RSPCA Million Paws Walk 2019

About Million Paws Walk 2019

Since 1994, RSPCAs across Australia have been running the annual Million Paws Walk (Million Paws Walk) fundraising event to show support for the animals of Australia, combat animal cruelty and bring people together for an amazing cause. Over the years, RSPCA has used a variety of off and online tools for promotion, to drive ticket sales and enable peer-to-peer fundraising. 

We have worked with the RSPCA on the Million Paws Walk campaign as their digital partner for the past three years. Our main objective each year is to provide their event and peer-to-peer fundraising platform and continually tailor each years’ approach to be more successful and ensure a great user experience. RSPCA’s previous efforts using off the shelf, third-party products lacked the flexibility necessary for large scale customization and integration necessary for ensuring the scalability and viability of this iconic nationwide event. Hence why we were called to build RSPCA’s very own fundraising and peer to peer platform to host this event.

See how far today’s Million Paws Walk website has come by taking a look at our case study from Million Paws Walk 2017’s campaign.

What we did

In order to build upon last year’s work and meet the needs of this year’s goals, we focused heavily on improving user experience (UX) and the performance of the ‘Find a Friend’ functionality;  updated the fundraiser profile page; and added advanced tracking.

Finding Friends

Looking more closely at the efforts by the team to improve the UX and performance of the ‘Find a Friend’ functionality, there were several significant changes made. Firstly, it was determined that the naming of ‘Find a Friend’ should be reworded to ‘Donate to a Friend’ to be more inline with the intended action of the user. Next, a link was added to the header of all pages to enable easy access for people who just wanted to donate directly to a specific friend/family/colleague’s fundraising page. The search functionality itself allowed users to search the campaign site for both individual fundraiser page and team fundraiser pages. A separate donation button was also added under the search functionality in the event that a user simply wanted to donate to the RSPCA and not a specific fundraiser or team. All these adjustments to the ‘Find a Friend’ functionality significantly improved the overall experience for donors.

Changes to the Fundraiser Profile Page

For this campaign it was important that all pages were optimised for the conversion of key actions such as buying tickets, fundraiser registrations and making donations are key actions for any fundraising campaign. The purpose of optimising the fundraiser profile page was to increase engagement with fundraisers throughout the campaign. Instead of having a standard fundraising page, fundraisers had options to personalise their page, allowing them the ability to shift the focus of the page onto their animals, by making their animal’s photos and names the focus of their page. 

These changes to the Fundraiser Profile page also included optimisation for page sharing, with pre-written messages and preset images. This allowed for each fundraiser to have more polished pages to source support for the cause. The page sharing functionality was a fun way for fundraisers to share and ‘show’ their fundraising efforts via social media but also to raise awareness of this event and reach out to more supporters.

Advanced tracking

Setting up advanced tracking across the bespoke platform was a key focus of the 2019 campaign efforts, in order to see how users interacted with the platform and the event. This works was done so RSPCA could see how people interacted with the platform, the event & the overall campaign from how they fundraise to how they donate to how they register for the event. We were able to generate fundraiser and registration information and analyse all users’ behaviour whilst on the platform.

In addition to easily tracking what type of payment methods were more commonly used, or noting donation sizes in relation to the amounts on the anchor of the giving handles, there were quite a few significant findings. As a result of the tracking, some key information was noted:

• A majority of activity (donations and ticket revenue) occurred towards the end of the campaign, informing RSPCA that more marketing is required to push traffic to the platform, but also a review of the length of the campaign could lead to reduced costs.
• Uploading a profile photo showed a positive increase in average amount raised, indicating that modify the fundraisers profile page was highly effective, as those fundraisers who uploaded a profile photo were more engaged with the campaign and raised more on average.
• The tracking consolidated each of the member states’ marketing strategy in terms of when and where; and what worked and what didn’t. This gave each state valuable insight on what to do for next year’s campaign because it offered comparisons between pre-registration ticket revenues, registered fundraisers from each state as well as total & average amounts raised.

The Results

This campaign is always a fun day out for families and their dogs! Not only is this campaign a great way to raise awareness in the fight against animal cruelty, but it is great fun for the teams involved. The 2019 Million Paws Walk campaign raised  $1.9M for RSPCA’s across Australia to help fight animal cruelty. 

Wrapping Up

RSPCA’s Million Paws Walk is a vital event in their annual brand awareness and fundraising strategy. Ensuring that the fun and excitement of the event is intertwined with the fundraiser’s ability to buy tickets and build an engaging fundraising page continues to be a focus of the campaign. Each year, we gain more insight into donors engagement with the platform and the event – especially this year with the advanced analytics set up on the platform, which will help inform next year’s strategy. We are very proud of our continued partnership with the RSPCA and our team is looking forward to the 2020 campaign where we will build new features and optimise the campaign to ensure that the Million Paws Walk campaign can maximise its fundraising efforts and attract more ticket registrations.