We’ve worked in the social sector for years and changing how it raises money for the amazing work that it does is something that we deeply care about. We’re the place where you can do work that you care about and be part of a fast-moving company at the same time.

You can read more here:

 

How to apply

Send us an email to careers@chuffed.org with the subject line: “Front-end Developer (Growth): Your Name” with your CV, any links you have to apps you’ve built, github repos, portfolios. If you feel comfortable including your current salary too, that’d help. We’ll generally pay a combined salary + equity package.

What we’ve learnt from over 100,000 donations on Chuffed.org

In December 2012, when we first pitched the idea of Chuffed.org to the Telstra Foundation, our Big Hairy Audacious Goal was to raise $10 Million across our first five years of operation. I remember writing it in our presentation and thinking it was so outrageously large as to be unbelievable. At the time, we had no product, no traction and no customers.

Today, less than three years since we launched, this happened:

The path to $10M

We are so proud of the thousands of campaigners who’ve chosen to use Chuffed.org to do everything from reuniting a refugee family who’d been separated for 23 years to helping stop coal seam gas exploration across Australia to getting a ban put on greyhound racing.

To celebrate, we decided to do something decidely geeky and delve into those 100,000+ donations to see what they could tell us about donors who give to crowdfunding campaigns.

Here’s our five fun (and sometimes surprising facts):

 

Fact 1. Women give more than men

As a man writing this, I find this both highly unsurprising, but also a tiny bit disappointing for my gender. I’ve had so many debates about why this gender split happens, but if you’ve got any theories, drop them into the comments.

Women donate more than men

 

Fact 2: Online giving isn’t a young person’s thing

I hear far too often that the growth in crowdfunding is because millenials are all moving online and charities need to adapt so that they don’t miss out on this next generation of donors. As it turns out, that’s not quite true. Charities need to learn how to crowdfund because the majority of their middle age and older donors prefer it.

 

Fact 3: People anywhere in the world are happy to give to your campaign

Ok, so we’re not holding our breath on North Korean donors flooding onto Chuffed.org, but hey, maybe one day. We’ve only run campaigns in 20 countries, yet donors have come from 152. The fact that your campaign can be based out of a country town and get donors from dozens of countries around the world – that’s what excites us.

 

Fact 4: Thursday’s the day for giving

Alright, we’re opening this one up for conspiracy theories. Maybe more people get paid on Thursday, maybe it’s because it’s nearly Friday, maybe it’s the day I most like surfing for crowdfunding campaigns on the internet, but well, there’s something noticeably more generous about Thursdays.

Day of the week for donations

 

Fact 5: People love a bit of pre-bedtime donating

This is probably my favourite. Right before bed, people pull out their phones, and well, donate. We suspect that they saw it at work when they got in – the 9am peak, check before they go to bed, notice that the donation total has jumped up, get FOMO, and grab their credit card.

People are most likely to donate at 9pm

Thank you again from all of us here at Chuffed.org. We can’t thank you enough for believing in the dream and trusting us with your projects. Can’t wait for the next ten million.

– Prashan, Seb, Dave, Bec and the Chuffed.org family

 

PS, if you have better theories on these donor behaviour stats, tell us in the comments below