Gamification for Nonprofits

Gamification as a medium is uniquely capable of helping users understand the context and extent of complex issues. By making content playable, and deliberately appealing to a user’s hunger for competition, challenge and discovery, gamified communications can maximise user engagement.

Through long form games, users are more immersed in your content, allowing you to broaden their understanding of issues that might be challenging to adequately explain in an article or video. This offers great utility to charities, NGOs, and government departments trying to engage demographics in challenging subjects.

Multiple generations have now grown up playing video games, and alongside the rise of social media, this has changed the way people absorb information. Younger generations are less likely to read a pamphlet or talk to a street fundraiser.

To reach younger audiences, interactivity, faster feedback cycles, and being shareable across social media are key. Gamification delivers in all three areas, making it a necessary part of any nonprofit organisation’s audience rejuvenation strategy. It can also instantly reposition your organisation, be that a charity or an NGO, as being more current and innovative.

Two huge levers gamification pulls on are the innate human desires for discovery and social interaction. These are also the pillars upon which successful community engagement projects are built.

Games can easily be made and distributed to communities to help them better understand and engage with local issues. The content can be customised to advise on best practices in specific scenarios, such as an upcoming health crisis. Including features such as leaderboards and the option to share results on social media leverages friendly competition to maximise individual engagement within the community.

Gamifying donations involves making donating more fun, more engaging, and encouraging donors to make it a long term habit. You could create exclusive, playable games to distribute to donors on your email lists which not only educate them on exactly how their donations are spent, but also give opportunities to win prizes. What format this takes would depend on exactly what your charity or NGO’s aims with donations are, but it can be thought of as an altruistic sibling of a retailer’s loyalty programme.

The keys are delivering fun experiences, showing how their donations are making a difference, and encouraging long-term commitment to your cause.

Gamification can be used to maximise user engagement to achieve any number of objectives, but as a byproduct, all modern gamification experiences created on Drimify are collecting data. Whether your organisation is using gamification to generate leads, or using longer form, multi-level gamification experiences to communicate complex ideas, you can break down user behaviour at every stage to see how effectively you’re communicating with your audience. This can massively enrich your overall data sets from other sources.