Classy Community Celebrates Billion-Dollar Moments

Today, the Classy community celebrates an exciting milestone. Thanks to the incredible dedication of our customers and their respective fundraisers, donors, and volunteers, we have raised $1 billion in donations on the Classy platform.

While this is a momentous occasion for the Classy team and we are so proud of the progress we’ve made in the last seven years, we recognize that it wouldn’t have been possible to evolve from a startup with big dreams to a far-reaching social enterprise, without you. To every member of the Classy family—from customers and donors to blog subscribers and Collaborative attendees—it’s your unwavering commitment to change the world that has made this moment possible.

So in addition to celebrating the prominent moments in Classy’s history, we also asked our customers to tell us about their “billion-dollar moment”—a game-changing moment of impact for their organization. Join us in celebrating the following Classy customers on their growth, success, and collective impact on the world.

Camp Kesem

“Camp Kesem’s billion-dollar moment could more literally be described as a ‘$2 million day.’ Giving Tuesday 2017 was a record-breaking event for our organization. We are so proud of our college student leaders from chapters across the country who passionately, tirelessly, and creatively fundraised nearly $2 million—an incredible 20 percent of our organization’s annual budget—in a single day.

We recently closed the most impactful summer in Kesem’s 18-year history, and the success of Giving Tuesday 2017 played an important role in allowing us to welcome a record 8,984 children into the Kesem family.

As we strive toward making Kesem’s services available to each and every child impacted by a parent’s cancer—a population of over 5 million in the U.S.—we are so thankful for the support of every college student leader, volunteer, donor, and partner who contributed to the magic that was last Giving Tuesday.”

Pencils of Promise

“Pencils of Promise (PoP) was founded in 2008 with the goal of providing children across the developing world with access to quality education. Ten years, 481 schools, and 93,000 students later, we’ve achieved more as a community than we ever dared to dream. Our billion-dollar moment is the moment we changed the global landscape by expanding the PoP model to rural Ghana!

As we celebrate our 10-year anniversary, PoP’s global impact and billion-dollar moment could not have been made possible without the generosity of the Eureka Charitable Trust at Marshall Wace and Classy campaigners, like Dawn and Claire, who cycled around the world to support PoP’s global build and programming goals.

The entire PoP family has allowed the idea of expansion to turn into a reality! Since expanding to Ghana, PoP has built nearly 150 schools and impacts almost 40,000 students with a path to systemic, country-wide scale in sights.

Here’s to the next 10 years and to the next tens of thousands of students impacted!”

All Hands and Hearts – Smart Response

“We help people, help people. In November of 2017, All Hands Volunteers merged with Happy Hearts Fund to form All Hands and Hearts – Smart Response. This merger was unusual in the world of nonprofits, but it was a smart decision that enabled two organizations to join forces to help even more people in need after natural disasters.

Together, we have served on over 100 disaster relief programs around the world and helped more than a million individuals get back on the road to normalcy. Not only do we serve the immediate needs of communities after disasters, but we also focus on long-term needs like rebuilding infrastructure and constructing disaster-resilient schools.

In the year since our merger, All Hands and Hearts’ fundraising increased by more than 400 percent year over year, earning us the number one spot on the Classy 100. Recognizing that we are stronger together was our billion-dollar moment. Since our merger, we have been able to put more hands and hearts to good work.”

Charity Navigator

“Charity Navigator’s billion-dollar moment was switching over to Classy for our donations. As we focus on the future of our organization, our vision for success, and connecting more donors to more highly-efficient organizations, Classy’s system makes it so easy to understand our donors and to connect with them. It was crucial for us to move toward a platform that understands the necessity of meeting people where they are, whether that’s on mobile, tablet, desktop, or in person. As we’re an online platform, this is integral to accomplishing our goals, raising more money, and creating individualized experiences for donors who want to change the world.”

24 Foundation

“Thanks to Classy’s intuitive and user-friendly interface, 24 Foundation’s vast network of fundraisers have been empowered to help us hit record-breaking totals to change the course of cancer this year.”

Hope For The Day

“Hope For The Day’s billion-dollar moment was when we decided to take our outreach and education partnership with Dark Matter Coffee to the next level. We created ‘Sip of Hope’ coffee, a blend and bag that would carry Hope For The Day’s message that ‘It’s OK not to be OK’ and raise the visibility of national resources by using the back of the bag as an opportunity to let people know where to seek help while also creating a stream of revenue for our outreach and education programming.

We distributed it via Whole Foods Chicagoland market in more than 30 stores for over two years and one night, I asked myself, ‘What if we opened a coffee shop that took this to the next level? A brick-and-mortar shop that not only served the best coffee but also allowed each customer to be able to help support people every day, with every cup of coffee?’

After building the business plan in February 2017, we set sail on our journey and opened Sip of Hope on May 3rd 2018. Sip of Hope is the world’s first coffee shop where 100 percent of proceeds support proactive suicide prevention and mental health education.”

Village Enterprise

“Our billion-dollar moment was when we received our Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) results earlier this year that verified that Village Enterprise is the most cost-effective ‘graduation’ out of extreme poverty program in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A third-party RCT is considered the gold standard of evidence for the social sciences and is rarely undertaken by organizations of our size. This RCT provided concrete evidence of what we have observed through our own 30+ years of experience: our program leads to increases in consumption, assets, and income, as well as improvements in nutrition, food security, and subjective well-being of our business owners and their families.”

Days for Girls

“In 2017, Days for Girls set an audacious goal to reach 1 million women and girls with washable pads (DfG Kits) and health education around the world. With an incredible army of loyal volunteers and supporters, we launched a new campaign using Classy’s peer-to-peer platform. Our campaign, CountHERin, exceeded all expectations. Not only did we reach 1 MILLION women and girls with Days for Girls programs, but we also raised $200,000 from the 150 fundraising teams that joined in.”

---

Here’s to the Next $10 Billion

“Since we launched in 2011, nonprofits on Classy have addressed some of the most pressing issues of our time—from major events like disease outbreaks, disasters, mass shootings, and social movements, to mainstay world challenges like environmental issues, child trafficking, human rights, and animal rights. We’re humbled to play a small role in our customers’ tireless efforts to make the world a better place, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with them to raise the next $10 billion and beyond.”

—Scot Chisholm, Classy CEO and Co-Founder

Editor’s Note: This post was published on October 30, 2018.