CHUFFED WITH A 1.1 MILLION FUND RAISE!

​Non-profit crowdfunding platform Chuffed.org has announced the closing of a $1.1 million seed funding round led by Blackbird Ventures, Bevan Clark, and the Telstra Foundation. As part of the funding, Niki Scevak, cofounder of Blackbird Ventures, will join the Chuffed board.
Chuffed first launched in 2013 to crowdfund non-profit and social enterprise projects. From there the platform has built up its own community that works for social causes. The process is free, it does not charge campaign fees and even if they don’t meet their target it allows campaigners to keep all of what they raised.
The funding comes a few years after Chuffed cofounder Prashan Paramanathan first pitched to Blackbird Ventures, unsuccessfully. At the time, Chuffed had a long way to go in order to prove their viability in a market that has a tough time finding investment. However, by october last year, the organisation’s engagement with its community and the number of crowdfunding campaigns facilitated on the platform had grown considerably.
Scevak explained the investment into Chuffed was determined by the connection between the team and the market, a connection that he says is more important than anything.
“As with any company that we invest in, it’s really about the founder and why they’re solving that problem and then why that problem is interesting in the first place,” said Scevak. “People are interested in learning about educating themselves and helping to change the world in a more positive way.”
This first round of funding will help Chuffed work to deliver on its social mission of transforming the nature of non-profit fundraising.
The three key areas of focus include fundraiser education, to inform the charity sector on how they can transform fundraising, donor movements, to educate donors about the issues that affect society, and growth, to build a larger audience and support more campaigners around the world.
Rather than being a transactional platform Paramanathan believes Chuffed can also take advantage of what’s lacking in the social enterprise sector, and that is innovation and transformation and play a bigger role in this sector.
“As far as we can tell, this is the first time that a major Australian tech venture capital firm has invested into a social enterprise. We’re hoping that this is a sign of things to come, rather than an anomaly,” he said.


With the rise of crowdfunding the world is moving towards a place of transparency, where direct impact upon a project can be seen by contributors. Rather than people donating to certain big brands ,Scevak believes people are changing the way they like to give their money, and this changed is partly to do with new ways of raising money and campaigning.
While Chuffed’s primary mechanism is to help fundraise non-profits, it will be interesting to see how the social enterprise crowdfunding industry innovates and finds news models of fundraising.
In the future, Chuffed will be seeking further funding, but now the company is at the crucial stage of development and audience education to prove that its funding model is the future of fundraising and, better yet, to help more social enterprises in Australia capture the interest of VCs. The investment lets Chuffed play a much bigger role than just a transactional platform. In the end, it helps more non-profits transform the way that they do fundraising and helps more donors engage, understand and act on the issues they care about.