Category: Blog

You may remember back in September we announced that we hit our first $1,000,000 through the platform. Well since then, things sped up, and we’re really excited to announce that we’ve now hit $2,000,000 donated to Chuffed.org campaigns.

We were blown away by the first million dollars coming in in 11 months since we launched, but this second million was even faster – it took under 5 months!

For the stats geeks amongst you:

• Donations came from 49 countries
• The average donation through our credit card system was $94
• The biggest campaign raised $162,000; and
• We now get >50% of traffic coming from mobile/tablet devices

None of this would be possible without your amazing support and trust. We can’t thank you enough.

2015 is set to be a very big year for Chuffed.org – with international expansions underway, and new product expansions on the horizon, we’ve got a lot to keep us busy. But first off the rank will be some feature releases that many of you have been asking for. Stay tuned.

Thanks once again, and if we can support you for any of your campaigns in 2015, please feel free to reach out.

Chuffed Love,

Prashan, Liv, Seb & Katie, and all the Chuffed.org family

Today we’re very pleased to announce a whole new way to crowdfund for social cause organisations. But before we do, some back story.

We firmly believe that crowdfunding is a team sport. It’s about starting with a core bunch of people who are passionate about your project (the champions), giving them something worth talking about and then making it easy for them to talk about it.

This ‘champions’ strategy was what Rob Caslick used to raised $30,000 for the Refugee Rooftop Garden and what Shanil Samarakoon used to raise $17,500 to build an Earthship Community Centre in Malawi.

And so, we wanted to create a product that recognised these ‘champions’ for their effort and supported them to raise more funds.

This is where ‘team crowdfunding’ was born.

So, how does it work?

At its simplest, team crowdfunding gives each of your champions their own crowdfunding page that’s connected with your main campaign page. The team pages can be customised by each champion and they inherit any perks from the main campaign.

Check out an example here: www.chuffed.org/project/the-welcome-dinner-project/

Who’s team crowdfunding best for?

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

So how do you get started? Well just shoot us an email at info@chuffed.org and we’ll give you access for your campaign.

The setup: I was sitting down with a friend who runs a $10m not-for-profit the other day talking Facebook. He knew they needed to be on Facebook, he said, but what exactly was he meant to do when he got there.

“Is it just about pushing out our content? How do we get above the noise of all the other stuff online? And is it an awareness tool or a fundraising tool?”

The challenge: Review 400 Australian not-for-profit and community fundraising pages and figure out what the good ones (and the crap ones) did.

The answer: So first we had to figure out what our definition of “good” vs “crap” was (hint: it’s not number of likes). We decided to go for an engagement-driven metric, what we called “The Facebook Engagement Ratio (FER)” which is:

(Head down to the bottom of this post if you want to see if your Facebook page FER is any good)

And then we looked at the top 10% and the bottom 10%. Here’s what we found out:

1. Entertainment and news trump information

Pages with content that’s entertaining and news(y) kill pages that are full of information. If I’m going to find out what first aid I need if I have a snake bite, or how to improve my cardiovascular health, I’m not going to go to your Facebook page. Sorry, but Google works fine for that.

If I want to find out the latest about a detained Greenpeace protester, or get cuteoverloaded with pictures of endangered orangutans, Facebook’s the perfect medium.

2. It’s not about you, it’s about them (and what they care about)

Pages that served up content about the issue people cared about, rather than about their own organization won every time. The truth is people care more about the issue than they do about you, so stop serving them up stuff about you.

The guys at The Animal Welfare League of Queensland get this (https://www.facebook.com/AWLQLD) . They get that their audience cares about animals finding new homes – so they post up stories about …. animals finding new homes:

3. From a person, not an organisation

Pages that had posts that sounded like they were from a person, rather than sounding like they had been filtered through “corporate communications” speak worked much better.

Like this:

Not this:

And finally, how good is your FER?

If you’ve calculated your FER, and want to know if it’s good or bad, here are the stats:

• Average FER: 6.5%
• Range: 0% – 57%
• To be in the top 10%, you needed an FER higher than: 13.5%
• To be in the bottom 10%, you needed an FER lower than: 0.76%

And just in case you’re wondering, higher likes correlates with lower engagement:

Quick note: ‘people talking about this’ moves pretty frequently, so maintaining a high FER takes ongoing effort i.e. you can’t like-farm your way to an engaging Facebook page

And that’s a wrap on our first blog post and we’d love to know what you think. Please leave your comments below.