A Crowdfunding Platform that Makes You A Better Campaigner

A few months ago, I was talking to one of our investors, Bevan Clarke, about the need for educating non-profits about crowdfunding and how to run the best campaigns. While many, many non-profits, charities, community groups really wanted to branch away from traditional fundraising, there was just a lot to learn about how to construct an effective campaign page and how to market it.

Our approach had been 1-on-1 coaching sessions, the conferences, the workshops, content, but Bevan made a remark in that conversation though that stuck in my head:

The best products teach a customer how to use them through the process of using them

For us, the idea of a crowdfunding platform that taught non-profits how to be better crowdfunders as they were creating their campaign has always been the holy grail.

There's only so many customers we can reach through 1-on-1 coaching sessions, conferences, workshops. But every customer uses our editor. And if that editor can show them what the best campaigners like them have done, and how they can improve their campaign, not only would our campaigners raise more money, we would be delivering our social mission better.

So that's what we set out to do. Figure out how to condense all the learnings from 3,000 campaigns into 1 editor.

Welcome to Chuffed.org version Banksia.

We started the process with:

• a set of usability tests (thanks to our testers - your brutal feedback was awesome);
• the experience of 1000s of collective hours providing support, coaching and guidance to our customers; and
• a bunch of data on what successful campaigns look like

While the data told us the endpoint that we wanted to get campaigners to, the cumulative sum of individual customer interactions told us where they were starting from, what they cared about, and where they got stuck.

The changes

We made a heap of small usability and stability changes, took out every unnecessary field that we could, upgraded the password-free login system but the biggest change we made is Tippy.

As you type, Tippy - our advice bot - will come up to help guide you on each element of your campaign page. We'll also link you to resources if you need to read a bit more on the topic. As we progress on this, the advice will adapt contextually to the type of campaign you're running. It'll also link you to campaigns that are like yours that you can be inspired by (read: copy). No more searching the internet for successful campaigns like yours or top 10 crowdfunding tip lists - it's all in the editor.

We've still got a lot more that we want to do to make the experience even better, but we're releasing this version now into beta testing to get your feedback first. We've selected a number of people to trial it - if you'd like be added to the list, just email us at info@chuffed.org with the subject line 'Add me to Banksia'.

Thanks for your support.

- Prashan, Seb, Dave, Bec and the Chuffed.org Family.