The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a major shift in traditional fundraising events. Virtual events are now the standard, which has created a new need for innovative, engaging online fundraising experiences.
Since the launch of Neon Fundraise’s new Virtual Toolkit, we’ve been working on some powerful solutions designed to help organizations make up some of the revenue lost to the initial wave of canceled and postponed events.
Today, we’re excited to announce our newest virtual fundraising solution, Endurance Challenges, designed to help you inspire and encourage fundraisers to raise more during distant events.
Update: We’ve rebranded! Our Neon Ecosystem is now Neon One. Same great products, new cohesive names.
What Are Endurance Challenges?
The new Endurance Challenges feature allows fundraisers to log their progress toward a specific activity-based goal from within your Neon Fundraise system. This simple, yet powerful feature recreates the thrill of in-person events and translates it to a successful, virtual experience.
Many fundraising events hosted on Neon Fundraise are designed around an accompanying endurance activity: walks, marathons, bike-a-thons, and even non-fitness challenges like read-a-thons or bake-a-thons. Engaging fundraisers in an endurance activity can boost their advocacy efforts, increasing their fundraising success.
We created Endurance Challenges to assist organizations in combining distanced endurance events with fundraising campaigns. This tool supports challenges of all kinds, from standard walks, runs, and rides, to more creative applications like general fitness challenges or even non-fitness challenges.
Here’s How it Works
To create an Endurance Challenge, your system administrator will have to create the challenge in your Neon Fundraise Admin. Before setting your challenge up, we recommend meeting with your team to nail down the specifics of your challenge. During this process, you should identify:
- Your challenge name. This name will be used across the site to display user progress.
- What types of activities you will challenge your fundraisers to do. There are some system defaults (walk, run, bike, swim, hike), but you can really add any activity type you wish. Additionally, you’ll want to decide if participants should be able to import activities from available fitness apps.
- What goal your fundraisers will track progress towards. You can choose distance (e.g., miles), duration (measured in hours and minutes), or any custom metric.
Here a few examples of Endurance Challenge configurations to get you inspired:
Once your Endurance Challenge is all set up, your fundraisers can edit their endurance goal and log activities toward the challenge in their Fundraiser Dashboard.
All site visitors will be able to view endurance progress in various widgets on your campaign homepage and across fundraising pages.
Endurance Challenges in Action
This new feature has already seen some big successes over the past month. The Michael J. Fox Foundation is using Endurance Challenges for this year’s Zurich Fitness Challenge, where every step gets them one step closer to a cure for Parkinson’s Disease.
During the month of August, fundraisers signed up to walk, run, and get active for a good cause. Their progress was recorded on the event campaign page. In 31 days, fundraisers walked over 49 million steps while raising $31,408.
We’re excited to see how other organizations use this tool to encourage their peer-to-peer fundraising efforts. If you’d like to learn more about Endurance Challenges, including how to apply it to your next fundraiser, please schedule a demo.
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