Multi-org Giving Day

We were delighted and thankful to have successfully participated in Charidy’s first United For Freedom campaign in 2017! Justice At Last is a young nonprofit and we didn’t even have a donor base when we learned about the Charidy campaign. At first, when our fundraising goal of $20,000 was set we were feeling a bit overwhelmed. However, Roxanna and the Charidy staff guided, encouraged and supported us through it all. They answered our numerous questions with patience, and were by our side sharing their expertise and connecting us to other nonprofits in the same campaign. Justice At Last was ecstatic that we were able to exceed our fundraising goal and we are grateful for the learning experience and confidence Charidy instilled! We also felt honored that we were able to participate in this campaign alongside other successful nonprofits doing inspiring work in the anti-trafficking movement. Thank you Charidy, Justice At Last is looking forward to 2018’s Giving Day!

For the second year in a row, we organized a Charidy Giving Day. Seventy-two organizations participated! In truth, we did have some reservations. We wondered if every organization could reach its goal; we were concerned that the shared campaign would drown out the importance of each individual message. Let me say: the results were simply spectacular in every respect! With the strategic and hands-on help of the enthusiastic Charidy team, we reached our goal with pride, tripled our donor base and came to appreciate the true value of our own work! An amazing 6,218 donors rallied to reach our goal. 1-in-4 donors gave to more than one campaign. Smaller chapters had the exposure that they could never reach on their own. We watched Charidy’s brilliant philosophy shatter myths about fundraising and we enjoyed, every moment of the experience!

This year was the first Olami-Charidy campaign that we did as a global initiative and we had a number of breakthroughs in the campaign that really demonstrated for us the power and the capacity of what Charidy can do for us as a global organization and for each of our member organizations locally. First of all, the obvious one is that there were local organizations that had never run crowdfunding campaigns before and for them, fundraising is a huge challenge; it’s something they generally perceive they cannot do. For many of the organizations that ran a Charidy campaign for the first time, they raised money that they didn’t think was possible. It raised their perspectives, their confidence, and their budgets. They simply are able to do more great work because of the resources and the tools that Charidy provides. Secondly, for the larger organizations that had run crowdfunding campaigns before like Nefesh Yehudi, like Me’or, they raised more money than they have ever raised in such a campaign before. Seeing what other people were doing and rallying together definitely pushed people to think bigger, to raise more and ask for more money. For them to know that they can go beyond their bigger budgets is a huge breakthrough. One specific additional breakthrough is that Nefesh Yehudi rallied their smaller groups within the new model and we think that’s the future of how we’ll do a lot of crowdfunding. I believe it was 845 fundraisers that they had, just for Nefesh Yehudi, which helped them to raise much more money than they ever anticipated they could and it was a huge breakthrough for them. Finally is the French region, where they didn’t have the whole concept of crowdfunding at all. When we originally presented it to them, they were uncomfortable with the whole idea, it wasn’t something that they had done before and they rallied together with the Charidy staff and created a fantastic campaign with many organizations. They were able to raise a very significant amount of money that, until today, was totally not in their mindset; they never would have thought that they could ever do. Overall, we raised just about 10 million dollars globally and that’s now going into new outreach efforts. We can’t thank everybody enough for the fantastic resource and the tool that is Charidy. It’s a fantastic platform. The technology worked great, the concept works great and the evolution of the concept, from just simple crowdfunding to now looking at different models of how matching can work and the flexibility to be able to do that, using it across different continents and languages and currencies too — that worked flawlessly which was really important to us. The ability to have support staff on all the different continents was really incredible. We’re very excited about that and think we can expand the campaign to be much larger for next year and we’re working already, thinking about how we can expand the campaign to include more of our member organizations now that they see what’s possible and also to increase the campaign size overall. Now that we recognize what’s possible, we want to do this in an even more significant way and reach even bigger numbers, both in terms of money raised and in terms of the population served. We know that having the ability to innovate is critical to the success of any organization and Charidy is doing that on the back of a solid platform that really works well. It’s a recipe for tremendous success moving forward.