A couple of weeks ago, I thought about what I should do for my birthday this year. I’m pushing 30 and I wanted to make the few remaining years of my 20s count. A few days later, I had a crazy inclination to jump out of an aeroplane – aka skydiving – to make my birthday this year memorable. So I thought, if I’m going to do something crazy, I might as well do it for a good cause. I chose Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) of New Zealand, an organisation for people with neuromuscular conditions, as the charity that I would support and help fundraise. It seems fitting since I was born with a neuromuscular condition (Spinal Muscular Atrophy) and this organisation has done many good things for its members. I’ve also lost 2 of my friends to a horrible disease, Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, while they were in their 20s. So, MDA is very close and dear to my heart.
So I quickly registered under the fundraising site and within minutes, I was ready to send the link to my contacts and seek for sponsors.
The FundraiseOnline website has got a great revenue model. The website provides a platform in which charities can register for an annual fee of $200 ($150 renewal fee). Once a charity is set up, people, like me, can click on the charity of choice and create a personalised page to conduct the fundraising. The website doesn’t charge the fundraisers but wait, they want a piece of the pie too. For every transaction, the website takes 5% + GST on all gross donations. On top of this, there is a credit card fee of up to 1.8% on every donation/transaction made through the site. So effectively, for every $100, the charity would only get $78.20.
To date, there are over 200 charities registered with FundraiseOnline website. If each of those charities have at the very least 5 fundraising events every year raising $2000 each, that equates to approximately $476,000 in revenue for the site every year. Not a bad business model, eh? The website pretty much does all the work since the entire admin process is automated with very minimal human intervention.
Made me think of one of the papers I took at Uni called “Making World Wide Web Work for you”. FundraiseOnline is a classic example of how they are really making the web work for them.
While I’m at it, I might as well advertise my fundraising appeal here: http://www.fundraiseonline.co.nz/skydive4mdn
- WT