Royal Children's Hospital - Everest Virtual Challenge

The Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) is one of the world's great children's hospitals and is internationally recognized as a leading centre of pediatric treatment, teaching and research. The RCH is known for its award winning event, the Virtual Everest Climb, a walking challenge, where you walk to the virtual top of the world.

The Everest Virtual Challenge enlists teams of 15 people to take 10,000 steps a day over two weeks, covering the same distance together as climbing Mt Everest itself.  Launched in 2007 as a digital campaign, participants register online, and are sent pedometers.  Every day they enter their steps online through a custom built web interface, and watch their team progress along a map of the Everest climb.  Participants were encouraged to seek sponsorship for their climb through the website.

From 2007, when the Everest Virtual Challenge first launched, until 2009, RCH only had a custom-built interface for registration and entering steps. There were no peer-to-peer fundraising pages and there were many challenges such as ongoing website glitches, problems impacting on retention, participant & donor satisfaction, and weak fundraising return.

The original website allowed for donations to sponsor participants, but not full peer-to-peer, personalized web pages, and lacked the rich online experience possible in 2010.  It utilized basic social media technology with Facebook and Twitter links, but without high take up.  Despite being a digital campaign, most fundraising was done offline, and the registration interface regularly failed, leading to participant complaints, and a high annual attrition rate.

In 2009, the Foundation recognized the huge potential of digital communication and fundraising. They launched a new website utilizing interactive multimedia and social networking, integrated with Artez as their online peer-to-peer fundraising solution, and began to trial new digital fundraising interfaces designed with leading international agency, Homemade Digital.

Now with Artez's tools in place, they had three key goals for 2010: (1) Improve user experience, (2) add peer-to-peer fundraising and (3) raise $70,000.

With the help of Artez, the event was a success and raised $130,000 (original goal was $70,000). They had 216 Facebook App users and 198 iPhone users, which gave their supporters more choices than ever. The event brought in 1,100 unique visitors to the Brisbane Times scoreboard. They also achieved a channel shift - of 2009's $65,000, only $7,000 was donated online, but in 2010, almost 100% of funds were raised online.

Royal Children's Hospital - CLEM7

Clem 7 Tunnel Run Organizers had a number of key goals:

• Secure at least $50,000 in participant fundraising and donation by developing and implementing fundraising incentive programs and utilizing Artez' sophisticated peer-to-peer fundraising and registration system.

• Secure at least 2500 participants from the event and increase the donor database quality by focusing on an online recruitment strategy with Running/Exercise forums and providing a seamless participant/donor experience though Artez' customizable online registration/fundraising system

• Develop and test participant segmentation fundraising strategies by identifying key motivations of participants from previous events and trialing key messages and incentives to engage additional fundraising, attachment to cause or interest in ongoing event participation.

What is the result of an online incentive & recruitment strategy coupled with the right fundraising solution? The event sold out within three days of going live and raised $143,672, a staggering 144% increase over fundraising target! Over 4,900 participants registered and over 3,700 donors captured on database.