The Chuffed Academy

“As an actor, after filming ‘The Tracker’, I was invited to some remote communities and was exposed to some of the extreme health problems that people are suffering from, as a direct result of having poor diet.  This problem was magnified for me when I visited South Australia’s APY Lands to film ‘That Sugar Film’. People were suffering from type II diabetes and renal failure, from obesity and other diet-related diseases.

Here, on the APY Lands, was an entire population of Aboriginal Australians, directly affected by poor diets due to the introduction of sugar and processed foods – the APY lands have been alcohol free for 40 years.

Late last year I met Ina and her story gave me hope. Ina Scales grew up in the western community of Pipalyatjara on the APY Lands. Unlike most people from the area Ina’s family were able to ensure she got a good education which lead to work as an interpreter. Neither education, nor ongoing work are easily accessible in remote communities – for a range of reasons and challenges people face every day. Ina’s unique circumstances, and her ability to not only know that she needed some help, but was also able to seek it out, and then pay for it meant that she was able to get herself to Living Valley Springs.

In the two weeks Ina spent in the Living Valley Springs intensive workshops her world was turned around. She couldn’t believe the positive changes she felt within herself, and when she saw my film and made the connection to the challenges people are facing on the APY Lands through poor diet choices – she asked myself, and the Foundation for help.  Ina could see that by giving people from her communities, an opportunity that they would not normally be able to access, to have two weeks of intense workshops in a supportive environment away from daily challenges, there was a chance that people’s poor health could be turned around. By giving people this opportunity, they too could return to community and shout the message of healthy eating and living from the roof tops, just as Ina has.

This same retreat has worked in the top end with Hope for Health – Yolngu returned with amazing results and a fresh attitude towards healthy living, and we are sure we can do the same for Anangu in Central Australia.

It’s a radical situation we are dealing with so it requires the radical approach that we are proposing.  The costs are considerable in getting these women out to the retreat from such remote quarters, however their influence upon their return to community will be well worth it.  We hope that we can have these sorts of retreats within community, once the word has spread as to how beneficial they are.”

Check out their campaign here:

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:

• Chuffed.org passes $10M in step towards social good economy
• Chuffed.org raises $1.1M seed round led by Blackbird Ventures

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.

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:

• Chuffed.org passes $10M in step towards social good economy
• Chuffed.org raises $1.1M seed round led by Blackbird Ventures

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.

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

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.

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

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.