Peer to Peer: Provide an option to remove 1st/2nd3rd place icons.
in progress
Alex Coleman
As a site owner I feel that our fundraisers would perform better if there wasn't a competitive aspect to P2P campaigns. Give site owners the option to remove 1st/2nd3rd place icons would be helpful.
In conjunction with the above, sorting parameters for the "Leaderboard" would help. Examples include: random, alphabetically, date (ASC and DESC), and amount (ASC and DESC).
If anyone has any other concepts, please leave a comment so the GiveWP can assess them.
Rick Alday
in progress
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Anne Munro
I agree. It would be very helpful for our Humane Society walkathon site. It would enable potential pledge providers with a chance to "Meet the Walkers" without the more competitive display of the leaderboard feature.
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Chris Boles
I strongly endorse this. Making fundraising competitive is very demotivating for many of my fundraisers. In many cultural contexts, competition in fundraising is very distasteful.
Volunteers do their best and may raise less than others raise, but the last thing I want them to feel is that they are somehow inadequate or a bit of a fundraising failure. Leader boards, position badges, Gold Silver, Bronze medals, etc, may be appropriate in some cases but I can't think of any in my own particular field.
so I very much endorse this request to have an option in peer-to-peer fundraising that gives no hint of competition (or 'gaming' as I see it being described in GiveWP).
Ben Meredith
Chris Boles: Thanks for the additional context there. I'm trying to understand more fully what the benefit of Peer to Peer fundraising is for you and your organization. The "friendly competition" aspect of it is the main draw of creating fundraisers and teams in order to raise money for a cause. It's gamification of fundraising, and not only is it very popular, it's very effective. People like to win competitions.
I agree that you don't want to make the "losers" feel inadequate, but generally the folks signing up to raise money on behalf of an organization understand that the game is an "everybody wins" type of situation.
If you don't want to gamify the fundraising, then I'd recommend not using Peer to Peer Fundraising and just sticking to donation forms on the site. To remove the leaderboard or position badges or the team competition aspects of the tool would be to remove the reason for using the tool!
Perhaps I am just misunderstanding, though. What's the benefit of Peer to Peer beyond that gamification, to your organization?
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Chris Boles
Ben Meredith: The peer-to-peer plugin is attractive because it provides a simple way to allow a number of fundraisers to sign up for a single campaign using a single donation form, to which each can contribute and each can call upon their own circle of friends and family to take part. For them to be able to donate by way of their own personal contact is a good option, and for all fundraisers to use the same donation form is very helpful. But it would never have crossed our minds to make it competitive, even just in fun.
Not to get too pious, the bible story of the poor widow giving her last two coins, in contrast to the rich who could give a lot more, is a bit of a guide for us in terms of how we view what we are given.
Our context for this fundraiser is to raise funds to supply equipment and resources for a team of European medics and country-of-origin translators taking part in clinics in a particular overseas location. They will each pay their own way there, but will draw from a common pool of medical resources and equipment, and it's the provision of these common resources that is the focus of the fundraising. I won't mention the cultures and countries involved in this but what works in North America doesn't necessarily work elsewhere, and this is my concern with having no option to remove the competitive element of the fundraising. If it works for some great, but just be aware it's an alien concept for others. I'm just proposing that the developers give a choice to remove it, not to remove it for all. From what you say it appears to be attractive to many.
The expression 'gamification' in the context of fundraising was unfamiliar to me until setting this up and finding it used on one of the support pages. And now your suggestion that the whole point of peer-to-peer fundraising is friendly competition is something I need to ponder. It's true what they say that every day is a school day!