Mid-Year Impact Report 2022

This is our biggest half-year donation to date - thank you so much for being a part of this! This brings our total donations to $1,508,390. 🎉🥂🎊

How did we get here? For the full update, read on.👇

The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful (No Ugly Here!)

Do you want the good news or the bad news first? We’re a believer in ripping off the band-aid and starting the day with a cold shower, so we’ll start with the bad (don’t worry, it has a silver lining!).

☁️ The Bad News:

Pandemic. Lockdowns. Cancellations. These are words that we have endured more times than we’d wish for in our lifetime. If someone utters ‘unprecedented times’ and ‘the new normal’ one more time, it’s not going to be a pretty sight… Alas, it would be blatantly ignoring the elephant in the room if we did not say a few words about how COVID-19 has challenged us and the events industry in a way we could not have imagined.

COVID-19 had a massive impact on Humanitix and our ticket sales - our revenue went from positive to negative overnight, and our focus drastically shifted from growth to supporting our event hosts and doing right by them as their income sources evaporated. We essentially had to switch modes from maximising impact to pure survival. Despite this, we were able to give over $470,244 AUD (that's $515,739 NZD or $319,570 USD) to our partner charities across Australia and New Zealand in 2020 and 2021.

What we’re most proud of during this period is the fact that we managed to keep our core team together. Many of our staff took pay cuts and reduced hours. Our sales team switched tack to work on more creative brand awareness and relationship building pieces, while the account management team took on side projects to vamp up the experience for our event hosts. Thanks to the relentless dedication of our team during this difficult time, we’ve come out on the other side stronger than ever, which leads us to…

☀️ The Good News:

In the first half of 2022 alone, we have redistributed $615,333 AUD (that's $674,865 NZD or $418,171 USD) of our booking fee profits! This means that we are on track to donate over a million+ each year. You can imagine our faces when we saw the stats –> 😍🥳🤩😲🥵😱🤪

These donations have contributed to:

• Code.org: our newest impact partner dedicated to expanding access to computer science in schools and increasing participation by young women and students from other underrepresented groups.
• Room to Read: transforming the lives of millions of children in low-income communities around the world by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education.
• Yalari: providing Indigenous children from regional, rural and remote communities across Australia the opportunity to receive a full boarding school scholarship for their entire secondary education.
• Manaiakalani: supporting Māori, Pasifika and disadvantaged learners in Aotearoa New Zealand to increase student outcomes and get equal access to digital education.

Want to learn more about the incredible work of each of these projects? We gotchu → Impact Updates From Our Partners.

While contributing to these impact projects, we’ve simultaneously helped reduce costs for thousands of non-profits who have access to our platform at a sustainable cost price through our Not-For-Profit rate. This allows their funds to go further, which in turn generates more impact!

🌞 Even More Good News:

We’ve been making great strides in the accessibility space ever since our win at the Microsoft Disability Hackathon in 2018. The most pressing challenge faced by differently-abled persons is the lack of social inclusion and meaningful community participation. We believe that people are well-intentioned and want to help, but don’t necessarily know how. Event hosts rely on ticketing platforms to make their events accessible, but for-profit platforms are not incentivised to solve this, resulting in people being cruelly excluded from participation. Humanitix is in a unique position to lead the way in this space - improving accessibility for all patrons is in line with our mission of using technology to solve social problems at scale.

Humanitix is being recognised as a market leader in accessibility requirements. Earlier this year, we were endorsed by Knowbility, one of the world’s leading accessibility charities. Learn more about why they switched all their event ticketing to Humanitix and how they rate our accessibility tools HERE.

We also received amazing feedback from a vision impaired event host that used our Humanitix for Hosts app for the first time:

"The Humanitix check-in app is amazing. I am vision impaired and use the screen reader on my iPhone. We ran an in-person event this week and I tried it. I can’t tell you how rare it is to download an app that is fully accessible. I usually need a sighted person to assist at registration to tick people off the list. I did it totally independently and I just wanted to thank you and know the impact you have made for inclusion. Great work."

Our ultimate vision is a world where all businesses, structures and systems work in harmony with humanity to serve the best interests of all people and our planet. Allowing differently-abled persons to participate meaningfully in the community through the magic of events is one small step towards this ambitious puzzle.

🌈 And Now, For The Beautiful:

While we are on track to donate over $1 million each year, the beautiful thing is that this is only just the beginning. There is so much potential for us to grow - there is an estimated $3.7 billion USD (yes, BILLION) in annual global booking fees in the ticketing industry, which is a lot of profit for us to disrupt! Imagine how much progress we could make if these funds are reinvested into solving the world’s biggest and most pressing issues, instead of going straight to the pockets of shareholders.

Our commitment (barring any other pandemic-level challenge 🤞) is to continue growing our impact and distribute 100% of our profits to high-impact partner organisations. We’re so excited to be on this journey with you, and acknowledge that we have a long way to go still. We’re ever so grateful to all our supporters, champions of change and our community of event hosts who have chosen the humane choice for their tickets and have aligned their profit with purpose.