In this blog I hope to inspire others with a sales story. It will end up in medium tech stuff, so keep on reading.
It all started when I saw a customer of mine mentioning on LinkedIn that they were about to start a fundraising. The plan was to sell lights in a christmas tree at the market square. As I do most of the time is thinking: "How can I make support this project online? Maybe even transIate the fundraising to an online application?". We needed 3 things:
- It should be fun. Magical. The first impression should make you feel like a feel good movie. With something that makes you smile.
- It is a fundraising so donating should be easy.
- The investment should be reusable. First of all because the investment might be too high to justify this project. But second, it allows them to think of reallocating budgets.
First step: create a demo for the customer. I mean, my plan was not their plan. Yet. And they certainly did not allocate a budget for this. Yet.
So, digging through Envato Elements and DepositPhotos for the right images. This might take an hour or two but it really is worth your while. A lot of people are sold by the right image. But just a nice picture was not enough. So, I went to Codepen for cool stuff that would inspire me. A christmas tree build in CSS was my winner. Sure, it is a bit tacky but come on, it is Christmas!
The customer was sold. Not only based on the looks but also because I explained the opportunities for future fund raisings. These can all benefit from this single solution.
Than the requirements came in:
Of course being able to donate. But also to have a list of people who donated. And the number of lights sold, should be updated after purchase.
Second step: creating the fund raising website where donations can be made. In the most efficient way as most charities do not tend to have major funding for marketing/communication. And flexible enough as the project had many stake holders, so you can bet wishes will shift along the line.
Weapons of choice: 2SXC for easy content editing, ActionForm for donating (connecting to a payment provider is an action on submit), Action Grid to show who donated (the latest hotfix enables the grid to descend the listing so the list looks updated every time) and MyTokens to get the values in the banner next to the Christmas tree. And NVquicktheme for the skin.
The result: A very happy customer. And the website itself: https://www.haarlemgeeftlicht.nl/
And as mentioneda platform where the can easily start new fund raisings. The logic is already in place and they can now sell tickets for dinner parties, valentine, easter etc. Just add another action (create PDF for tickets, for instance) and you're good to go. And for me: I now have a very good template for other charities.
Special thanks:
As always: I did not do this alone. I had skinning help from Timo Breumelhof and to get the most out of the DNN Sharp suite, I had Hans Lenting who worked his magic.
I hope this example inspired you to:
- Pitch you ideas even before the customer knows he/she wants it
- Create your own donation platform to get DNN on that market and your portfolio filled