Australia's First 24-Hour Online Community Giving Day Kicks Off

More than 70 Not for Profits and community organisations in central Victoria have joined forces in the name of fundraising, holding Australia’s first 24-hour online community crowdfunding campaign.

From 12am to 11.59pm on Thursday 1 September the group will fundraise together on one platform, while competing for $30,000 in prizes from corporate sponsors.

The Community Foundation for Central Victoria worked with Chuffed.org to build the Big Give platform.

“Big Give is like a more fun, transparent telethon, that everyone in a community can be part of,” Chuffed CEO Prashan Paramanathan said.

“While several US states and cities have run giving days that raise millions of dollars, this is the first time this has happened in Australia.”

Community Foundation CEO Ann Lansberry told Pro Bono Australia News the event was an opportunity for Not for Profits to increase their collaboration.

“We’re really excited about moving into this collective impact model, where when we work in collaboration with our community we can just get impact on a much greater scale,” Lansberry said.

“We wouldn’t have been able to reach all of these 70 groups under our traditional granting model, but we’ve made new relationships, new partnerships, new collaborations, and really got our name out there.

“The Community Foundation for Central Victoria is not a huge foundation, but this model, where organisations are actually raising funds for themselves, and they give us a small fee back, really turns philanthropy on its head.”

More than $25,000 has already been raised in the months leading up to the big day.

“We know that every successful crowdfunding campaign is actually really a successful marketing campaign, you’re successfully telling your story,” Lansberry said.

“The really exciting thing is seeing all the individual campaigns find great, interesting ways to communicate with their donors. So there’s East Loddon P12, one of our local schools, they’re just killing it at the moment, you should see the videos they’ve made, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Their latest one has the kids from the schools holding up a little thank you to each of the donors so far.

“And Mirawara, who are an outdoor educator in Castlemaine, they’re going to be scaling a rock face, Dog Rocks, at Mt Alexander and for each donation they’re going to climb further up the rock wall.

“It’s beautiful to see the different, innovative ways that our local groups have found to communicate their story to their donors, to their supporters, and also to grow their base.

“One of our campaigns Bendigo Blaze Hockey Club, they’re saying, ‘we haven’t had so many donations so far, but we’ve had five new members,’ and that’s astonishing. So when you get out there and start telling your stories you have all these other benefits apart from financial.”  

She said Big Give would become an annual event, and one that could easily be replicated Australia wide.

“There’s so much interest and so much excitement, and people are already saying ‘what we’ve learnt this year, we’ll be applying next year, we would do this differently,’ because learning to crowdfund online is a really different skill than going out and hosting a sausage sizzle or doing a raffle or one of the other things groups might do,” she said.

“So we’re online, we know there are lots of other ways to get cash in person but we wanted to be at the forefront of this fast-growing market where you’re getting donations online, people are donating from their mobiles.

“Online giving is the fastest growing method of giving, and we just wanted to support our community in learning how to move into the online giving space.

“We’re building capacity in this sector as we’ve been learning ourselves, and they’ve been learning as well.”