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Crowdfunding Platform for Personal and Team Campaigns Leads to Increased Fundraising and Engagement

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

Peter Petrik leads as CEO, supported by developers Mark Hanna and Jeremy Proffitt. Miriama Kovacikova efficiently coordinates project tasks, while Bryan Daniels adeptly manages project operations.

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Our mission at Skvare is Helping Others Help Others by providing strategy consultation, IT system development, website design, system hosting, and site maintenance for nonprofits, membership associations, and educational organizations. We are open-source software champions, committed to making the tools we and our clients use better. We embrace the competitive nature of system development by providing a refreshing experience. Our human-centric communication style and belief that all development must be done with change in mind have created long-term relationships and trust. Skvare may do technology, but what we care about is who our clients are and the positive impact they are making.

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