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!

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

The Ultimate Guide to Crowdfunding for Schools

At Chuffed.org, we love seeing parents, teachers,  students – people like you – coming together to support their local school. We’ve seen campaigners raise thousands for playgrounds, excursions, programs and plenty more.

To help you run the most successful school crowdfunding campaigns that you can, we’ve put together this guide that will step you through creating an effective crowdfunding page.  

The Crowdfunding Campaign page

A crowdfunding campaign page is the page on Chuffed.org where you’ll direct supporters, donors, friends and family. It includes the details of who you are, what you are trying to achieve and how you plan to do so. It’s the place supporters actually donate to your campaign.

Choosing the right options and including information in an easily digestible way is important and can be the difference between a good campaign and a great one.

A campaign page looks a bit like this example (below) from the Central Coast Montessori Primary School. The title is at the top, followed by the name of your organisation. To the left of the screen under the title is the campaign banner or video; on the right is the campaign target and counter. Under this is a box containing your campaign’s ‘pitch’ and buttons supporters use to initiate their donations. 

Beneath these is the main body text outlining your campaign’s story – the campaign description. The tabs can be switched to show comments from supporters, and names of supporters. On the right next to the main story are where perks are listed should you choose to have them.  

Click here to see the full campaign page. 

 

Setting up your campaign page

All the components of a crowdfunding campaign page are stepped out below alongside examples from successful school campaigns we’ve hosted on Chuffed.org.  

We’ve also created this handy Google Doc template that you can use to collaborate with your team. It contains some more examples from great campaigns.

To start setting up your crowdfunding campaign page, head to chuffed.org/start.

 

1. Campaign title

This is what your campaign is called. The title shows at the top of your campaign page and is shared with potential supporters when you share the campaign out via Facebook and Twitter – so the title (along with the banner image – more about that below) is the first thing people will see.

Good titles are less than 5 words long and are like the title of a book: memorable or catchy. You might include alliteration, a question, a play on words or unique spelling.

Some real examples from successful campaigns:

  • Graduate to Greatness
  • Education in a suitcase
  • Rocklands Book Nook Appeal
  • How Cool is Our School – a – thon 
  • Every kid deserves a slam dunk!

 

2. Target

All campaigns on Chuffed.org need to set a campaign funding target. You’ll receive your funds even if you don’t hit your target, but it’s important to set your target at an achievable level to build credibility with your supporters.

You should set your target based on three factors:

  1. Cost: What does it cost to deliver your project?
  2. Audience size: How many people do you have already in your database or email list?
  3. Available time: How much time do you have to prepare in the 4 weeks prior to the campaign and promote during your campaign?

As a rough rule of thumb, we find that the following is a reasonable way to set your target:

Email contacts are the most valuable, followed by Facebook friends and then Twitter or LinkedIn contacts.

 

3. Timeframe

On Chuffed.org, you can choose to either run your campaign for a fixed length of time (90 days or less) or ongoing with no end date in what we call Infinity Mode.

If it’s your first campaign, we generally find that you’ll raise the most when you run a 30-40 day campaign. The reason for this is that the time pressure forces your team to act, which drives momentum, which brings more people to your campaign. Campaigns that stretch on for a long period of time struggle to gain interest because supporters get distracted by other things in their lives.

 

4. Writing up your campaign

This is where you tell your supporters about your project: why your cause is important and what you are doing to make a difference.

 

Pitch

The pitch is short blurb to describe what you’re doing in 200 characters. It sits in a box just under you campaign target on the campaign page.

It is what potential supporters are likely to read first and helps them understand quickly what your project is about. Remember: they’re busy, and they’ll be skim reading, so the pitch is your chance to grab their attention and tell them why they should read your full campaign description. Be as succinct, specific and engaging as you can.

Here are some examples of good pitches used by real school campaigns on Chuffed.org: 

Please help Rocklands school to rejuvenate our library. Every penny will count, from furniture to books, we’d love your help! Please support our 73 children build their dream library.

We are raising funds for Crestmont, our beloved parent co-operative school in Richmond, California. We need a permanent home in order to sustain Crestmont’s legacy. Please consider making a donation today!

Montmorency Primary School needs your help… we’re hoopless!

And some not so great pitches:

Help us build a new building for our school.

We’re trying to produce and distribute books that inspire our children to become AMAZING people.

 

Campaign description

This is the larger block of text on your campaign page and it’s where you can go into detail about what you’re doing. The best campaigns use about 300-500 words, combined with pictures, to tell a story about the change they want to make and how they plan to do it. You can even embed images or videos that you might have (in addition to the main campaign banner or video – described below).

As your campaign progresses, you can keep editing your campaign description. It’s a great place to put in progress updates- like Edgar’s Mission did in this award winning campaign – so that supporters who are checking your page regularly have fresh content to enjoy. The folk at North Perth Primary School also did this really well in their campaign to build new outdoor play equipment.

Below is a simple structure you can use for your campaign description. The example we’ve used is a summarised version of the excellent North Perth Free-Climbing Dome campaign run by North Perth Primary School. Click here to see their full campaign page.

 

EXAMPLE CAMPAIGN DESCRIPTION STRUCTURE

Section: Background

In this section:

  • Introduce your vision for change and/or the story of who you are.
  • Tell supporters briefly about the issue you’re addressing and why you want to do something about it.
  • Use first person stories over facts and numbers to paint a picture.

Example 

North Perth Primary School desperately needs more play equipment. So the P&C set out to find a solution. During our research we learned that imaginative physical play is proven to help children’s development: socially, emotionally, physically and intellectually.

 

Section: What we’re doing

This is where you should:

  • Describe your project in practical detail. If you’re building something, show drawings or images of what it’s going to look like.

Example

We found the perfect solution in the Explorer Dome – a multi-layered net structure developed in Germany – designed to provide unlimited opportunities for challenging, imaginative play.

We have the perfect place for it on the school oval, where our kids can enjoy the active play that we know helps build strong bodies, minds and hearts. And in that lovely grassy spot, all the children and families in the community can enjoy it after school and on weekends. It’s perfect.

 

Section: What we’ll do with the funds 

In this part you should:

  • Break down your target and talk about what exactly the money will be spent on.

Example

But large free-climbing domes that’ll last a lifetime don’t come cheap. The Explorer Dome will cost around $85,000. We’ve been working hard to raise the money for over a year now. The P&C has raised $25,000, the school has committed $10,000 and the City of Vincent has generously donated $10,000.

We just need the final $40,000 to make it happen. That’s around $88 for every student the school. 

 

Section: Who we are

People give to people. They want to supporter a person, not a faceless project. So:

  • Add a bio of yourself and your team.
  • Add quotes from well known people to build credibility.

Example

*North Perth Primary School use the visuals in their campaign video to show their school community at play.  

 

Additional sections 

You may also want to include sections in this main body text about:

  • Perks – Describe the perks that donors get back for donations at different donation levels. You can insert pictures that show them.
  • Media – Tell supporters about any media articles you get about your campaign. You can use the logos of the media outlets to build credibility.

 

Another example 

Another great example comes from Rocklands Community Primary School in Norfolk, who blitzed their £10,000 target (raising £12,731) to put towards a new library.  See their campaign page here. They take a different approach to the structure laid out above – presenting first information about the problem they have and then the solution and how donors can help.  

 

5. Banner image

The banner image is the main visual element of your campaign. It’s the first thing potential supporters see and it gets shared on Facebook and Twitter alongside the campaign’s title.

You want your image to:

  • Make your supporters feel inspired, entertained or curious, not guilty or shocked.
  • Be formatted to 684 x 385 pixels for optimal compatibility on our site.
  • Be in a normal image format – JPG, PNG or BMP.

For clarity, Chuffed.org is a guilt-free site. We reject campaigns that use guilt-imagery like dehumanizing photos of starving children to get donations, or graphic, disturbing images of animals.

This one comes from Merrylands East Public School’s campaign to raise funds for equipment and expertise for digital storytelling. View their campaign here.

 

6. Video

The best crowdfunding campaigns include a campaign video. This is a specific 2-5 minute video created for the campaign. Don’t use a generic promotion video designed for something else.

Campaign videos don’t need to be expensive or have high production value. It’s far more important that the video tells a compelling story than looks pretty.

Here are some tips:

  • People love seeing faces. Make sure the video includes relevant people talking at the camera at some point.
  • Keep it short. People get bored easily, so unless you’ve got an incredible storyline, don’t have a video longer than 3 minutes.
  • Be ridiculously enthusiastic. Not only do viewers feed off your enthusiasm, video has a weird way of taking normal speech and making it look like you’re bored senseless. If you act ridiculously enthusiastic, it looks completely normal on video.
  • Use narrative storytelling over facts. People share stories, not facts. An easy way of doing this is to follow one person’s story – which could be your own or a beneficiary.
  • Later model phone cameras and DSLR cameras take excellent quality videos. If you can pair that with a free movie editing package like iMovie on Mac, you can create fairly professional looking video for free.
  • If you do end up paying a production company for your video, budget at least $2,500/£1,500 for a 2 minute video.

All videos on Chuffed.org need to be uploaded to Youtube or Vimeo first. You then enter the URL from either service into the relevant field in the campaign editor.

Examples: For some inspiration, take a look at these amazing videos: 

 

7. Creating perks

Perks are things that you offer supporters who donate above a specific amount.

We get asked a lot about perks, especially about how important they are for crowdfunding success? Do I really need to offer perks? Won’t it stop people being philanthropic?

Our answer? Perks help. A LOT.

The reason for this is that perks give people a way of participating in your campaign. They tap into selfish motivations as well as benevolent motivations. And they let you access your supporters’ spending purse, not just their philanthropic purse — you can guess which of these is bigger.

So what perks should you offer?

Perks tend to fall into three categories:

  1. Pre-release products or services: ‘Selling’ products and services via crowdfunding is probably the most common type of perk. Whether it’s a cookbooka weekend away, tickets to your event, memberships, CDs, bee-hives or even crepes, forward selling products and services is a great way to get people involved in your project.
  2. Unique experiences: Most schools don’t realise it, but they can be well placed to offer unique experiences. It could be tickets to the campaign success party, bumper stickers or personalised pavers, through to seed packets or hand dyed wool made by the school students. Or even school merchandise
  3. Special recognition: A non-profit classic. Getting their name on or sponsoring a part of a project is still popular among many crowds. The key here is being creative on what can be sponsored. Edgar’s Mission had barns, rocks, rakes, posts, shelters and even a mountain. You could do new school buildings, sponsors’ names printed on equipment or sponsorship of tickets for a student to attend an event.

So, how do you come up with perks?

This might sound obvious, but the easiest way to come up with perks is to co-design them with potential donors. Edgar’s Mission ran a workshop with some of its key volunteers prior to its campaign to come up with their perks. Spacecubed – a co-working space in Perth – did the same with their members. It’s best to have a hypothesis on your perks as a starting point, as well as the levels you need perks at (normally $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000, $2500, $5000).

Some other considerations:

  • Have perks that are directly connected to your campaign These let people participate in your campaign or project and are far better than unconnected perks, e.g. Amazon gift cards.
  • Have an early bird offer on your perks This is a great way to build momentum. Spacecubed released a very limited number of highly discounted memberships in the first 24 hours of their campaign.
  • Some perks (drugs, anything illegal, raffles) are not allowed Make sure you check our terms to stay on the right side of the rules. 

Another option – impact levels 

If you can’t find appropriate perks, you might like to try what we call ‘impact levels’ where you can choose to show donors what impact different levels of donations make – think the classic £50 buys a goat for a farmer in Africa. It’s a bit old-school, but still works. Rocklands Community School in Norfolk did this well. 

8. Payment options

When you’re setting up your campaign, you’ll have to choose what payment options you give to your donors. Your two options are:

  • Credit/debit cards: Donors can use any domestic or international Visa, Mastercard or American Express card to pay directly on our site (recommended). To use this payment option, you’ll need to create an account with Stripe for the funds to be transferred to. If you’re running an Australian campaign then you’ll just need to give us your bank details so we can transfer credit/debit card donations to you there.
  • PayPal: Donors can pay using their PayPal accounts.

Tip: Donors find the credit/debit card payment system much easier to use than PayPal. The donation process happens entirely on the Chuffed.org site – they just enter their card details and it works. PayPal unfortunately is confusing for a lot of donors and regularly rejects valid cards and accounts. They may also unexpectedly restrict your PayPal account if your campaign is very successful. We recommend only using PayPal as a secondary option with the credit/debit card system.

The way that you receive the funds from the two systems depends on which country you choose for your campaign – this should be a country where you have a bank account:

(1) During the campaign creation process, you will need to create an account with our payment processing provider, Stripe.com. This is a very simple, one form process, which will take less than 5 minutes.

(2) To accept PayPal payments, you will need to create a Premier or Business PayPal account at www.paypal.com, prior to launching your campaign. The campaign will need to be confirmed and connected to a bank account. This can take up to 3 months.

 

9. Additional options  

On Chuffed.org, there are a number of optional customisations for your campaign page, including:

  • Collecting addresses from your donors: we’ll add an address collection form on the payment page if you select this. We only recommend collecting addresses when you absolutely need to, like if you need to post out a perk, as people feel weird giving about you their address.
  • Custom Thanks Message: you can customise the message that donors see immediately following their donation.
  • Custom URL Link: your can change the default URL link assigned to your campaign.
  • Custom default donation amounts: you can customize the default donation amounts that are shown on the donation box on your campaign page.
  • Offline donations: when supporters send you donations in cash or via cheque/check, you can add these to your campaign total by using our ‘offline donations’ function. You should limit the amount of offline donations to 50% of your total donations.
  • Tax-deductible receipting (US, Canada, Australia):  Available for campaigns in Australia, Canada and the US where your organisation is eligible (e.g. 501(c)3 in US, Deductible Gift Recipient for Australian charities). Every donor will be sent a receipt to meet requirements for them to claim a tax deduction.
  • Gift Aid (UK): Chuffed.org can collect Gift Aid Declarations on behalf of recognized charities or registered community amateur sports clubs (CASC) which you can then submit to HMRC to claim your Gift Aid

 

Submitting for approval

All campaigns on Chuffed.org have to be submitted to us for approval before they can go live. We check that they satisfy our eligibility requirements and that they have a decent chance of reaching their target.

The approval process usually takes less than 24 hours. You will get an email from us that either approves your campaign for launch, asks you to modify your campaign and resubmit, or rejects your campaign outright.

About 60% of campaigns are approved on first submission. Once you’ve had one successfully funded campaign on Chuffed.org, we auto-approve all future campaigns.

 

For more inspiring school campaigns check out…

  • Search the ‘School fundraisers’ and ‘Schools’ subcategories on our movements page. 

 

For more information and tips on how to crowdfund…

If you’d like to read more about how to crowdfund, view our full guide here. Or if you’re ready to draft your campaign, just head here

The Ultimate Crowdfunding Guide for Health Charities

At Chuffed.org, we want to see our awesome health campaigners – people like you – run the most successful crowdfunding campaigns that they can. 

So – based on our experience with over 8,000 campaigns, we’ve put together this guide that will step you through creating a strong  crowdfunding campaign page to strengthen the foundations of your campaign.  

 

The Crowdfunding Campaign page

A crowdfunding campaign page is the page on Chuffed.org where you’ll direct supporters, donors, friends and family. It will include the details of who you are, what you are trying to achieve and how you plan to do so, and, it is the place supporters actually donate to your campaign.

Choosing the right options and including information in an easily digestible way is important and can be the difference between a good campaign and a great one.

A campaign page looks a bit like this example from Homeless Healthcare. The title is at the top, followed by the name of your organisation. To the left of the screen under the title is the campaign banner or video; on the right is the campaign target and counter. Under this is a box containing your campaign’s ‘pitch’ and buttons supporters use to initiate their donations. 

Beneath these is the main body text outlining your campaign’s story – the campaign description. The tabs can be switched to show comments from supporters, and names of supporters. On the right next to the main story are where perks are listed should you choose to have them.  

Click here to see Homeless Healthcare’s full campaign page. 

 

Setting up your campaign page

All the components of a crowdfunding campaign page are stepped out below alongside examples from successful campaigns run by health organisations that we’ve hosted on Chuffed.org.  

We’ve also created this handy Google Doc template that you can use to collaborate with your team. It contains some more examples from great campaigns.

To start setting up your crowdfunding campaign page, head to chuffed.org/start.

 

1. Campaign title

This is what your campaign is called. The title shows at the top of your campaign page and is shared with potential supporters when you share the campaign out via Facebook and Twitter – so the title (along with the banner image – more about that below) is the first thing people will see.

Good titles are less than 5 words long and are like the title of a book: memorable or catchy. You might include alliteration, a question, a play on words or unique spelling.

Some real examples from successful campaigns:

  • Let’s take concussion out of play!
  • In A Heartbeat … Prevent, Predict, and Detect Heart Disease
  • Cents for Senses
  • Project Piggy Paradise
  • Save Sawtell Cinema
  • Two Good Lunch

 

2. Target

All campaigns on Chuffed.org need to set a campaign funding target. Unlike other platforms, you’ll receive your funds even if you don’t hit your target, but it’s important to set your target at an achievable level to build credibility with your supporters.

You should set your target based on three factors:

  1. Cost: What does it cost to deliver your project?
  2. Audience size: How many people do you have already in your database or email list?
  3. Available time: How much time do you have to prepare in the 4 weeks prior to the campaign and promote during your campaign?

As a rough rule of thumb, we find that the following is a reasonable way to set your target:

Email contacts are the most valuable, followed by Facebook friends and then Twitter or LinkedIn contacts.

 

3. Timeframe

On Chuffed.org, you can choose to either run your campaign for a fixed length of time (90 days or less) or ongoing with no end date in what we call Infinity Mode.

If it’s your first campaign, we generally find that you’ll raise the most when you run a 30-40 day campaign. The reason for this is that the time pressure forces your team to act, which drives momentum, which brings more people to your campaign. Campaigns that stretch on for a long period of time struggle to gain interest because supporters get distracted by other things in their lives.

 

4. Writing up your campaign

This is where you tell your supporters about your project: why your cause is important and what you are doing to make a difference.

 

Pitch

The pitch is a short blurb to describe what you’re doing in 200 characters. It sits in a box just under you campaign target on the campaign page.

It is what potential supporters are likely to read first and helps them understand quickly what your project is about. Remember: they’re busy, and they’ll be skim reading, so the pitch is your chance to grab their attention and tell them why they should read your full campaign description. Be as succinct, specific and engaging as you can.

Here are some examples of good pitches used by real health related campaigns on Chuffed.org: 

The Black Puppy Foundation funds research into mental health issues affecting Australia’s youth. Support your stair climbing colleagues as we raise money for a wonderful cause!

Join Dr Jacobson as he strives to purchase a vital piece of equipment which will have a big impact on adults and children with head & neck cancers and life threatening airway obstructions.

We’re going out on a limb here – literally! Help us engineer an epic STEAM education opportunity for kids by using plastic waste to 3D print ROBOTIC PROSTHETICS for Australians in need. Let’s move!

And some not so great pitches:

We want to give those paralysed from Guillain Barre Syndrome the ability to communicate, join us as we make this happen using NeuroNodes. 

A virtual walkathon is about creating greater awareness and understanding of life with Dementia and Cell Activation Syndrome. Every $ supports The Dementia Society.

Raising money for a cure for dementia.

 

Campaign description

This is the larger block of text on your campaign page and it’s where you can go into detail about what you’re doing. The best campaigns use about 300-500 words, combined with pictures, to tell a story about the change they want to make and how they plan to do it. You can even embed images or videos that you might have (in addition to the main campaign banner or video – described below).

As your campaign progresses, you can keep editing your campaign description. It’s a great place to put in progress updates- like Edgar’s Mission did in this award winning campaign – so that supporters who are checking your page regularly have fresh content to enjoy. 

Below is a simple structure you can use for your campaign description. The example we’ve used is a summarised version of the excellent NRG Collective campaign to create  Rare Revolution Magazine – a resource made for and by children with rare health conditions. We recommend you read the full campaign description.

EXAMPLE CAMPAIGN DESCRIPTION STRUCTURE

Section: Background

In this section:

  • Introduce your vision for change and/or the story of who you are.
  • Tell supporters briefly about the issue you’re addressing and why you want to do something about it.
  • Use first person stories over facts and numbers to paint a picture.

Example 

Our journey into rare disease started in 2012, when my son was diagnosed, with xeroderma pigmentosum (XP). Since then, we (sisters, Nicola Miller and Rebecca Stewart) have founded a dedicated XP charity which has grown to have global reach. Following our own frustrations with access to research and having our rare voice heard, we decided just over 12 months ago, to launch a not-for-profit, free subscription magazine and online community, and this has fast become a special place for adults affected by rare disease, from all walks of life so share their experiences and support each other.

But, what we know from talking to children and young people affected by rare, is that they feel under-represented and that their voice and opinions aren’t heard. They, and we, feel it is time that the balance is redressed.

 

Section: What we’re doing

This is where you should:

  • Describe your project in practical detail. If you’re building something, show drawings or images of what it’s going to look like.

Example

We have teamed up with the RARE Together Project by the BPSU and Larissa Kerecuk of Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Rare Disease Centre to create an innovative youth project.

Our youth project brings together a team of ten children and young people aged 8 – 22 years old to form our first ever youth editorial team, creating a dedicated rare disease publication for kids-by-kids.

 

Section: What we’ll do with the funds 

In this part you should:

  • Break down your target and talk about what exactly the money will be spent on.

Example

We have already been working very hard and secured some project partners and investment, but we need your help.

We need to raise a further £20,000 to make this project a reality and give our eager team of budding editors, journalists and creative writers the opportunity to create something very special for young people and carers who live with the challenges of a rare disease.

 

Section: Who we are

People give to people. They want to supporter a person, not a faceless project. So:

  • Add a bio of yourself and your team.
  • Add quotes from well known people to build credibility.

Example

NRG Collective is a not-for-profit organisation, founded by two sisters,Nicola Miller & Rebecca Stewart.

 

Additional sections 

You may also want to include sections in this main body text about:

  • Perks – Describe the perks that donors get back for donations at different donation levels. You can insert pictures that show them.
  • Media – Tell supporters about any media articles you get about your campaign. You can use the logos of the media outlets to build credibility.

 

Another great example comes from the University of Western Australia, who raised over $10,000 to fund research to validate the accuracy of a simple blood test to detect the risk of premature birth.  See their campaign page here. They take a different approach to the structure laid out above – presenting first their vision for the future, followed by how they intend to make it happen. 

 

5. Banner image

The banner image is the main visual element of your campaign. It’s the first thing potential supporters see and it gets shared on Facebook and Twitter alongside the campaign’s title.

This one comes from the Prince of Wales Hospital Foundation’s campaign to raise funds to purchase surgical equipment for life-saving ear, nose and throat procedures. View their campaign here.

You want your image to:

  • Make your supporters feel inspired, entertained or curious, not guilty or shocked.
  • Be formatted to 684 x 385 pixels for optimal compatibility on our site.
  • Be in a normal image format – JPG, PNG or BMP.

For clarity, Chuffed.org is a guilt-free site. We reject campaigns that use guilt-imagery like dehumanizing photos of starving children to get donations, or graphic, disturbing images of animals.

 

6. Video

The best crowdfunding campaigns include a campaign video. This is a specific 2-5 minute video created for the campaign. Don’t use a generic promotion video designed for something else.

Campaign videos don’t need to be expensive or have high production value. It’s far more important that the video tells a compelling story than looks pretty.

Here are some tips:

  • People love seeing faces. Make sure the video includes relevant people talking at the camera at some point.
  • Keep it short. People get bored easily, so unless you’ve got an incredible storyline, don’t have a video longer than 3 minutes.
  • Be ridiculously enthusiastic. Not only do viewers feed off your enthusiasm, video has a weird way of taking normal speech and making it look like you’re bored senseless. If you act ridiculously enthusiastic, it looks completely normal on video.
  • Use narrative storytelling over facts. People share stories, not facts. An easy way of doing this is to follow one person’s story – which could be your own or a beneficiary.
  • Later model phone cameras and DSLR cameras take excellent quality videos. If you can pair that with a free movie editing package like iMovie on Mac, you can create fairly professional looking video for free.
  • If you do end up paying a production company for your video, budget at least $2,500/£1,500 for a 2 minute video.

All videos on Chuffed.org need to be uploaded to Youtube or Vimeo first. You then enter the URL from either service into the relevant field in the campaign editor.

Examples: For some inspiration, take a look at these videos: 

  • Jewish Care Victoria – Cents for Senses campaign to raise funds to build a sensory stimulation room for children with disabilities; 
  • NeuroKinex Charitable Trust – Redefining Possibilities for Kids with Paralysis campaign  to provide rehabilitation resources for children with paralysis. 
  • Hope for Health – Restoring Our Health campaign to train female elders from East Arnhem Land in life-restoring nutrition science to help their communities improve their health.  

 

7. Creating perks

Perks are things that you offer supporters who donate above a specific amount.

We get asked a lot about perks, especially about how important they are for crowdfunding success? Do I really need to offer perks? Won’t it stop people being philanthropic?

Our answer? Perks help. A LOT.

The reason for this is that perks give people a way of participating in your campaign. They tap into selfish motivations as well as benevolent motivations. And they let you access your supporters’ spending purse, not just their philanthropic purse — you can guess which of these is bigger.

So what perks should you offer?

Perks tend to fall into three categories:

  1. Pre-release products or services: ‘Selling’ products and services via crowdfunding is probably the most common type of perk. Whether it’s tickets to your event, t-shirts or chopping  boardsmemberships, bee-hives or even crepes, forward selling products and services is a great way to get people involved in your project.
  2. Unique experiences: Most charities don’t realise it, but they are well placed to provide special or unique experiences. It could be a personalised guided tour, workshops on a farm, tickets to an opening party, or even a chance to swim with whales.
  3. Special recognition: A non-profit classic. Getting their name on or sponsoring a part of a project is still popular among many crowds. The key here is being creative on what can be sponsored. Edgar’s Mission had barns, rocks, rakes, posts, shelters and even a mountain. Making a documentary film? Offer sneak previews of the script or a donor’s name in the credits.

So, how do you come up with perks?

This might sound obvious, but the easiest way to come up with perks is to co-design them with potential donors. Edgar’s Mission ran a workshop with some of its key volunteers prior to its campaign to come up with their perks. Spacecubed – a co-working space in Perth – did the same with their members. It’s best to have a hypothesis on your perks as a starting point, as well as the levels you need perks at (normally $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000, $2500, $5000).

Some other considerations:

  • Have perks that are directly connected to your campaign These let people participate in your campaign or project and are far better than unconnected perks, e.g. Amazon gift cards.
  • Have an early bird offer on your perks This is a great way to build momentum. Spacecubed released a very limited number of highly discounted memberships in the first 24 hours of their campaign.
  • Some perks (drugs, anything illegal, raffles) are not allowed Make sure you check our terms to stay on the right side of the rules. 

If the challenge of generating appropriate perks for your health campaign is too great another alternative, that can add value, is using ‘impact levels’. These show donors what impact different levels of donations make – think the classic £50 buys a goat for a farmer in Africa. It’s a bit old-school, but still works. Perks and impact levels are treated differently within the Chuffed.org campaign editor – so skip past perks and use the impact levels section to define yours. 

 

8. Payment options

When you’re setting up your campaign, you’ll have to choose what payment options you give to your donors. Your two options are:

  • Credit/debit cards: Donors can use any domestic or international Visa, Mastercard or American Express card to pay directly on our site (recommended). To use this payment option, you’ll need to create an account with Stripe for the funds to be transferred to. If you’re running an Australian campaign then you’ll just need to give us your bank details so we can transfer credit/debit card donations to you there.
  • PayPal: Donors can pay using their PayPal accounts.

Tip: Donors find the credit/debit card payment system much easier to use than PayPal. The donation process happens entirely on the Chuffed.org site – they just enter their card details and it works. PayPal unfortunately is confusing for a lot of donors and regularly rejects valid cards and accounts. They may also unexpectedly restrict your PayPal account if your campaign is very successful. We recommend only using PayPal as a secondary option with the credit/debit card system.

The way that you receive the funds from the two systems depends on which country you choose for your campaign – this should be a country where you have a bank account:

(1) During the campaign creation process, you will need to create an account with our payment processing provider, Stripe.com. This is a very simple, one form process, which will take less than 5 minutes.

(2) To accept PayPal payments, you will need to create a Premier or Business PayPal account at www.paypal.com, prior to launching your campaign. The campaign will need to be confirmed and connected to a bank account. This can take up to 3 months.

 

9. Additional options  

On Chuffed.org, there are a number of optional customisations for your campaign page, including:

  • Collecting addresses from your donors: we’ll add an address collection form on the payment page if you select this. We only recommend collecting addresses when you absolutely need to, like if you need to post out a perk, as people feel weird giving about you their address.
  • Custom Thanks Message: you can customise the message that donors see immediately following their donation.
  • Custom URL Link: your can change the default URL link assigned to your campaign.
  • Custom default donation amounts: you can customize the default donation amounts that are shown on the donation box on your campaign page.
  • Offline donations: when supporters send you donations in cash or via cheque/check, you can add these to your campaign total by using our ‘offline donations’ function. You should limit the amount of offline donations to 50% of your total donations.
  • Tax-deductible receipting:  Available for campaigns in Australia, Canada and the US where your organisation is eligible (e.g. Deductible Gift Recipient for Australian organisations). Every donor will be sent a receipt to meet requirements for them to claim a tax deduction.
  • Gift Aid (UK only): Chuffed.org can collect Gift Aid Declarations on behalf of recognized charities or registered community amateur sports clubs (CASC) which you can then submit to HMRC to claim your Gift Aid

 

Submitting for approval

All campaigns on Chuffed.org have to be submitted to us for approval before they can go live. We check that they satisfy our eligibility requirements and that they have a decent chance of reaching their target.

The approval process usually takes less than 24 hours. You will get an email from us that either approves your campaign for launch, asks you to modify your campaign and resubmit, or rejects your campaign outright.

About 60% of campaigns are approved on first submission. Once you’ve had one successfully funded campaign on Chuffed.org, we auto-approve all future campaigns.

 

For more inspiring health check out…

 

For more information and tips on how to crowdfunding…

If you’d like to read more about how to crowdfund, view our full guide here.

And if you’re ready to try drafting a campaign – just head here