How Humanitix Is Disrupting The Ticketing Industry Into A Force For Good

Humanitix is an innovative event ticketing platform that uses 100% of its booking fees to create social impact by funding education projects for the world's most disadvantaged children. Event organizers use Humanitix software to sell tickets to their events, pay lower ticketing fees, and its profits fund education programs for the world’s poorest children.

In 2018 Humanitix won the Google Impact Challenge and has since doubled in size every six months, becoming one the fastest-growing ticketing platforms in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Thanks to the foundations of Google and Atlassian which funded it, its platform is world-class and already sells millions of tickets every year.

I sat down with Joshua Ross, CEO and Founder of Humanitix to find out about their origins and journey to disrupt the global ticketing market.

“Imagine a world where Amazon’s mission wasn’t to make shareholders rich but to save the Amazon rainforest. Then I can guarantee you the Amazon rainforest would have been saved ten years ago. Technology is the world's biggest driver of change; it makes more money than any other industry, and yields the most power. This is why we believe we need technology charities at scale to solve social problems. That’s a world I want to live in, and that’s why I teamed up with my best friend Adam McCurdie to start Humanitix,” Ross explained.

So why would a non-profit get into ticketing? “We realised early on that to create a technology charity; we’d need to intertwine a social enterprise model so it could be sustainable. So, we searched for the world’s most hated industry. You know that one that stings you with a $30 booking fee and then follows up with terrible customer service. We’re talking about event ticketing. Billions of dollars in fees, annoying to deal with. So much so that John Oliver, host of The Last Week Tonight did an entire skit in March ripping into the industry and its opaque pricing and resale system ‘the most hated companies on earth’,” Ross further explained.

John Oliver unfortunately missed the good news story. Six years ago Ross and McCurdie decided to build the world’s most humane ticketing platform, as a non-profit, that both lowers fees and uses them to fix global problems. No longer are customers being screwed, and even better the world gets better with every ticket sold. A complete reimagining of the ticketing industry which is social enterprise at its most powerful.

With respect to the journey, a big turning point came in 2018 when Humanitix won the Google Impact Challenge. This gave it serious fire-power and additional funding, since then, it has scaled globally. It is now the leading ticketing platform in Australasia and is growing rapidly in North America and the United Kingdom. “I’m spending half my life in Colorado at the moment and absolutely loving it,” Ross added.

Humanitix has three core impact pillars. There are billions of dollars in booking fees, and they are mostly funding dividends for some very wealthy shareholders. Humanitix is flipping this on its head and using its fees to fund programs for children’s charities. To do this, Humanitix is structured as a technology charity, so in effect, its shareholders are some of the world’s poorest children.

“We fund literacy programs for young girls in low-income countries, computer science programs for disadvantaged children in North America, and many other amazing causes. To date, we’ve given over $1.5M to our projects, and coming out of COVID it's growing quickly. In the next 12 months we should give another $2M to our projects. We think in 5-10 years, we may be giving $30-45M per annum to our projects and all of this costs nothing extra for consumers or event organizers,” Ross said.

The non-profits that use Humanitix for their events, use the platform at its sustainable cost-price, so they aren’t losing out on high fees. This is typically the cheapest way for charities to run their events. “It’s beautiful when non-profits procure from non-profits; we save our industry over a million dollars a year through gifting our platform,” Ross calculated.

Humanitix also does some innovative work around event accessibility for people with disabilities; excitingly it’s getting a lot of great feedback from the disability sector. One of the most frequently reported issues by people with disabilities is community participation and social inclusion. Events are at the heart of how people connect. None of the event registration platforms work for people with disabilities, its typically a disaster for those affected, whether the cause be incompatibility with screen readers, a lack of information, or the ability to run an event as a person with a vision impairment to name a few of the frequent challenges. Humanitix built the world’s first properly accessible registration platform.

Here is a recent testimonial that Ross shared from a legally blind event organiser just the other week:“I just wanted to get a message to whichever team developed your check-in app. It’s amazing. I’m 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 on the list. I did it totally independently and just wanted to thank you and let you know the impact you have made for inclusion. Great work”.

Ross reflected on another story of people whose lives Humanitix has impacted, “One of our loveliest stories is that of Tyrese, an Aboriginal student whose school education was funded through our amazing education partner, Yalari. Tyrese is from regional Australia and, upon finishing his schooling scholarship, came to Humanitix to learn about technology and sales on a paid internship. It’s a heart warming story for a couple of reasons, not just because we’ve been able to witness the amazing man Tyrese is maturing into, but on a personal note for our team, it’s the full-circle impact whereby one of our beneficiaries actually ended up working with us.”

Just the other weekend, Ross caught up with Tyrese for an ocean swim. Tyrese is now part of the Humanifamily, not just a beneficiary of its education programs. He is studying Commerce at the University of New South Wales and is intending to spend more time working at Humanitix. Everyone is super excited to see where his journey leads.

I asked Ross about their move to the United States and his bigger vision for Humanitix. “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. We also believe companies that align profit with purpose can solve the world's biggest problems and that humane use of technology can help us reinvest in humanity far beyond traditional corporate responsibility. So I guess you can say Humanitix is our first step on this journey. Give people the platform, and they'll step up (and throw down!), Ross concluded.