FEATURE - September, 2018
Omaze
An Omazing Experience
REPORTERS/WRITERS: Jackie Chin, Kylie Sebastian and Zadie Winthrop
Would you like to win a walk-on role in a Star Wars movie? Go shopping with Julia Roberts? How about a chance to meet Ed Sheeran backstage, then watch him perform from a front-row seat? Thanks to Omaze, an online fundraising platform, you just might enjoy unforgettable experiences like these—without spending your life savings.
Omaze is dedicated to helping people through fun and innovative philanthropy. The company plans personal experiences with entertainers, pro athletes, and other celebrities, and for as little as $10 you can enter for a chance to win one of those once-in-a-lifetime prizes. The sweepstakes raise money for a diverse group of charities chosen by the celebrity, ranging from children’s hospitals to homeless aid and community programs. Omaze co-founders Matt Pohlson and Ryan Cummins started the company in 2012. After graduating from Stanford they worked in cause marketing, spotlighting charities and worthy causes. Omaze was born the night Matt and Ryan attended a charity auction together. One of the items was a chance to hang out with Magic Johnson. The bidding got very expensive very fast, much pricier than the two recent grads could afford. As two diehard Magic fans, they were heartbroken and frustrated. Why should these amazing opportunities only be open to the extremely rich? Pohlson and Cummins knew there had to be a better way to fundraise.
Reporters Jackie Chin, Kylie Sebastian and Zadie Winthrop with Omaze COO, Helen Melluish
FastForward arrived at Omaze’s sun-filled Culver City office for an informative chat with chief operating officer Helen Melluish, who explained how the business works. Essentially, a $10 donation gives you 100 chances to win. “So you can imagine your name is in the hat a hundred times. A $50 donation gets you 500 chances to win, so your name’s in the hat 500 times. So the more you donate, the more chances that you have to win. We use a company called random.org; they pull the winner. We don’t have any input or a say in who wins, they randomly select the winner, and it’s really cool. I think at this point it’s 86 percent of the people that win donate $100 or less.”
Originally from England, Melluish visited the United States for the first time when she was 21 and knew from the get-go that she wanted to embark on a career in California. She loved the idea of working at Omaze because they “believe in disrupting the giving space” and also liked how Pohlson and Cummins believe in the causes they’re supporting: a whopping 80 percent of net donations go to the charities.
Both Helen and Omaze have come a long way in a short time; when she started with the company in 2015, there were only 30 people working out of a one-bedroom apartment in Venice. “I remember thinking that at this point in my career, it was really important to me to use my skills and to leverage what I’ve done in my past to actually do something that gives back to the world. I wanted to feel like I have purpose in what I’m doing and that I would look back at what I’ve done and feel excited by what we’ve achieved. When you start to think about a career through that lens, there aren’t many companies that you really want to work for…I really wanted to be a part of this journey.”
When you’re starting a business that’s unlike anything anyone’s ever done before, the biggest challenge is to keep having faith in it. Melluish said that all of the startups that are wildly successful now can look back at the moment(s) when they didn’t think they were going to make it. Do we push forward, or give up? “For us, the answer was clear. We believed in what we were doing and felt it had to exist. We talked a lot about the fact that Omaze is too important to not be here, not because we’re drinking our own Kool-Aid but because it’s really cool to know that we’re doing something that has, to date, raised over a hundred million dollars for charity.” And created lots of once-in-a-lifetime memories at the same time.
An Omaze Moment
Omaze ran a campaign in which a lucky winner could meet Bono backstage at a U2 concert, and a dad named Dane entered it. He found out he won, and he decided to take his daughter Chloe, who was 14 at the time. He wanted to take her because she had recently been severely bullied and assaulted at her high school because she has a club foot and a group of girls picked her up, put her onto a table in front of everybody in the dining area, removed her shoe and started to make fun of her. It really shook her and for a long time she had very low self-esteem.
Her dad introduced her to U2 music and there was a song that she just really gravitated to called “Invincible.” She said that song really helped her get through the experience that she had. So fast forward a few months and Chloe learns that she’ll get to meet Bono through this Omaze experience. During their meeting, Bono asked Chloe about her story. And Chloe told him she was assaulted. After she told him her story, he told her that she has right on her side, and that it packs a punch. He told her that she’s going to go on to do great things, and how proud she should be of herself. It was truly a life-changing moment for Chloe.
From there, Chloe started a foundation called Stand Beautiful, and has gone to multiple high schools telling her story and sharing what it felt like for her to be assaulted, how she got through that, and why you shouldn’t bully. She’s written a book. She’s in a TEDx talk. She really is trying to spread her message.
A couple years ago, Chloe visited the Omaze office to talk to the team about everything that’s happened to her from the moment she and her dad had this experience, and, randomly, Matt Damon walked in. Our CEO was in the middle of interviewing Chloe for our staff, sees Matt Damon, and explained Chloe’s story to him. The team here did not know what to do. Half of them were looking at Matt Damon, the other half were looking at Chloe; Chloe thought Matt Damon was awesome, Matt Damon thought Chloe was incredible. It was just this really cool Omaze moment.