That’s why today, I couldn’t be more excited to announce that Classy has raised $118 million in Series D funding led by Norwest Venture Partners.

So, why raise financing when the company is already strong and profitable? In short: to meet the tremendous demand for our suite of products (current and future). Coming off a tumultuous, yet record-setting year for giving, we saw a 15-year trend of online fundraising accelerate like never before. The nonprofit sector was already moving this way—it was the thesis that Classy was founded upon—but 2020 changed everything. Long gone are the conversations about online as a future investment. The future is officially here, and it’s here to stay. 

But we can’t rest on our laurels. The online world is evolving fast. So with this new funding, we’re doubling the size of our product and engineering organization over the next two years. We’ll accelerate our work on the core fundraising suite, which is always improving (that’s the beauty of SaaS). We’ll continue to add features to our hugely popular payments product, Classy Pay. And we’ll keep investing in the future, with a focus on recurring giving, hybrid events, and new-channel donor acquisition. 

We’re also exploring synergetic markets like corporate giving, which has suffered from a similar technology deficiency over the last 40 years. The lines are blurring between for-profit and nonprofit models like never before, and the strain of 2020 proved to us that the traditional CSR model is outdated and broken. 

New Beginnings

Our funding announcement opens up a new and exciting chapter for Classy and its stakeholders—not only for our customers with accelerated product development and support, but also for our team and our community. 

First, Classy is officially changing from a C-Corporation to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). This move follows our earlier announcement that we have become a Certified B Corporation, the highest standard of social and environmental performance for business. The move to a PBC integrates our commitment into the company’s governance, one of the most meaningful steps you can take as a business to ensure that your values are everlasting.  

On the team side, we also have a few exciting moves to share with you.

First, the Board of Directors is thrilled to welcome two new members. The first is David Su, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners who will be joining the board as part of the financing. The second is Depelsha McGruder, the COO at the Ford Foundation, and the founder of Moms of Black Boys (M.O.B.B) United, a nonprofit dedicated to positively influencing how Black boys and men are perceived and treated by law enforcement in society. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome David and Depelsha to the Board as part of this next chapter. 

And finally, after over 10 years as Classy’s Chief Executive Officer, I’ve decided to transition to a full-time Executive Chairman role and hand the CEO reins to my longtime Classy partner, Chris Himes. 

Chris has been involved with Classy for over seven years as an advisor, investor, Board Director, and most recently as an operator, currently serving as Classy’s Chief Operating Officer. He’s a tremendous leader with a background in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, and I couldn’t think of a better person to help take Classy to the next level. In my new role, I’ll be focused on next horizon product development, Mergers & Acquisitions, and playing a leading role on the Board of Directors. 

We recently sat down with Chris to reflect on his partnership with Classy over the years, our shared vision for the future, and how our Series D will enable us to accelerate the impact of more organizations around the world. 

I couldn’t be more excited about Classy’s future, and for the future of all of our stakeholders. Please join me in welcoming David and Depelsha to the team, and Chris to the new role! 

Onward!

Scot Chisholm

Classy Family,

Today, I’m excited to announce that Classy is officially a Certified B Corporation. We’re proud to stand with socially responsible companies that have blazed the trail before us, like Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, AllBirds, Lemonade, and many others.

In a way this milestone was a long time coming, as we’ve always thought about business a bit differently. In our view, the very nature of our work necessitates it, making giving easier for nonprofits and their supporters.

We believed then, as we do now, that a company will find its greatest success by marrying purpose and profit. For us this means an unwavering dedication to our clients and the broader social sector, combined with a stakeholder-led approach to business decisions. This philosophy has led to programs like the Classy Awards, now the largest impact awards program in the country, and ClassyGives, an innovative volunteering program for our team and clients.

Now we’ve taken things one step further with our B Corp Certification, which is the highest standard of social and environmental performance out there for business. It was tough to get, and it’ll be tough to maintain (the way it should be). But we believe that becoming a Certified B Corporation will ensure that our founding principles hold true as we continue to grow.

Our Score and Our Stakeholder Promise

The B Corp Certification process is comprehensive and challenging, with over 200 questions about your business that you need to fill out and verify. Only 4% of the 120,000 companies who have gone through the process have been successfully certified—which is why we are tremendously proud to not only pass the certification process, but launch with a score of 115.3 (with the minimum being 80).

Classy was assessed across five areas: governance, customers, workers, environment, and community. With the certification comes a promise to each one of our stakeholders.

• For our customers, we will strive to deliver unquestionable value to you and your supporters. Before we were Classy, we were fundraisers ourselves, trying to humbly raise money for cancer research. We’ve been in your shoes and that’s why we understand firsthand that your time is limited. You need to increase sustainable revenue, and your supporters deserve an exceptional giving experience.

• At the heart of Classy is our team. You are driven by passion and a commitment to our mission, and we want you to feel like every moment you’ve invested in Classy has provided you with growth, accomplishment, and purpose. We are committed to fostering a safe and inclusive environment where all team members can thrive.

• To our investors, through your commitment to Classy, you are enabling thousands of organizations working on the front lines to address today’s social and environmental challenges. We’re focused on maximizing your investment over the long run and creating meaningful value in the world from your support.

• Our community is central to our efforts to make giving easier and help advance the social sector. As a purpose-driven company ourselves, we must practice what we preach. This is illustrated through the Classy Awards, the Collaborative, and ClassyGives, as well as our recent environmental commitments towards a more sustainable future.

Bigger Than Us

Classy started as a passion project to raise money for a cause that we cared deeply about. Now we want to help create a world where anyone, anywhere, can easily support the causes they care about. To us, becoming a Certified B Corporation will help get us one step closer to this vision.

But we know we can’t do it alone. So I invite all of you to join us on this journey—to challenge us if we falter, and to challenge yourselves (and your companies) with a higher standard of social and environmental performance.

For Classy, this is day one in a way, and I’ve never been more excited to see what the future holds.

Onward and upward!

Scot Chisholm

This type of recognition is a testament to the strength of our social enterprise mission and stakeholder values, and I couldn’t be more proud of the entire team and broader Classy community for this achievement. Make sure to check out the press release and the official list.

Classy started as a simple way to raise money for a cause that we cared deeply about. When the process was a lot harder than we anticipated, we were left asking ourselves, “Why does giving need to be so hard?” So, we evolved our passion project into a tech company and launched in 2011 to solve that problem on a larger scale.

For the next nine years, we dedicated ourselves to making giving more accessible and helping our nonprofit partners not only raise more money, but do so in a more sustainable way. The collective result has been nearly $2 billion raised on Classy for myriad social and environmental causes. And, as our team will tell you firsthand, we’re just getting started!

As first-time entrepreneurs, we also had much to learn about growing a business. But the great thing about starting something from scratch is that you can follow your intuition about how the business should be built and what values should guide you.

That freed us to pursue things like our early Pledge 1% commitment to stakeholders, the #ClassyGives program that sends employees around the world to volunteer, and the launch of the Classy Awards—the “Oscars of Philanthropy”—all born from our team’s dedication to our social mission and stakeholder values.

This dedication became the glue of our culture in many ways, reinforcing a “lead by example” mindset and propelling our growth. And grow we did. Over those nine years we went from two people to 200, and from a handful of amazing nonprofit customers to over 4,000!

We also learned that if you’re not careful, it’s easy to develop a “growth at all costs” mentality which will quickly disconnect you from the very things that got you there. While Classy is far from perfect, our team’s dedication to our social mission and stakeholder values through all of this growth is the single thing that I’m most proud of after our first nine years in business, and it’s what we’ll use as our anchor for the next nine years and beyond.

Classy is proud to stand with the companies on the Real Leaders Magazine “Top 100 Impact” list. It gives me hope that the business world is moving in the right direction. It wasn’t long ago that companies like Ben & Jerry’s, The Body Shop, and Patagonia were complete outliers in the business community, mocked for their willingness to consider more than one stakeholder.

Today, thousands of companies around the world are building off of the foundation that these early pioneers set and are literally rewriting the definition of business from the ground up. Even the Business Roundtable recently declared that the purpose of a corporation should extend well beyond shareholder value. It’s a great start, but there’s a lot more work to be done.

Moving forward, our team at Classy is more committed than ever to sharing our efforts with the broader community so we can learn from, and grow with, each other in a more sustainable way. So, congratulations again to all of the companies on the Real Leaders list this year! The Classy team is inspired by you and we hope to collaborate in a more unified fashion in 2020 and beyond.

That’s $1 billion raised toward responding to disasters, advocating for human rights, curing disease, fighting injustice, protecting our environment, and so much more.

And the Classy community isn’t slowing down. It took us approximately six years to raise our first $500 million on the platform, but only 14 months to raise the second $500 million. It was done one donation at a time, millions of times, from people of all backgrounds and cultures in 190 countries around the world. Take a look:

So, What’s Next?

The impact that the social sector has on the world has never been more important. Yet at the same time, the sector faces some very real fundraising and technology challenges that have, in many cases, held it back from achieving its full potential.

Our goal is to help fix that by working closely with our 4,000 nonprofit partners to accelerate the pace of innovation in the sector. We’re laser-focused on bringing you world-class technology that increases your capacity, strengthens your sustainability, and maximizes your impact. This is core to what we hope to achieve together as we raise the next $1 billion and beyond.

Our recent fundraising report, The State of Modern Philanthropy, shows that recurring donors are over five times more valuable than one-time donors. That’s five times more funding towards your mission. Yet, less than five percent of our nonprofit partners have dedicated recurring giving programs.

In light of this opportunity, we’re setting a bold goal:

Classy is committed to (at least!) doubling the number of recurring donors on the platform by the time we’ve raised our next $1 billion.  

We see an undeniable value in helping you grow your recurring donor base. And when you pair that value with broader supporter trends and the growth of the subscription economy, it reveals a massive opportunity for nonprofit organizations to build new forms of scalable and sustainable revenue that can power their impact like never before.

So as we forge ahead together, expect us to double-down on our recurring giving roadmap, and we’ll be sure to keep the Classy community updated along the way.

The Journey to $1 Billion

We started Classy as fundraisers ourselves, raising money for the causes that were near and dear to our own hearts in the San Diego community. The idea for our platform was born out of a personal need to make giving easier and to help nonprofit organizations connect with the next generation of supporters.

Today, as we cross $1 billion raised on the platform, this same core purpose still rings true in everything that we do. From the impact of the platform itself, to our various social initiatives like Pledge 1%,  ClassyGives, and the Classy Awards, we are more dedicated than ever to advancing the important work of the social sector.

But, as excited as we are to look toward the future, it’s days like today when it’s most important to reflect back on the journey. Check out just some of the amazing customers and milestones we’ve seen along the way:  

Our journey together has been nothing short of inspiring. As we close this chapter and start a new one, our team at Classy wants to extend a huge thank you—to our customers, and to all the individuals that support them, whether through individual donations, recurring gifts, fundraising efforts, or volunteering. Thank you for your dedication, for your passion, and for your tireless efforts to change the world for the better.

You are the reason we’re at this milestone, and we’re honored to be your partner both now and into the future. Onward and upward!

Scot, Pat, Marshall, and Joe

Adam joins Classy from Okta, where he grew revenue from $1 million to over $300 million and then led them through a very successful IPO. He will be leading Classy’s sales and customer success management teams moving forward. Neena joins Classy from Civitas Learning—where she led the product organization—and HomeAway, where she helped steer the acquisition to Expedia for $3.9 billion. Neena will lead Classy’s product management and data insights teams moving forward.

One of our core values at Classy is to “Always Be Learning,” and I’m a firm believer that adding experienced people around you is one of the best ways to fulfill this value. Since our launch in 2011, our team has grown from a handful of scrappy founders to now over 250 amazingly talented people from every background imaginable, united under the mission of mobilizing and empowering the world for good. The additions of Adam and Neena to the Classy team only reinforce our commitment to this value and help set us up for the massive growth we see in front of us.

Ultimately though, the main purpose of building out our executive team by bringing Adam and Neena on board (and previously Carilu, our first-ever CMO, and Ron, our first-ever CFO & COO) is to serve our 4,000+ nonprofit partners even more effectively. We’re proud of the work we’ve done since we launched in 2011, but we know there’s still so much more to accomplish together.

Please join me in welcoming Adam and Neena to the Classy team!

Scot, CEO & Co-Founder

Editor’s Note: This post was published on August 28, 2018.

Almost six years later, our passion and focus have only intensified. When we announced our last funding round 18 months ago, we committed to working together to launch the next generation of the Classy platform and bring much-needed innovation to the sector. The result has been nothing short of amazing.

With the launch of the new Classy Fundraising Suite, organizations are already seeing more success and we’re now on pace to power over $500 million in donations over the next year. Our customer base has also grown over 230 percent across that same timeframe and now includes leading organizations like Acumen Fund, Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Room to Read, and Massachusetts General Hospital. Our roots remain strong with fast-growth nonprofit startups though, with thousands of campaigns on Classy at any given moment by organizations like Girls Who Code and Team Rubicon.

Our team has also grown from a handful of early founders to over 200 people. Yet, we still wake up every day just as excited to serve you—our customers, and our partners. We’re inspired by the work that you do and motivated by the possibility that we can play even a small role in helping you solve some of the world’s toughest challenges, such as disease, poverty, human rights, and climate change. And it’s for that reason that today’s financing announcement is an extremely exciting moment for all of us here at Classy.

Yes, we’ve accomplished a lot together over the last 18 months, but we know there is still so much left to do. Our new partnership with JMI Equity will help us further accelerate our product roadmap and deliver on a mission to which we’ve been committed since the beginning: To mobilize and empower the world for good. Like Classy, JMI’s team has a deep appreciation and passion for delivering better technology to the social sector and we couldn’t be more excited to work with them to do just that.

We speak for every person at Classy in saying that we are fortunate and proud to be working with you to shape the future together. As we’ve said before, anything truly awesome starts with at least one believer, and we will forever be grateful for your belief in us as we continue to turn our shared vision into a reality.

Cheers to our future!

Scot, Pat, Marshall & Joe

Other recent company announcements:

• Classy named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Brilliant 100 companies list
• Classy named in Fast Company’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies for Social Good

Editor’s Note: This post was published on November 1, 2016.

Years later, we’ve now built a company that helps organizations harness the same eagerness we saw in ourselves and in our peers. Our dedication to drive meaningful change in our San Diego community and beyond has only strengthened over the years. That’s why we took the pledge.

So what is Pledge 1%?

Pledge 1% is a commitment to dedicate a percentage of our time, equity, or product to philanthropy. In other words, dedicate some portion of our resources to directly help organizations solve social problems. Pledge 1% was founded by the Salesforce Foundation, Atlassian, Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Rally, and now has hundreds of companies in its integrated philanthropy community including Yelp, udemy and TechStars, just to name a few.

In many ways we’ve been doing this through Classy Awards and our team’s own desire to fundraise for our partner organizations over the years; however, today we want to go a step further. There are two parts of the Classy pledge:

• The first part of the pledge is to dedicate 1% of our team’s time back to the social impact organizations using the Classy platform. This means that every Classy staff member will be given additional paid time off for volunteering throughout the year. They will be able to use this paid-volunteering-time-off to get involved with any organization that they are passionate about on the Classy platform.
• The second part of our pledge is to dedicate 1% of our product back to every organization that uses our platform. To do this, we’ve made the bold decision to waive all Classy transaction fees across our platform on #GivingTuesday, one of the largest giving days of the year. That will put more funding back in the hands of over 1,500 social impact organizations worldwide (and growing fast).

Classy’s mission is to mobilize and empower the world for good. Taking the 1% Pledge and joining an integrated philanthropy community of 350+ companies furthers our commitment to this mission and every social impact organization we serve.

Editor’s Note: This post was published on September 9, 2015.

• Peter Thiel & Ajay Royan’s firm, Mithril Capital, has made a very significant investment in Classy alongside investors Salesforce Ventures, Bullpen Capital and others.
• We added two amazing leaders to our advisory board: Scott Harrison, CEO & Founder of charity:water, and Suzanne DiBianca, President of the Salesforce Foundation.
• And lastly, Michael Young, the former CTO of Redfin, has joined Classy as our first Chief Technology Officer.

These partnerships will help us accelerate and expand upon a vision to which we’ve been committed since the beginning. Nine years ago when Classy started as a simple pub-crawl, it was about bringing friends and family together to raise money for something we believed in. This one event inspired dozens more to help local nonprofits solve problems in our San Diego community, like youth homelessness, beach pollution and low-income families dealing with the burden of cancer.

Four years ago we made the transition from fundraising events to a technology company, but our mission is still very much the same: To mobilize and empower the world for good. To us, this means bridging the technology gap for nonprofits and social enterprises so they can scale their impact in a way that was never before achievable. The first phase of this journey has been to help organizations modernize the way they attract funding online; and together with our customers, we’re well on our way to accomplishing this goal in a big way. Over the last four years we’ve witnessed tens of thousands of amazing campaigns that have drawn funding from over 150 countries around the world.

We’ve seen incredible stories of social innovation, human perseverance and generosity that transcend borders, race or sexual orientation. Stories like Team Rubicon, a veteran-led disaster relief organization, whose Classy campaign funded their life-saving response to Hurricane Sandy; or, Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Peace prize winner ever, who used Classy to launch her nonprofit to empower adolescent girls around the world; or lastly, Pencils of Promise, who has raised enough funding through Classy to break ground on hundreds of schools in disadvantaged parts of the world. It’s organizations like these that inspire us to keep going, to keep building and to keep dreaming up new ways to help them grow.

But as amazing as these stories are, the financial and operational challenges that nonprofits and social enterprises face have only increased over the past four years. Not only that, the way in which people give is changing faster than ever. The stakes are far higher than ever before for the nonprofits and social enterprises on the front line of some of humanity’s greatest challenges, like disease, poverty, human rights and climate change. It’s imperative that we continue to help them navigate these trends, secure funding and empower their supporters so they can continue to provide these vital services to the world. At the same time, we know we can do more. And that’s the reason we’re most excited about today’s news.

For the past several years we’ve been taking a deep and holistic look at how technology can accelerate the pace in which organizations solve social problems at a local, national and global level. Mobilizing and attracting funding online is a critical piece of the equation, but it is one piece of many. Fortunately, with the help of our customers, the Classy Awards nominees and Leadership Council and our new partners, we’ve been very busy expanding our product and we’re extremely excited to start rolling out some of these innovations over the course of the next year.

So while today’s announcements are glass-raising milestones by themselves, it’s what they will enable us to do over the long-run that is most exciting. To think that we can play even a small role in helping to accelerate solutions towards the world’s social challenges is not only extremely gratifying, it’s extremely motivational. We speak for every person at Classy in saying that we are fortunate and proud to be part of this team, doing what we’re doing, helping who we’re helping and shaping the future together. And that includes you too, our customers, our partners, our investors, our advisors and our friends and family. Anything truly awesome started with at least one believer, and we will forever be grateful for your belief in us as we continue to turn our shared vision into a reality – today, we feel a few milestones closer to making this happen.

Cheers,

A note from Ajay Royan at Mithril Capital:

Editor’s Note: This post was published on June 30, 2015.

As Salesforce.com announced this morning here, they have made an equity investment in Classy to help us grow the business and ultimately serve more nonprofits and social enterprises around the world. The financial investment is also paired with a closer partnership with the Salesforce Foundation, which manages Salesforce’s nonprofit and higher-ed CRM products.

Salesforce Ventures’ investment in Classy means a lot to us for several reasons.

First, it’s amazing (and humbling) to be included alongside some of the world’s top technology companies, like Dropbox, Evernote, DocuSign, RoundCorner, and Hubspot. These companies are truly pushing the boundaries of innovation in their respective industries, and that is something that all of us at Classy truly admire.

Second, it is an honor to have the fastest growing SaaS company on the planet, and also one of the most philanthropic, believe in our vision. From the very first meeting, it was obvious that the team at Salesforce Ventures and the Salesforce Foundation shared our belief that the best days for the Social Sector are yet to come. There has been a technology gap across the sector for far too long, and with Salesforce’s help, we intend to fix that.

And lastly, Salesforce’s support is a testament to all the tremendous work that the Classy community is doing. Without the campaigns and causes that you are creating and standing up for, we would have no reason to exist. As you grow, we want to grow with you. This financial and technological support will help us do just that, serve you even better.

We’ve all heard the advice, “You are the company you keep.” As I start this week, I’m grateful for the company I’m in, for the hundreds of organizations representing thousands of social causes, for our incredibly dedicated team of 48 amazing individuals and for our newest partners, Salesforce Ventures and the Salesforce Foundation.

We want to thank everyone who has stood with us throughout the journey so far. We can’t wait for what’s coming next!

Onward and Upward,

Scot Chisholm, CEO & CoFounder, Classy

Editor’s Note: This post was published on September 8, 2014.

How Salesforce + Classy Can Transform Your Organization

Relevant Links from around the Web:

• Entrepreneur.com: Salesforce Launches $100 Million Fund to Invest in Entrepreneurs Building Apps On Its Platform
• Yahoo! Finance: Salesforce.com Announces New Salesforce1 Fund
• CNN Money: Salesforce.com Announces New Salesforce1 Fund from Salesforce Ventures
• CBR Online: Salesforce is Doling Out Money to Mobile App Startups
• MarketWatch: Salesforce.com Announces New Salesforce1 Fund to Fuel Mobile Innovation for the Internet of Customers