The Undead Charity Fundraiser 2022 is over!

As you may be able to tell by the date (and the title of this post), the fundraiser that I did throughout the month of June is over now. Yup, it’s the 1st of July today, meaning that Pride month is over… but that doesn’t mean that queer issues are over as well. No, while companies may stop having pride logos up on their social media profiles and whatnot, it’s still important to talk about topics relevant to queer and questioning people… but today I wanted to talk about the fundraiser I did for Charity.

Frankly, it’s been great this time around. We reached our initial goal of 100$, meaning that I will eventually play through Hollow Knight… and by that, I mean that I’ll do a 112% playthrough, possibly from a fresh save file as it’s been a solid few months since I last played Hollow Knight. The stretch goals I did initially are probably great for a future event. Pride Month is just a great incentive to support the Trevor Project. In the future, I want to support a different charity… and if I don’t find anything that I’m 100% sure about, it will be the Trevor Project again (more on that later). Anyhow, we had some very generous donations throughout June and it went relatively smoothly. I set up incentives along the lines of quick doodles and emote drawings (that I’ll have to actually work on in the near future if exam-study-sessions permit it) and it’s been quite successful. In contrast to our previous charity fundraisers, I didn’t actually do any giveaways – mostly because I just didn’t have the viewer base for it and when I was announcing it, nobody wanted to participate… which in itself, is fine. I have regulars in my community that don’t play games themselves but they do watch streams, which is perfectly fine.

Anyhow, 100$ is amazing. A fifth of that was donated by me to kickstart the event at the beginning of June but I had some very generous donations throughout June that have been more than amazing. I will most likely still gift a game or two to the few donors – although I’ll have to see if they’ll accept it or not. Either way, I’m looking forward to doing another fundraiser in the future.

As for the fundraiser itself, I’ll talk about polls later on but I wanted to talk about the Trevor Project again. The Trevor Project is amazing. They’re a wonderful charity organisation that do a lot in terms of Suicide Prevention and Crisis Intervention – especially through their 24/7 hotline/chat/text service as well as educational and research projects that work really well. As I mentioned before, there are a lot of ways to screw things over… but there are a lot of ways to save a life and I believe that The Trevor Project does an amazing job at that. If you wanna check out the charity organisation for yourself, you can do so over here. The fundraiser I was hosting at the moment may be over but you can still donate to them year-round. Queer-Topics aren’t just a Pride Month exclusive, after all!

As for the extension/website I used to host the fundraiser, I used Tiltify which is a wonderful website that works as the “middle-man” between your stream/community and the charity organisation of your choice. You can set up campaigns of your own over there and it’s honestly an amazing tool to use. If you’re a content creator and if you wanna host a charity fundraiser of your own, you can check out Tiltify over here. I was able to set up polls, incentives/rewards, as well as alerts using Tiltify’s setting and most of them worked incredibly well for my stream. I highly recommend checking them out! As for the money, every donation goes directly to the charity org (as their receipt will say), meaning that you don’t have to worry about trust or whatever. It’s honestly quite incredibly and removes a lot of hurdles from you as a streamer.

And well, I did host two “polls”, actually, meaning that people were able to attribute their money to a specific choice. In this case, I did one poll on what game to continue/finish. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice will be the next game to stream once my internet issues are resolved. I’ll try to get that sorted out once everything’s ironed out… and then we’ll finally play through that. On top of that, I also wanted to do a “Nutzlocke” for the first time, ever, but in Gen 1, meaning that I had the choice between “Leaf Green” or “Fire Red” up for a vote. In this case, “Leaf Green” won and we’ll do a Nutzlocke of that first with the top donor being able to name our starter Pokémon. I’m looking forward to that!

Overall, it’s been a fun month to stream games. We played through Life is Strange 1 and tried to play Tacoma but I sadly ended up not being able to play through it all. I’m looking forward to tackling those games in the future, possibly, but it all really depends on time and motivation, for the most part.

I was incredibly excited about this event and for the next time, I have learned a few lessons. For starters, I know that setting up a “stretch goal” is silly if you haven’t made the actual goal yet. If you set up a different goal in Tiltify, you’ll end up increasing the Goal overall, which isn’t too great. In my case, I had a goal at 100$ (aka the actual goal) for Hollow Knight 112%, followed by a goal at 150$ for a “Baby-Minigame” Stream where I play said minigame in The Stanley Parable for four hours… followed by another goal at 200$ in the form of a playthrough of DMC2 (very bad game btw) but this time on Hard Mode and as Lucia… The actual campaign looks like we reached the halfway mark but I never intended to go over 100$ and just figured that it may work out if people wanted to make it work. Personally, I hate the idea of having to play DMC2 again so I’m somewhat relieved that we don’t have to do that… Next time, however, I’ll make sure to set it up correctly. At the same time, I know that I’ll need to work on the event a lot earlier with more time to prepare a graphic of sorts. I will also need to work on the incentives to donate. Giveaways work quite well for that. “Reaching a specific goal triggers a Giveaway” sounds great in theory, so next time I’ll do that better.

Anyhow, with lessons learned and a goal well-achieved, I’m looking forward to the future. It’s been amazing that we hit a goal in the first place and if you wanna donate to The Trevor Project even after Pride Month (only if you have a few bucks to spare), feel free to do so over here on the website!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.