WaterAid's click-to-give site hits target 45 days early
Howard Lake | 8 July 2004 | News
Aquaplastics.org, the click-to-give online fundraising site for WaterAid, has reached its target 45 days ahead of schedule, raising ‚€150,000 for the charity.
The click-to-give campaign encouraged the public to click once a day on the aquaplastics.org Web site in order to help raise funds for WaterAid. For every click European plastics industry body the Association of Plastics Manufacturers in Europe (APME) agreed to donate 10 cents.
For the second year running Ellipsis Media was appointed to design, build and maintain the site. Tink Taylor, New Business Director at Ellipsis, explained: “The international site, launched in April 2004 in six countries was set to run for three months with the aim of achieving 1.5 million clicks and in the process raising ‚€150,000 to support WaterAid’s work.” The site reached its target faster than last year’s.
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The success of this year’s site can be attributed to a number of new and improved features designed to heighten interest and ensure that visitors returned on a daily basis. These included the introduction of an educational daily quiz that, if completed correctly, generated a bonus click for the participant. The quiz was not only fun for the participants but also allowed WaterAid and APME to communicate important messages, facts and figures in an interesting way.
Emily Boyd-Carpenter, Corporate Fundraising Manager at WaterAid explained: “Ellipsis used a content management system called dotEditor® which allowed Aquaplastics to monitor where the clicks originated from. It was fantastic to see that so many of the clicks were as a result of the quiz and it was undoubtedly a factor in the target being reached so quickly.”
Another key factor was the international viral marketing campaign used to launch and raise the profile of the site. The viral campaign was implemented using Ellipsis’ dotMailer® and involved e-mailing a database of 50,000 people. This database was built by dotMailer following the 2003 ‘click-to-give’ campaign where many of WaterAid’s 2003 fund-raisers had opted in to receive further e-mails. DotMailer provided them with details of the 2004 campaign in a graphical HTML e-mail.
WaterAid were then able to monitor the responses to the e-mail using the dotMailer’s reporting tools. This allowed them to see exactly how many people were prompted to visit the site after viewing the launch e-mail.
Emily explained: “The view and forward rate of the viral marketing was outstanding, especially from those supporters who signed up to our daily reminder feature that automatically emailed those who opted in.”
A major issue which could have had a negative impact on the success of the campaign was that of ‘do-gooders’ trying to override the site’s complex software by implementing automated clicking programmes and generating fraudulent clicks. Ellipsis was well aware of this potential issue and devised new anti-clicking detection software that automatically detected and then discounted fraudulent clicks.
The content management system, dotEditor, also provided assistance in detecting the fraudulent clickers, via its real-time reporting tool. Users that were hammering the server, attempting to try and crack the code were soon spotted in the real-time click chart reports and subsequently blocked. These users soon gave up and accepted defeat. Ellipsis said that the anti-clicking detection software combined with dotEditor “proved to be extremely successful in beating off the ‘hackers’ whilst not preventing the genuine fundraisers from donating.”
Tink Taylor added: “A key to the site’s success in establishing and maintaining donator’s interest was communication. Each and every visitor was kept constantly updated on the total and amount raised on a daily basis, subsequently our visitors recognised that they played an effective and essential role in raising funds for the project. Ellipsis Media would like to thank each and every person that assisted in helping www.aquaplastics.org.uk reach its target in such a short time and watch this space for news on www.aquaplastics.org.uk 2005.”
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.