Yitzi Bude, 39, is from Hendon, where he lives with his wife and three children. In 2019, he was helping his brother with a digital fundraising campaign for a local school. He launched the Charity Extra website, and the campaign flourished. Seeing his platform’s potential, he quickly hired an employee – who still works for the company today – and they sought to assist other charities with their fundraising ventures.
Seven years on, the JC can exclusively reveal that Charity Extra has surpassed $1 billion (£740 million) in donations. The company has offices in London, Jerusalem, Miami and New York, with 22 employees between them, and more than two million people have donated through their platform.
1. How is Charity Extra different to what else exists on the market for fundraising?
The most important thing is what goes on behind the technology. On average, a charity that comes on board works with us for three to four months in advance of the campaign. We give a really high level of service – there are guides, templates and timelines helping them through the campaign. Each charity also has a customer relationship manager who stays with them throughout, and we have technical support where there is a real person available 24 hours a day, who gives very fast responses on WhatsApp to technical queries.
2. How have you used modern trends and technology to the benefit of fundraising campaigns?
Our second unique feature is how we think about the psychology of why people give tzedakah. We have worked hard to gamify campaigns: alerts of real-time donations, leaderboards showing what position people are as donors, pop-ups with what’s going on. And we make it very easy to donate – what we call a one-step checkout. It takes on average 45 seconds to make a donation, so there’s no risk of a “lost checkout” – when people go through pages and pages of information and give up.
3. How proud are you to have surpassed $1 billion in fundraising on the Charity Extra platform?
It’s very, very surreal. It’s hard to explain but it doesn’t make sense to me that something I never thought would be this big, this fast, could see this growth. And it’s a team effort; there’s an amazing team involved. I believe everything comes from God – and it must do because none of this makes sense to me. When I started, I honestly thought this would be a side gig and we’d do two or three campaigns a month and we’d be happy with that.
I always wanted to run my own business. Before this, I had a children’s furniture business. To run a business is really hard on a personal level; it’s so lonely at the start. You have no support and no idea if you can feed your family each month, and you’re working early mornings, late at night, with no one to tell you what to do. But I would never be at this stage without all the steps beforehand, and I’m grateful to God and my team at Charity Extra for that.
4. What has been your strategy for expanding the platform?
I decided to go in multiple directions at the same time. There’s the Jewish community, at home and around the world, and the non-Jewish community. I’m trying to retain customers by creating products in addition to the one-off campaigns. We run a lot of raffles on the website, plus we have capabilities for text-giving, phone-giving, gala event-giving, and more.
I have also started another product – fundraising hubs. There is a year-round page, a space where people can sign up to run a fundraiser with no specific time or target constraints. Everything is very automated. A big part of what I’m trying to do now is to work with all the charities and say: “We’re not just a one-off, we can offer you a product all year round.” We’ve already raised more than £20 million in these hubs.
And we’ve done a very big push into the non-Jewish market in the UK. We’ve got a website redesign launching next week, and that’s to structure it in a less Jewish sort of way, for want of a better way of putting it, to show that there’s so much to what we do.
5. In another seven years, where do you want Charity Extra to be?
I would want to be known in the UK as widely as JustGiving or GoFundMe. I want to have every single charity in the country signed up to Charity Extra for fundraisers, both small and big. I’m working hard towards that extremely ambitious goal. Anything is possible. If you had asked me seven years ago if what I’d achieved so far would be possible, I’d have said no.
But with God’s help, there are no limitations to what we can do.
Click here to visit the Charity Extra website.
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