Ticket To Thrive
Author: Rochelle Gillespie
Georgia Robertson is a disruptor. She and her team at Humanitix are changing the face of not just one industry, but two.
It began a few years back when a couple of ambitious entrepreneurs in Australia wanted to find a way to create a business that would not only put purpose over profit, but was built with the end goal of having the biggest possible impact for good.
Their solution — event ticketing. Not the first thing that springs to mind when thinking about saving the world, but there were a couple of reasons why it was the perfect choice.
Firstly, other operators were already doing it, but from a customer-satisfaction perspective being made to pay booking fees felt at best like a necessary inconvenience, at worst, a rip-off.
Secondly, they knew they wanted to change the way philanthropy is done, on a massive scale. They believed that by creating a platform with leverage they could have an even greater impact. They set up as a charity, ensuring that from the get-go they were able to start having an impact without needing to pay a dividend to owners.
Their big, bold and gutsy goal is to solve world inequality. They funnel the power and technology of business towards social good, by redirecting 100% of the booking fees into education projects that close the inequality gap.
The Aussie duo formed the idea and were at the early stages of launching when Georgia Robertson entered the picture.
The Humanitix team take a break from saving the world to adopt their perfectly-natural Book Club pose.
The Humanitix team take a break from saving the world to adopt their perfectly-natural Book Club pose.
At the time, Georgia was a corporate lawyer at Duncan Cotterill in Christchurch with a keen interest in supporting different models for doing business that had purpose “baked into their core.”
She was organising an event for the law firm around this topic, went online and entered “social enterprise ticketing” into her Google search engine and Humanitix popped up.
Georgia sent off an introductory email and as the three got chatting and became more excited about the project, Georgia was eventually coaxed away from the law by those ambitious Aussies to become CEO of the NZ operation.
“Our bigger vision is to create a charity that is entirely self-sustaining and scalable that can grow to have unicorn-like status as a billion-dollar tech company using a charity model.”
Remember that big, bold and gutsy goal, to solve inequality? At the beginning the idea was to allow customers to pick their own project to support, but they realised that wasn’t going to achieve long-lasting, transformational change. By democratising that process their impact was being diluted as the money was being distributed too thinly. So, instead, by focusing on just two or three education projects, they’ve been able to have a much larger impact and have distributed over $800,000 to date.
Georgia says much of Humanitix’s growth has come from word-of-mouth and from cold-calling event organisers convincing them that by switching platforms they can have a positive impact on the world, for no additional cost and without compromising on tools and features.
Of course, at the outset such a bold and novel business and charitable model needed brave investment. It wouldn’t appeal to a traditional venture capitalist, because there was no equity at stake. Instead, they looked to philanthropic investors who were willing to take a risk believing that every dollar they invested to help get Humanitix set-up would be leveraged to amplify their impact.
They’ve since engaged an external consultant to measure that return on investment and discovered that a funder can have 40 times the impact by using Humanitix, than if they donated that money to the charity directly.
“For instance, a foundation could invest $1 million into an education project, or they could invest it in Humanitix and in 10 years time could have multiplied their investment by 40. That’s super powerful and is what got them excited to back us,” Georgia says.
There are also the stories of the increased exposure for those education charities they support. One person who purchased a ticket through Humanitix hadn’t heard of Manaiakalani, one of Humanitx's beneficiaries which is focused on solving the digital divide in New Zealand schools. This ticket buyer was inspired by the project, called the Trust’s CEO and offered a substantial donation.
So far so good. But then: 2020, and what Georgia calls the “black swan” event — the COVID-19 pandemic which brought in-person events to a grinding halt.
They were nimble and built tech solutions to support online events instead. “We captured a lot of market share in Australasia over that period just by being good people.”
In the same year Georgia herself was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and spent months receiving chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment. She acknowledges the support of her team in helping her through such a difficult year. The cancer hasn’t slowed her down and she’s more determined than ever to bring her business and commercial acumen to the charitable for-good space.
These young entrepreneurs are now eyeing up their next big, bold and gutsy goal with plans to launch later this year in the United States, taking on some of the big boys in the e-ticketing space on their own turf and hope to have a huge impact, not only on the silicon valley elite, but more importantly, the lives of children right around the world who will benefit with every clip of the Humanitix ticket.
NOTE: If you’re like us at LEAD and are a charity or community organisation that runs ticketed-events, Humanitix will support you by not charging a booking fee that has a profit margin built in. Those events won’t see funds redirected towards education, but they also won’t dilute the message around your core purpose. Find out more at humanitix.co.nz.