Crisis Square Mile Run launch

Social campaign platform to support effective fundraising – integrated with Virgin Money.

We have just lauched a new social site for Crisis’ annual Square Mile Run, which will be on 7-8 June this year. The site is designed to support runners in their fundraising, and encourage them to aim to raise a target £200.

Over the last few years the event has continued to be popular with runners, but the average amount of money they have been raising has significantly decreased. Reversing this trend is the primary reason for the site.

Our solution integrates with Virgin Money Giving to automatically display the amount raised by each fundraiser on a goal chart, so visitors can see how much each runner has raised and who has reached their goal. It also displays the total amount raised, in brings in social media features to support viral marketing for the event.

Virgin Money Giving does not provide an API, so to accomplish this Loft’s team worked with their team to develop a page scraping tool. This automatically scans Virgin Money giving profile pages in the background to extract the information required for the site, and saves it in a local database to ensure everything runs quickly.

This site is the latest in a series of projects with have been working on with Crisis over the last few years. It forms part of our overall digital strategy for the organisation, which is designed to continually increase online engagement by volunteers, fundraisers and campaigners.

Head over to squaremile.crisis.org.uk, take a look, and why not run or donate to this valuable cause?