Gamification for fundraising: A guide for charities

1. Fundraising: Play your way to higher donations

Gamified activations can revolutionise fundraising by turning it into an interactive and engaging experience. Here’s just a handful of tactics to consider:

• Fundraising leaderboards: Tap into that competitive spirit by creating leaderboards for fundraisers. This friendly competition encourages participants to raise more while giving you valuable insights, like where your supporters are located for targeted campaigns.
• Achievement badges and rewards: Offer digital badges for milestones like first donations or hitting fundraising goals. These shareable badges provide recognition and motivation, keeping supporters engaged and excited.
• Offline to online donation triggers: By placing QR codes within physical elements that link to your gamified campaign, you can sweeten the deal by offering instant rewards for their on-the-spot donations, turning a simple scan into a fun experience.
• Game types and mechanics: Choose mechanics that resonate with your audience. Quizzes can test their knowledge, scratchcards add an element of luck, and competitive arcade games let them show off their skills. These elements boost visibility and engagement for your cause.

2. CRM growth: Building relationships

A robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is vital for nurturing relationships with donors, volunteers, and partners, while also providing a lasting and valued stewardship journey.

According to a Gartner report, organisations that successfully integrate gamification into their CRM strategy can expect to see a 30% increase in user engagement. This engagement is crucial to maintaining strong relationships and driving tangible ROI through donations and committed giving. With this in mind:

• Acquire first-party data: Create interactive games and experiences that require user sign-ups, gathering valuable data for your CRM. For example, a challenge-based game that’s well aligned with your mission can educate users while also collecting valuable information for future campaigns. Win-win.

• Personalise your approach: Use CRM data to tailor campaigns to each user’s interests. For instance, if someone often supports animal welfare, create a fun virtual pet based challenge just for them. This tailored content will boost engagement and donations, strengthening your bonds with supporters.

3. Corporate partnerships: Amplify your impact

Corporate partnerships can provide substantial value for both charities and businesses. Adding gamified activations into the mix strengthens these partnerships to be more attractive and effective for all involved:

• Internal fundraising platforms: Develop gamified platforms for corporate partners where employees’ physical activities, such as miles run, link to fundraising efforts. You can easily integrate with fitness apps like Strava to track and motivate participation, turning corporate wellness into a cause-driven activity.

• Co-branded activations and experiences, to drive data collection and donations: Collaborate with corporate partners on joint campaigns where achievements translate directly to donations. For example, collecting virtual coins could result in real money donations. Hosting these across audiences means more data collection and mission exposure.

A real-world example: Inspiring action and 500k game plays for Old Mout Cider and their plight to save the kiwi bird.

Old Mout Cider set out to save New Zealand’s native kiwi bird from extinction. They needed more than just awareness - they needed a campaign that would entertain, inform, inspire action, and elevate their brand.

We created “Kiwi Cycle,” a gamified activation featuring the famous flightless bird on a unicycle, dodging obstacles while collecting fruit and Old Mout bottles for recycling. For each bottle collected, they donated 1p to the charity World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

With over half a million plays and a 70% redemption rate, “Kiwi Cycle” successfully engaged their audiences and delivered a real impact, demonstrating how gamification can drive both awareness and tangible return, while boosting brand and mission visibility.

4. Education and inspiration: Bring your mission to life

Charities often struggle to convey their mission and impact effectively, at pace. Yet research by Tech for Good shows that non-profits that prioritise educational content centred around their mission and impact of work, receive 29% higher engagement compared to those that don’t. Here’s where gamification comes in; it offers the opportunity to deliver speedy experiences that can both educate and engage, for example:

• Mission-based games: By developing games reflecting your charity’s goals through storytelling, you can drive engagement and educate users, while capturing data for marketing efforts.

• Interactive quizzes: Create quizzes that test users’ knowledge about your cause. Not only do they engage participants, but they also provide insights into their understanding and interests, helping you tailor future content and campaigns.

5. Volunteer engagement: Energise your teams

Keeping volunteers motivated and engaged is crucial for sustained success and to prevent fatigue. Track progress and gamify achievements in a way that keeps them moving:

• Volunteer platforms: Why not implement platforms that gamify volunteer tasks? These let you track progress, offer badges and rewards for completed tasks, and create leaderboards to create that vital sense of community and competition. A recent survey found that 90% of employees said they felt more motivated when a gamification tool was employed - this taps right into that.

Real world example: Raising the bar for charity and our wellbeing with the Engage Elympics.

The Engage Elympics is our annual challenge to become the healthiest agency in the UK, all while raising money for our nominated charities.

As part of this initiative, different exercises are assigned varying values based on the effort involved. All activities are tracked using Strava, allowing us to collect valuable data which feeds into our monthly Elympics leaderboard. The more activity we complete, the more we donate - fueling friendly competition, (and a buzz around the office!).

Now in its 8th year, we’ve raised nearly £70,000, and our team is happier and healthier as a result!

Incorporating gamification in the non-profit landscape can be transformative — for a range of departmental objectives — but it’s not without its challenges. Here’s how to address some of the most common:

1. Cost and resources

The challenge: Limited budgets might make gamification seem like a big investment.

The solution: Gamification drives tangible, measurable results, making it a smart investment with clear ROI. By starting with a scalable solution, you can quickly demonstrate tangible outcomes like additional CRM opt-ins, higher conversions, donations - making the investment worthwhile and modelable from the outset.

2. Engagement Fatigue

The challenge: Over time, participants may lose interest if the gamified elements become repetitive or predictable.

The solution: Keep the experience fresh by rotating challenges, updating rewards, and introducing new elements periodically. For example, you could change the themes of challenges based on current events or seaons, or offer limited-time rewards that encourage ongoing participation. Variety is key to sustaining interest and avoiding burnout.

3. Data Privacy

The challenge: Collecting data through these campaigns can raise privacy and compliance concerns.

The solution: It’s crucial to prioritise data protection. Make sure you’re transparent with participants about what data you collect and why. Comply with relevant privacy regulations such as GDPR by implementing robust security measures and providing clear, accessible privacy policies. Not so much a challenge when considered from the get-go.

Gamified activations and campaigns offer not-for-profits a fresh, strategic avenue to engage their audiences in a memorable, interactive way. Deepening connections while driving mission-aligned objectives.

And the impact of gamification is real. In fact, M2 Research found that effective gamification can lead to a 100%-150% increase in engagement metrics, with supporting studies suggesting a notable 22% boost in loyalty.

What does this mean for your non-profit? Well, if you can successfully integrate gamification into your strategy, you can expect to see more active and committed supporters, along with a measurable rise in donations and volunteer participation.

Ready to get started? You’ve come to the right place. At Engage, we work with a number of leading charities to help them win online. And yours could be next. Get in touch today to discover how we can help!