Crowdfunding Platform for Personal and Team Campaigns Leads to Increased Fundraising and Engagement
University of Minnesota Foundation
The University of Minnesota Foundation (UMF) coordinates and executes fundraising activities on behalf of all University of Minnesota campuses, colleges, and programs. They needed a robust, scalable crowdfunding platform to accommodate the diverse range of causes and interests of the more than 66,000 students on seven campuses, plus the associated faculty and staff. Skvare developed the UMF crowdfunding website with CiviCRM and Drupal with customizations to boost the power of team campaign and personal campaign pages, social sharing, user interface and reporting. The new crowdfunding website empowers supporters to create personalized fundraising web pages to share with their family and friends in just a few simple steps.
Background
The goal was to provide a peer-to-peer fundraising platform to collect donations for several large campaigns by allowing crowdfunding for individuals and teams. Teams were given the ability to compete with one another to increase excitement and support for their causes.
Challenges
The University of Minnesota Foundation was challenged with a way to unify many individual campaign pages, and they lacked a way to collect crowdfunded donations effectively.
Solution
The University of Minnesota staff chose CiviCRM to integrate with existing software and avoid the high fees and prescribed functionality of commercial peer-to-peer fundraising services. UMF selected Skvare to build the crowdfunding website for their expertise in custom CiviCRM implementations, support and maintenance.
Functionality
Robust Personal Campaign Pages
Skvare added features to improve the styling and effectiveness of the Personal Campaign Pages, such as a rich style editor for users to configure text and media, the option to add custom fields, and displaying the total raised up to and beyond 100% of goal.
All New Team Campaign Pages
UMF wanted to give teams the ability to collectively fundraise and compete with other teams. Skvare developed a new extension to relay data between team pages and personal campaign pages. The team campaign pages aggregate data from each of the individual fundraisers on that team, showing totals raised by their participants on the team campaign page.
Easy Navigation Through Breadcrumbs, Search API, Views and Custom URL’s
UMF’s crowdfunding website employs Search API integrated with Drupal Views to accurately find and display some of the more than 400 personal or team campaign pages. A new Drupal module, Views CiviCRM Expose Tables, allows all the participant information or team page information to be clearly displayed.
Team campaign page administrators have the option to select custom, readable URL’s to make sharing the team campaign page easy. Additionally, breadcrumbs are built into pages to show where the user is, and the site is fully responsive for viewing on all screen sizes.
Social Sharing
UMF’s crowdfunding site allows campaign contributors to easily share their contribution activity via social media to encourage other teams or individuals to do the same.
Seamless Reporting
A specially-built integration provides the accounting department with a feed of all the donations, too. Skvare created an XML feed to pass all of the donation information to UMF’s donor database. This ensures that donor information goes to one central space for receipting and accounting.
Conclusion
The University of Minnesota Foundation’s crowdfunding website is a prime example of the type of large-scale, flexible solutions that Skvare can develop with open-source tools. Skvare customized the site to suit UMF’s specifications, adding many new features by extending CiviCRM and Drupal software.
The peer-to-peer fundraising pages “played a key role in helping to grow the University's giving day by more than 50 percent in 2015, when the U community raised $515,000 in a single day for University causes,” notes University of Minnesota Foundation’s Digital Content Manager, Robyn White. The University of Minnesota Foundation and their donors will benefit from this model that has predictable costs and avoids the high fees of commercial peer-to-peer fundraising services. With Skvare’s ongoing support and maintenance, it’s a winning combination.
To learn more about this project or other CiviCRM solutions, please visit Skvare.
Slider photo on CiviCRM homepage courtesy of University of Minnesota Duluth CC BY-ND 2.0 on Flickr
Project images (click to enlarge)
Peter Petrik, CEO
Mark Hanna, Developer
Jeremy Proffitt, Developer
Miriama Kovacikova, Project Coordinator
Bryan Daniels, Project Manager
