You may have heard us talk about gamification recently. Gamification means to add game elements into activities that are not typically seen as games, like donating. It’s a great way to engage your user base to take action and have some fun along the way.
You might already have elements of gamification in your nonprofit fundraiser without even realizing it — like when you give donors a certificate for their contribution, or insert a donation bar to show overall progress, or even when you recognize top donors.
Did you know you can easily add even more gamification features to your GiveWP plugin, including those we introduced in our new peer-to-peer fundraising solution?
It’s true! You can add gamification elements right into your GiveWP donation forms without having to build or customize your own progress bars and badges.
Why Gamify Fundraising?
Adding gaming elements means more than just infusing some fun into giving. It also adds a sense of satisfaction and task completion, and adds in a bit of a challenge, too.
There’re studies around using leaderboards to drive competition, as people love seeing their name ranked higher on a list for a sense of self-satisfaction and pride.
You don’t have to build a game from scratch to engage your donors; you’d be surprised with just a few simple tweaks how “gamelike” your strategy can become to increase friendly competition.
If you’re looking for WordPress gamification tools, we’ve rounded up the best plugins for your GiveWP donation form to integrate gamification into your nonprofit’s fundraising strategy.
GamiPress
GamiPress is a plugin we love with great GiveWP integration. This plugin automatically connects GamiPress with GiveWP and adds gaming elements in minutes.
With GamiPress, you can reward donors with a variety of points, awards, and badges for their contributions. Here are a few ways you can use these features:
- Points can automatically award your users for interacting with your site or for contributing towards a donation total
- Achievements award users for completing a requirement, like filling out a profile, liking a post, or chipping in towards a donation goal
- Ranks let your users climb in status by completing a set criteria of requirements
You can also customize the ways you use points, achievements, and ranks in simple ways that can add more game-like excitement to your fundraiser:
- Automatic points awards and deductions: someone “steal” points from someone else? Someone like a blog post? You can add in features that will automatically add or subtract points from a user’s pool without having to micro-manage.
- Custom requirements: What do you want your users to accomplish first before unlocking a certain rank? You can lock or hide features to tease a sense of competition in your fundraiser.
- Time limit requirements: Want to unlock something for only 48 hours, or challenge users to hit a weekend milestone? Add the pressure of a timer to raise the stakes!
You can also easily illustrate achievements, organize requirements, and choose assessment options to check if each requirement has been achieved successfully or not.
Simple but powerful, GamiPress is loaded with some of the best gamification features to engage users in your cause. Installation is simple too, with an easy-to-follow plugin upload in your WordPress. Once uploaded, you’re ready to gamify your giving!
myCred
myCred is another add-on with several gamify features that work with your GiveWP plugin. myCred helps reward donors with points and badges:
- Custom unique badges can award donors for making donations, such as a “minimum donation badge” for any user who hits a threshold that you determine.
- Donation points can add or deduct points from individuals or from groups for a sense of competition.
To run myCred, you need both plugins and then the myCred GiveWP Addon. The free plugin includes support and one year of updates. myCred can run on pretty much every browser, too.
The 2.2 release of myCred introduced some new features, like a redesigned main menu for an improved user experience, a simplified badge page layout, and options for social media sharing. There are also new “treasure” features that offer attractive graphics that can be used for ranks and badges.
The myCred plugin is perfect to integrate not only into your GiveWP donation form, as well as anywhere else needed on your website, like an online store for rewards, community leaderboards, or embedded in your site content.
Explore additional add-ons too, like arcade games and spin wheels, to further gamify your site!
GiveWP Peer-To-Peer
Of course, the much-anticipated GiveWP Peer-to-Peer add-on is a great way to gamify your giving, too!
This new Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Solution adds gamification elements through exciting new features that support team giving.
With a peer-to-peer fundraiser, your supporters have the ability to raise money on your behalf. This new tool lets volunteers sign up as team captains, join existing teams, or donate directly to a team or individual fundraiser.
The gamification features come in with the ability to show goals and progress bars for each team, as well as for each individual donor:
- Goal bars can motivate teams and individuals to hit their mark. You can also add a “total raised” goal bar too.
- Leaderboards incentivize individual fundraisers and teams to raise more money.
- Captains can customize the color, image, and name of the goal, as well as embed videos and other content for a custom experience each time.
- Social sharing is simplified with built-in calls-to-action, motivating a sense of competition even more.
You can create and customize these peer-to-peer donation forms without any code, and your branding carries through on your peer-to-peer donation forms!
And since these peer-to-peer campaigns are powered by our GiveWP donation forms, you can combine them with our other powerful add-ons, like recurring donations, fee recovery, and more.
Though peer-to-peer can be used with the free plugin, upgrading to the Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Suite further optimizes your fundraising efforts and can lead to a better donor experience.
Let’s Gamify!
With any of these top WordPress plugins, gamification is easier to include than ever, and donors will feel the difference with multiple engagement levels. Whether you’re looking to add in a point system, badges, ranks, leaderboards, or goal bars, these features offer everything you need to get started and more.
Let us know how gamifying your giving can help your strategy today!
About the Author
