GivePenny connects fundraisers to Twitch
Howard Lake | 31 January 2017 | News
Users of digital fundraising platform GivePenny can now connect their fundraising pages to online gaming community Twitch. This will allow them to connect their gaming experiences to fundraising activities in new ways.
Twitch is one of the most popular PC and console online gaming communities, with 9.7 million daily active users. It is used to watch and discuss games live or via video on demand.
The first charity to take advantage of this new opportunity is paediatric palliative care charity Tŷ Hafan. Their supporters now have access to a range of new features designed to inspire gamers to raise money for the charity.
Live gaming for charity
Users keen to run a gaming-related fundraising activity can now stream their gaming action via their GivePenny page, which includes a chat window plus key statistics such as the number of hours streamed.
Longer is quite often better! Gaming marathons lasting 24 hours or more are popular amongst many players. Digital media entertainers Yogscast for example have run charity gaming months for the past four years. In December 2016 they raised over $2.5m for charities. $284,000 was raised on the first day and $1 million was raised in the first week.
Using the GivePenny milestone donation feature fundraisers will be able to collect sponsorship against specific personal gaming goals, helping to sustain and encourage their efforts.
Users can generate donations for their charity even after the live broadcast. Supporters will be able to play back gaming broadcasts and still make donations to the promoted charity.
Lee Clark, founder and CEO, at GivePenny said:
“Millions of pounds have been raised for charities around the world by the gaming community over the past few years, sometimes by cobbling together a combination of a streaming platform like Twitch, a social media website and payment merchant, like PayPal.
“We wanted to provide a more effective safe, secure and, most importantly, fun environment for gamers to raise money online”.Advertisement
The team at Tŷ Hafan were very keen to help them test and develop the new service.
Clark added:
“It will be exciting to help them try to inspire a new fundraising channel outside of traditional community and events-led fundraising methods.”
The new features are now available to all other charities who are registered on GivePenny.
Raise Your Game
A gaming themed appeal called Game Raiser: Raise Your Game for Tŷ Hafan is to be published on the GivePenny website. Work is underway to promote the appeal to existing supporters of the charity.
There will also be a new section of the site designed to celebrate all of the fundraising activities of gaming fundraisers in one place.
Sara Webber, Head of Marketing and Communications at Tŷ Hafan said:
“We’re very excited to launch this partnership with GivePenny as it will provide us with a new fundraising platform and give us increased access to new audiences”.
New record for Twitch
The launch by GivePenny coincides with Twitch breaking its own record for the largest number of people watching a Twitch livestream.
On Sunday ELeague’s channel attracted 1.026 million concurrent viewers during the live broadcast of the grand finals of the 10th Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major. It’s previous single-channel concurrent viewer record was 890,000.
https://twitter.com/Trancez0r/status/825790267454324736
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.