Gamification stuff we love: Charity Miles
Simplicity is great when you are creating an application with fundraising as one key output. The App Charity Miles has linked corporate sponsors with individuals shot run, bike or walk for a chosen cause. The key is to log the miles you do and share this through social media, whilst also thanking your sponsor. Each mile logged is worth a number of cents and a sponsor will pay out as a result of your activity.
For the philanthropist player types, this is an ideal way to still log the miles, but also to feel like they are achieving it for the greater good of a cause. The key for this app is to appeal to people who are interested and possibly already actively taking part in sports which is known to have beneficial health factors for the individual involved, but then adds the feel good dimension of doing it for the greater cause on top. Social sharing and crowdsourcing are the key behavioural drivers, the app itself is effectively really simple. You choose your charity and start your activity, afterwards you share your activity and thank your sponsor.
I could see how this may be a great add on collaboration feature with other running or fitness tracking apps, which are more commonly used. For the time being the app is only supporting charities in the US, but I can see how this would also have great appeal in the UK, where if you look at any running event from small fun runs to big city marathons fundraising is the other sport on top of the chosen activity.
Having connected sponsors, which could be employers encouraging their staff to be active by giving sponsorship, is definitely the ultimate gift giving game element put into practice.
What an app like this shows is that it doesn’t have to be complex nor include a vast amount of game dynamics for it to be effective. If you are aware of European or UK equivalent of this application, by all means let me know.
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