Giving to Receive. Gamifying Charity Tech.

The subtle art of online Marketing for digital products.

Raising funds even for charity is probably one of the hardest things to do for most people and organizations alike.

Within the 21^st century there have been a number of platforms such as GoFundMe, Kickstarter and indiegogo that have come up and have really helped with reducing the gap between donors and those who require funds. Even so, it has now become even harder to raise funds even on these platforms because they are crowded with products, services and causes that all require donors’ attention.

Users on these platforms have to market their products and causes intensively on other platforms before they can begin to see any positive traction donation-wise, more so if they are raising for the first time.

Raising funds for whatever reason has never been easy and many have had to get creative with their causes. Some campaigns such as the “one for one” model where for every product a customer buys, a similar product is given to a person in need have worked quite well for many companies mostly in the fashion business including: Bombas, Bixbee, One World Play Project to mention a few.

I believe raising funds for charity has become harder for two reasons:

One, there are so many people and causes asking for money while peoples’ sources of income have remained the same over the years and two we mostly ask people to help and keep helping without ever getting anything in return even if it’s intangible, when it has been shown time and time again that when you want to receive you have to be willing to give even if it’s not directly and you always end up receiving a lot more.

So how do we make charity more of a give to be given kind of scenario?

Gamification.

It’s hard to give something tangible when you are trying to raise money to build a hospital in Guatemala, but you can definitely give something intangible like a feeling: joy, accomplishment or sense of community when people contribute to your cause.

This can be done through games/ gamified apps and websites that are fun and most importantly can create a sense of community and belonging. Give people some sense of Joy, fun or laughter as you receive their money.

Case Study.

#theonemillion

A mobile game with one million saved locations across the world or your country of residence.

The game would be limited to only one million downloads and each download would be sold for one dollar. Once you download the game you would then pick one location out of the one million, go to the place, be it a restaurant, zoo etc. whether it is in England or Zambia and only be able to unlock it once you reach that exact position.

If you are not able to go to your location, you would have the option of switching with somebody else.

Each download will only unlock one location.

This idea could be used to get people to travel more or to raise money for charity by bringing people from across the world together to achieve a single goal while at the same time doing something fun or something that they wouldn’t normally do.

To involve people in the process of making such experiences, you could also ask that potential donors submit one thing on their bucket list on an online form. These would then be the activities/challenges that people would be assigned at random and told who had submitted their assigned activity to promote community engagement.

A really great example was the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Granted, this would not be an overnight success, but with the likes of Tiktok and X, virality of cool concepts that connect people, has become much easier to achieve.

Think upon it.