San Diego’s Classy, Riding Growth Spurt, Inks Biggest Customer Yet

Classy founders Todd Crutchfield, Scot Chisholm, Pat Walsh

Classy, a San Diego company providing Web-based fundraising services for schools, nonprofits, and other social impact organizations, said Tuesday it has agreed to serve as the online partner for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society until 2021. The society operates as a voluntary health agency dedicated to finding cures, and helping to ensure access to treatments for blood cancer patients.

A spokeswoman for Classy said the company does not disclose financial terms of its customer contracts.

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society raises an estimated $75 million in annual online donations. The spokeswoman said that means the society would likely be Classy’s biggest fundraising partner once its various campaigns migrate to the Classy platform.

The deal comes at an auspicious time for Classy, which has been growing rapidly and was listed in September as one of Xconomy’s 12 San Diego tech startups to watch in 2016. While Classy was founded in 2006 to raise funds for charitable causes, the company did not develop its software platform until 2011. Classy said it now helps raise donations for more than 2,500 nonprofits of all sizes, including Heifer International, Oxfam America, National Geographic, Team Rubicon, FEED, and Pencils of Promise.

After raising $19 million in Series B funding last summer from Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital Management and other VC investors, Classy expanded its workforce from 50 to 150 employees. The company also increased 2015 fundraising on the Classy platform by 100 percent over the previous year.

Classy’s performance was noteworthy enough to recently land the company on Fast Company’s list of the top 10 most innovative companies in social good, joining the ranks of Facebook, Warby Parker, and Indiegogo.

The company said it is already set up to serve big enterprise customers like the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, an account that includes a dedicated account manager, priority technical support, and an engineering project lead for implementation.

Classy said the society’s flagship fundraising campaign, Team in Training, will be the first to move to the Classy platform. Since its inception 27 years ago, Team in Training says it has trained more than 600,000 participants in triathlons, marathons, cycling events and more, raising nearly $1 billion for blood cancer research and patient support.

Over the next two years, the society also plans to move three other fundraisers to Classy: Light the Night Walk, Man and Woman of the Year, and Leukemia Cup Regatta.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.