Charity Fundraising Platform
Over the years Ronald McDonald House Charities of Manitoba has had fundraisers that include fashion shows and golf tournaments. These are fairly simple fundraising events that are generally simple donations. A couple of years ago they came to us with the idea of a pledge based fundraising platform where participants or teams of participants would pull together the donations based on a physical activity like walking, bike-riding, running, horseback riding, etc. This started out as their Red Shoe Crew Walk. We had created a trimmed down version of this platform previously, but after last year's event they wanted to expand the functionality.
We created its own standalone website and pledge transaction platform on our Catalyst CMS that was to be for their Red Shoe Crew Walk, however with the intervening COVID-19 pandemic, they needed to modify the focus a bit. Rather than a physical event taking place on a small set of days, they wanted to turn the event into something virtual. Participants and participant teams would still be taking pledges for doing the physical activity, but the event would be a self motivated and socially physically distanced endeavour in order to comply with Ministry of Health guidelines.
Instead of a fundraiser that took place over one or two days, the pledging would take place over a period of months. This resulted in the new RMHC Manitoba 151 event. The 5km Red Shoe Crew Walk turned into an event where participants would travel a distance of 151 kilometres by walking, riding, swimming, hopping, skipping, etc.
The site required connection to their online transaction provider, a way to track pledges to participants and teams, all while considering privacy concerns as some of the participants were children. Behind the scenes the administrators are able to review the pledge amounts and to whom the pledges were made. This tracking is necessary in order to rectify the transactions with their banking institution. On top of that the administrators can also send out tax receipts to pledgers who qualify.
The system can support multiple events and can be set to have start and expiry dates to be sure that pledges only come through during a specified period.