Category: Inspiration

I remember when #GivingTuesday first launched in Australia. It was 2013, I had just hired our first employee, and together, we had just launched the new rebranded “Chuffed.org”.

This is what it looked like (the internet ages quick!):

About as many people knew what #GivingTuesday was as knew what crowdfunding was – and even fewer knew about us. As a concept, crowdfunding was so foreign that we had to slip it into presentations about “online fundraising” so that people knew what we were talking about.

It wouldn’t be until the next #GivingTuesday in 2014 that we’d announce hitting our first $1 Million milestone through Chuffed.org.

Now, three years later, we have an incredibly special announcement. You, our amazing community, have now donated $20 Million to campaigns on Chuffed.org.

We can’t thank you enough for believing in us, and more importantly believing in our campaigners. Everyday, they put up their hand to make our community and the world at large better for everyone.

When we hit $10 Million in donations, we celebrated by letting you in on some of our more interesting data in this post.

Today, we’re reflecting on the big trends in 2017 and what that means for the future.

Trend 1: Seniors are getting online – fast

The growth of 65+ year old donors outstripped the growth rate of any other demographic bucket. Their share of donations grew at 20%, mostly taking market share from 18-24 year olds. To put that in perspective, 65 year olds now account for nearly twice as many donations on Chuffed.org as 18-24 year olds.

Trend 2: Mobile donating is taking over desktop

It’s been coming for a long time, but now it’s official. We’re at 50/50 for mobile -tablet donating vs desktop donations. Despite those tiny keys, punching in your card details on your phone or tablet is now just as popular as doing it on a computer. Looking at the trend, mobile donating is set to become the norm very soon.

Trend 3: Campaigns are getting bigger

This year we focused a lot of effort on bringing more education to our campaigners: we built the Chuffed.org Academy, we trained 100s of campaigners through our in-person workshops, and we focused on building tools in Chuffed.org that we know make people more successful – like our new Chuffed Team Tools.

The result: campaigns now raise 28% more on average.

Oh, and not only are they raising more, their doing it even quicker – 15% quicker to be exact.

Stayed tuned in 2018 for some great tools we’ll be adding that are going to help you raise even more.

Trend 4: People aren’t stopping for dinner

Last year, people used to take the 7pm hour off from donating to – we assume – stop and have dinner. In 2017, it looks like we’re now on our phones, donating straight through dinner – the dip has disappeared. I’m not really sure how I feel about this one!

Want to know what didn’t change?

Trend 5: Women are still much more likely than men to donate

Women continue to lead the revolution. Donors are still twice as likely to be women than men and women outshine men in every single age demographic.

To celebrate #GivingTuesday2017, we’re giving you a sneak peak into Movements – a brand new way of finding campaigns you care about on Chuffed.org. Just click through here, find something that you’re passionate about and I’m sure you’ll find a campaign that’ll inspire you.

Prashan Paramanathan, CEO, Chuffed.org

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.

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.

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

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:

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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

 

A definition, introduction and 101 for not-for-profits and charities

The traditional definition of crowdfunding goes something like this:

Crowdfunding is the process of funding a project online by collecting small amounts of money from a large volume of people

While there are a lot of flavours of crowdfunding the most important components are:

• A project that needs to be funded (not an organisation);
• A fixed goal that needs to be raised; and
• A timeframe that the fundraising campaign runs for

The problem with this definition is that it’s misleading and makes people think that to access the crowd of funders out there, you just need to put your project online and do no work. That’s why we came up with a better definition. One that reflects how you get to the crowdin crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding (verb): A marketing campaign targeted at people who love you… which if you do well, spreads from your friends to their friends and from them to the crowd

We like this definition of crowdfunding better, because it emphasises:

• That crowdfunding is all about marketing
• That crowdfunding is social i.e. you access the crowd via people you already know talking to their friends
• It makes it clearer what you need to do to succeed

 

So if I’m marketing to people I already know, how is this different to emailing my list a link to my website?

While it might not be immediately obvious, how you run a direct email campaign and the experience donors get is totally different to a crowdfunding campaign. Here’s three differences:

1. A direct email campaign is designed to get a small percentage of people on a large list that you already own to donate. Crowdfunding is designed to get those people to donate AND to tell their friends about the campaign. That means that if you have a starting list of 1,000 people, a direct email campaign limits your maximum number of donors to 1,000, whereas a crowdfunding campaign could well attract donors that are not on your list.
2. The fixed goal, timeframe and project nature of crowdfunding means that donors get an engaging experience that they want to come back to to check the progress of the campaign.
3. A direct email campaign is about a charity (you) talking at a large volume of people (broadcast marketing). A crowdfunding campaign is about your supporters talking to their friends (social marketing).
4. (Bonus) You’ll very rarely get press about your direct email campaign. Heaps of crowdfunding campaigns get written about – you can check out a few from Chuffed.org campaigns here.

 

Ok, got it. So where does crowdfunding fit into the charity fundraising landscape?

So roughly speaking, you can split charity fundraising into two buckets:

• Relational Fundraising: large value, low volume (Government, High Net Worth, Trusts/Foundations, Corporates)
• General Public Fundraising: low value, large volume (Face-to-face, Direct Mail, Direct Email, Telemarketing, Events, Peer-to-Peer)

Crowdfunding belongs squarely in the ‘General Public Fundraising’ bucket and in a non-profit, it’s usually led by the same person/people who looks after other public fundraising campaigns.

While crowdfunding is heavily project focused, increasingly smart non-profits have found ways to running regular crowdfunding campaigns to fund their ongoing operational costs – but that’s a whole other post.

At Chuffed.org, animal welfare is one of our biggest categories. Dozens of animal shelters, advocacy organisations and protection groups have crowdfunded their projects with us. Today, we wanted to share with you how they did, in the hope that it might inspire you to do the same.

1. The new shelter campaign

When Edgar’s Mission ran out of space at their former sanctuary, they knew they needed to move. The costs associated with fitting out their new site though were immense, and so they turned to their crowd to help them out. In the space of 60 days, 1,800 people from 17 countries raised over $162,000 (their original target was $50,000!). The trick to these campaigns is to design great ‘sponsorship’ perks. For $500 you could sponsor a perch in the chicken barn; for $1,500 you sponsor the duck pond, and so on. These types of sponsorship perks work well because people love being able to “own” a bit of the sanctuary you’re creating – think Farmville except in real life.

Other great examples:

• Gunyah’s Greener Pastures Campaign raised $13,470 to set Gunyah Animal Healing Sanctuary up on its new site
• Winter is Coming – an awesome Game of Thrones themed crowdfunder from Little Oak Sanctuary raised $14,400 for their new site

2. The injured animal campaign

When the team at Maneki Neko Cat Rescue get a new cat come in that needs surgery, they fire up a campaign on Chuffed.org and turn to their audience for support. As the support comes in and the surgery progresses, the Maneki Neko team do an amazing job of telling their donors about what happened to the cat that they saved – it’s an intimate blow-by-blow account, often from the surgical theatre, that gives donors an unheard of peak into exactly what happened with the money they donated. This post-campaign story-telling is key for these types of campaigns and its the reason that donors keep coming back for more.

It’s worth noting that although each individual campaign isn’t huge, in total Maneki Neko have set up 13 campaigns with us, raising over $20,700.

Other great examples:

• Brightside Farm Sanctuary raised $4,000 for emergency surgery on two of their greyhounds, Patch and Theo.
• Melbourne Animal Rescue raised $2,000 to save Cupcake, the most gorgeous puppy ever

3. The advocate campaign

When things need to change in the animal world, it’s nearly always animal welfare organisations that need to lead the charge. Many of us have been horrified by the practices used in the greyhound racing industry, but the team at Animal Liberation Queensland decided to do something about it. They set up billboards at the main train station and then turned to their supporters to help keep it up. The $10,500 they raised helped keep the billboards up, exposing 105,000 people a day to their crucial message.

Other great examples:

• Humane Research Australia raised $10,400 to put up a billboard encouraging a ban on primate experiments
• Aussie Farms Inc raised nearly $20,000 to fund the documentary, Dominion, to expose the way that animals are mistreated through various industries

If you think your organisation could do something similar, just get in touch at info@chuffed.org or just click on the button below.