Architex produces a fundraising-focused virtual event for the United Nations Women's Peace and Humanitarian Fund featuring real-time visual feedback for in-the-moment donations.
SUMMARY
On International Women’s Day, March 8th 2021, Architex produced a campaign kickoff event for the United Nations Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF) for their 1,000 Women Leaders campaign, aiming to fund the work of 1,000 women leaders on the front lines of crisis-affected communities around the world. The event was a one hour program hosted by Whoopi Goldberg with special guest Kristen Bell, and began by introducing a few of the thousand women leaders in crisis areas doing critical work in need of funding.
EVENT DESIGN
With a focus on spreading awareness and fundraising, we had many moving pieces to the broadcast design. We utilized multiple overlays to bring in social media banners, logos, lower thirds, closed captioning and frequent translation overlays for accessibility. As a fundraising campaign, the most critical overlays during the program were donation specific. Often, we design these as ribbons or banners, with information like “text 707070 to donate!” For this event, WPHF partnered with Pledgeling to provide an interactive donation overlay.
Pledgeling is one company that highlights small and large donors by announcing each donation as they come in in real time. We worked with the team at Pledgeling to design and integrate live donations into the live broadcast. The creative team opted to focus on the impact of small donations by choosing the individual counter overlay, listing each gift without listing the running total of money received. Architex then created a donations cue sheet for our staff in conjunction with the live broadcast run of show to determine the moments pre-gifted donations should appear, where big pre-promised gifts should be announced, and in what moments the program’s content should take precedence over the donation ask.
To kick off the donations, our team started by uploading pre-gifted amounts by donors for the first few donations, which allowed the audience to see the live donation process become an interactive part of the event both in the broadcast and the accompanying live chat. The overlay showed only first name and last initial as well as amount donated, keeping the mechanism informal. Once the first few pre-gifted donations scrolled, audience interaction began and individual donations began rolling in. From the chat, engagement was high with callouts, “Way to go!! Let’s get it even higher! It all adds up!”
BACKGROUND
The Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund was created as a nonprofit partnership between the United Nations and civil societies for the purpose of empowering local women to be a force for crisis response and lasting peace building in conflict torn areas of the world.
The WPHF leadership attended another virtual event produced by Architex, and wanted to replicate some of the unique elements they experienced at their own upcoming event.
DONATION OVERLAY BEST PRACTICES
Establish the purpose, faces and needs of the program before soliciting donations
Begin with pre-gifted donations to establish the interactive nature of donating
Show flow expertise determines the right moments to call attention to donations
Custom program return feeds to talent allow them to acknowledge donations in real time
Staff access to the Pledgeling backend allowed control of when donations begin
Large pre-gifted donations and pledges can be announced at strategic times
Staff support in the chat allows donors to be acknowledged and thanked in real time
Backstage comms allow for real time troubleshooting and decision-making on the fly
CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS
The host was limited in what language could be used (and could not be used) to solicit donations. Exact wording was extremely important.
We provided a teleprompter feed and operator for the host to ensure that the exact the script as approved by the legal team was read on-air.
Forbidden wording was kept out of the graphics and taken out of the teleprompter script to be replaced legally allowed wording.
Overlays and staff in the live chat played a crucial role in engaging donors
A few large donations had been secured prior to the event which, if displayed off the bat, could have discouraged smaller individual donations.
We began the program without the donation overlays on. Once the campaign was announced, the overlays began with small gifts only and allowed current attendees to interact, give and be recognized.
The generous large donations were featured in the middle of the program and thanked verbally, but were not added to the live donation overlay to not overshadow personal gifts for the remainder of the program
The donation overlay could not be turned off without restarting from the first donation, it could only be hidden. This meant it had to either be on the whole time once brought in, or hidden with some donations not seen.
The decision was made to begin without the donation overlay, and only bring it in with the Text To Give overlay when the campaign was formally announced. It was then left on throughout the program to acknowledge each individual donation as they came in.
RESULTS
The 1,000 Women Leaders event generated significant revenue in small donations over the course of an hour. Around 25% of personal donations came in anonymously. Around 72% of the small donations came in before the large gifts were announced. The donation overlays encouraged engagement in the event and the chat. Combined with a professional broadcast, WPHF and Architex boosted participation in the campaign launch, meeting and exceeding fundraising goals!
To learn more about United Nations WPHF see https://wphfund.org/ and to learn more about 1,000 Women Leaders, see https://wphfund.org/1000womenleaders/