SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1713 Is this a better way for schools to fundraise?
02 Apr 2020
Chapter 1: What is FarmRaiser and how does it change traditional fundraising?
Launched FarmRaiser a couple of years ago, now working with over 30 groups, really doing fundraising or basically fundraising companies now using his SaaS platform. He's got a big ecosystem play here though. They're tracking many different things, really replacing the old kind of high school PTA booster club fundraising model with junk food to, hey,
you know, let your people sell local goods, local things. They take a small cut of that. They've raised a million bucks to build out the ecosystem, the mobile app, the website, the marketplace, scaling with nine people between Virginia and remote locations as they look to get to break even by the end of this year. Hello, everybody. My guest today is Mark Abbott.
He shares a passion for farms, food, and community wellness with his wife and two school-aged kids. He's a founding team member of AmeriCorps and past director of the poverty program at the C.S.
Chapter 2: How does FarmRaiser connect local goods to fundraising efforts?
Mott Foundation. He's got a PhD in economic anthropology from the University of Pittsburgh and startups in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. He's the founder and CEO today of FarmRaiser, a platform and service for healthy product fundraising. Mark, you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. So let's double down here on FarmRaiser.
I know you're doing a lot, but what does FarmRaiser specifically do and what's the revenue model? How do you make money?
So basically, it's a marketplace and a service that allows anyone with a healthy product to make it available for school or group fundraising. So the purpose of FarmRaiser is to blow up the fundraising industry that usually sells pizza, cookie dough, gift wrapping paper, lots of
goods that are high the low value high cost with low profit for the causes so farm raisers trying to reinvent that model by directly connecting people with great products that we'd like to make them available for fundraisers in their community and folks needing to make money what do you mean by by fundraising so for example i mean i'm on your site now i'm in austin i see honeycomb by the austin honey company 28.29 suggested selling price so who is the person that's usually looking at this a local grocery store
No, actually it's going to be like the local PTA organizers. So your school is going to do a fundraiser instead of asking for a cash donation, they're going to sell something. They would normally sell a really poor product, but we're going to have them sell something grown or made in your community. Oh, I see.
We sell like CSA baskets for farm fresh produce or fruit or honey or coffee is a big one that we sell a lot of. There's a lot of local roasteries out there. So we take healthy products that are not sugar laden junk food. We make them available in a wholesale market that you as an organizer can come select those products, see the wholesale price,
price them for retail and launch them in a crowdfunding site. That crowdfunding site then would, the students at your school or your cause can sell using their phones or by sharing a link on Facebook or email and they can do old fashioned school fundraising digital.
This is like a healthier, sexier way. When I was on the tennis team back in high school and we got a box of 30 things of kind bars or sugar, like candy bars and I had to go sell them in my local neighborhood.
That's exactly right. So we did it. We, we automated the entire process from A to Z to make it really easy for an organizer to have a sale like that. It's all pre-sale. So we reserve product ahead of time and we made it really easy for folks that have great products that want to get new customers in their community to, to make those products available for fundraising.
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Chapter 3: What is the revenue model for FarmRaiser?
not dissimilar to what Airbnb does. And then on the backside, we take five to 10% of the retail price. So the end consumer is paying a little bit as well.
Okay. You're building that, this suggested retail price of 28, 29, has that already, or you're taking that in? It does. It does? No, it has already. Okay. Interesting. Okay. So I'm trying to think about what metrics are most important for you to determine if this thing is a success or not. So what are you tracking? Number of dollars raised, number of fundraisers?
So we track a lot of different, we track about 28 different things, but the revenue driving things that we like to pay attention to are the number of campaigns on the platform. Okay. So how many organizations come in and do a fundraising campaign with us and how many of them do a second and third one? Basically, once you do two, you're going to do five on average. So that's our churn rate.
We pay attention to that. We also look at how much you raise. So a typical fundraising campaign will sell about $3,000 worth of product. which is which which is about 270 for us right so we're watching that metric also of how much and then
diving into that a little bit, we're looking at what products you're selling, what the average price point of the product is, what the markup of the price is, because you can adjust your markup as an organizer. You're not locked into a price. You can actually custom make your prices.
If they want to take, if they want to essentially raise more money for themselves. Yes.
So without, you know, and we try to say, you know, we try to say, listen, this has got to be a great deal for the supplier because they're giving you a wholesale, they're getting a wholesale price for their product. which covers their costs, and they're getting a customer email for every sale. It's gotta make you at least 45% off.
Who's getting the customer email though, the Booster Club or the product the Booster Club is selling, the Honeycomb Company?
The Honeycomb Company's getting that.
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