Gamification can increase your fundraiser’s engagement rates, driving donations. Learn how gamification works and how it can benefit your fundraising efforts.
Guest blog from Grant Cobb, fundraising specialist at GivingMail.
Crowdfunding campaigns have become proven fundraisers for nonprofits and individuals alike. By leveraging online marketing tools, crowdfunding campaigns have the potential to earn lots of money fast. However, before starting your crowdfunding campaign, you should familiarize yourself with current fundraising strategies and practices to run the most effective campaign possible.
Gamification has gained ground in nonprofit fundraising due to its potential to engage supporters and drive more donations. Nonprofits operating on a donation-based funding model continually look for ways to attract new donors and connect with their current base. For these organizations, the use of gamification practices can introduce their organization to new supporters as fun, exciting, and representative of a good cause.
Fortunately, nearly every fundraiser can make use of gamification with the proper application. While it may sound complicated, gamification relies on a few core principles regarding supporter participation, attainable rewards, and motivation. To help your organization decide whether gamification makes sense for you, this article will explore:
- How Gamification Works
- The Benefits of Gamification
Gamification is always more successful when it’s used to emphasize what makes your fundraiser and nonprofit unique. As you read through how and why gamification works, consider how this approach to engagement could apply to your own organization. Additionally, many fundraising software solutions come with some gamification tools that can help get your nonprofit started.
How Gamification Works
Gamification involves using visual and interactive elements typically associated with playing a game, including score keeping, competition, and leaderboards, to encourage participants to accomplish a specific goal.
In fundraising, gamification is used to motivate supporters to continually take action and participate in an online system that tracks their contributions. Some types of fundraisers such as crowdfunding campaigns lend themselves particularly well to gamification because they already include core visual or participatory elements that encourage engagement.
While the exact science behind why gamification works is fascinating, you don’t need to be a psychologist to see how core principles of it can apply to fundraisers. Here is a breakdown of a few elements of gamification and why they are so engaging for supporters:
- A sense of personal accomplishment. It’s well known that the rewards supporters earn during gamified activities are rarely valuable in and of themselves. Instead, supporters simply enjoy seeing their contributions acknowledged, and little pieces of encouragement such as badges, points, or a position on a leaderboard give supporters something to show for their efforts.
- The ability to progress. Ensure that you provide a continual track of awards, fundraising marks to hit, or other progress markers. Doing so lets your supporters know that their goal is accomplishable and provides a reason to continue contributing. By contrast, if you provide a reward for each supporter who donates only once, donors motivated by gamification methods would have no reason to continue offering their support.
- Continual incorporation of new rewards. While our brains naturally enjoy seeing numbers go up, you can keep your supporters interested in your campaign for longer by regularly providing new rewards or achievements that can be unlocked when a certain amount of fundraising is reached. These rewards don’t need to be physical items that are distributed to supporters, but rather something new that signals a short term goal has been completed, further fueling a sense of progression while giving reason to celebrate an immediate win.
How you gamify your fundraising campaign will depend on what kind of fundraiser you are running. For example, at a silent auction, you might include a leaderboard tracking the highest bids to create a sense of competition, while a crowdfunding campaign might split their overall goal into smaller milestones so something new is unlocked every so often over the course of the campaign.
Your nonprofit’s brand identity will also play a role in how you gamify your campaigns. Remember that gamification is a form of marketing, and, like all your marketing materials, it should reflect your nonprofit’s values. Avoid treating gamification as separate from your other outreach methods. As GivingMail’s article on marketing for nonprofit organizations explains, “Marketing shouldn’t be seen as a completely separate function within your organization, but rather as a piece of the greater whole working together to maximize your impact.”
The Benefits of Gamification
Gamification helps your nonprofit earn funds, but it can also give your nonprofit long-term advantages over organizations with more traditional fundraising approaches. Remember that gamification provides benefits to your supporters, too, by making fundraising a fun, social experience.
Increase Engagement
Nonprofits with active online supporter communities can earn reliable fundraising revenue, whether they’re hosting a dedicated fundraising campaign or they’re between campaigns. The question, then, is how can you convince supporters to interact with your nonprofit’s campaign posts?
Gamification provides supporters a structured way to participate in your nonprofit’s digital campaigns and fundraisers. By reaching goals and completing games, supporters will not just contribute to your campaign, but have an enjoyable experience doing so, which encourages them to keep participating.
Some supporters are able to make their own fun or contribute in their own ways, but proper gamification allows your nonprofit to design methods of interaction that give them a reason to keep coming back to your nonprofit. In some cases, supporters may make checking in on your nonprofit and participating in gamified activities a regular enough part of their day that they share your fundraiser with friends and family so they can participate alongside them.
Build Fundraising Momentum
As mentioned, gamification helps create a sense of progress, which is especially useful for long-term fundraisers and crowdfunding campaigns. Most professional crowdfunding services are aware that maintaining momentum is a regular challenge for fundraising organizations.
As Double the Donation’s list of recommended crowdfunding websites demonstrates, many popular crowdfunding platforms make use of deadlines or all-or-nothing approaches to fundraising as a way to motivate donors and supporters alike to see campaigns through to the end.
By contrast, gamification aims to make the end of your campaign the most exciting part. You can accomplish this by including some of the following gamification techniques:
- Final reveal. Some gamification tools center their campaigns around slowly revealing an image, interactive graphic, or other visual. When these campaigns hit milestones, parts of the image can be revealed to get supporters interested in seeing more while creating a sense of accomplishment. Once most of the image is revealed, supporters will be incentivized to make the last push for the final product.
- Acknowledging top funders. While you should acknowledge all of your donors, you can create a sense of friendly competition by giving shoutouts to top funders. Leaderboards or funding tools that track your highest single donations can help inspire donors to get their name to the top of the list. With each new highest total, donors can be encouraged to top it before your fundraiser comes to an end.
- Adding donor friendly visuals. Gamification tools don’t only encourage supporters to give — many of them also provide a visual representation of how close your fundraiser is to its goal. The higher your fundraising total, the more difficult it can be for supporters to conceptualize how close or far you are from your goal. Gamification tools like fundraising thermometers, milestones, and image reveals all give supporters a visual representation to determine how far along your campaign is at a single glance.
Fundraising, and especially crowdfunding, is a social activity. Gamification tools can help show off just how active your other donors are, which can convince new supporters to join in, increasing your campaign’s momentum until its finish.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Crowdfunding is a popular way to fundraise, which means it’s also competitive. Whether you’re hosting your crowdfunding campaign on a third-party platform or your own website, you’ll have to stand out amongst thousands of ongoing campaigns.
Gamification tools give your supporters unique ways to interact with your fundraiser, making it stand out from other similar campaigns. Whether you’re offering completely new ways to engage or putting a creative twist on traditional gamification practices, your campaign will be more engaging than those who opt for straightforward fundraising practices.
If you’re having trouble brainstorming what makes your fundraiser unique or how you can incorporate gamification principles into your campaign, consider hiring a fundraising consultant for advice. Referral lists like this one can be a helpful resource for evaluating your consulting options, so you can find a consultant who fits your campaign’s needs.
Nonprofit fundraising tactics have come a long way, but most proven methods continue to focus on what matters: your donors and how to engage them. Gamification techniques work because they add extra incentives to help a good cause, which your supporters are ultimately happy to do. Consider how you can add gamification practices to your campaign and reap the benefits during your next fundraiser!
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The Impact of Gamification in Fundraising was originally published in The Pozible Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
