Together we raised $60 for NorCal Resist through Happy Home Fundraiser! :O) I’m very appreciative to those who donated and shared the fundraiser posts. The need for mutual aid support continues and every bit helps. It also really helps me personally to see the collective desire to support the mutual aid organizations that support so many communities.
When I set out to do the fundraiser, I wanted to make sure it was something that I could deliver on. Making Animal Crossing: Happy Home designs was something that I could do in my spare time regardless if it was an odd hour.
After getting over an initial hesitation on whether or not this was something people would want in exchange for a donation, I made a plan to get the word out, which I think could use some improvements. Some thoughts about the process:
Reach and Exposure
I decided to try using Instagram to promote this fundraiser. After I made my first post, I realized that I completely forgot to use hashtags which I think would have been helpful to include. I also think it might help to time the fundraiser with something like Giving Tuesday or another coordinated time to promote fundraisers.
Communication
In my future attempts, I need to be much more succinct. I put lots of text and rules into the initial post which can be overwhelming and create a barrier. So I’ll work on getting a better balance with that.
Sharing the Designs
While I can use social media, I wanted to share the designs on my website.
(This is big tangent regarding GIFs and doesn’t have to do with the fundraiser process. Please feel free to skip if it’s not of interest!)
At first, I wanted to share a 360 degree view of each of the rooms in the design via a video clip. I discovered that WordPress transitioned to needing a subscription to post an uploaded video. In trying to avoid using YouTube to embed video, I looked into making a GIF (which I haven’t done until now, haha!)
It’s a weird goal, but I wanted to make the GIF without the use of a third party app. That led me to see that I can make GIFs via Shortcuts which comes with iOS. This Reddit post informed that I can make a GIF that outputs the original ratio of the video.
That’s really cool, but then I remembered that most GIFs are huge in regard to file size, which isn’t great for a website. There are lots of third party softwares that compress GIF files, but the result is unfortunately low-quality and the file size remains pretty big. So I just decided to share as still images from multiple angles.
Overall, I think the important thing is to try, identify where improvements can be made, then try better the next time. Thank you for reading! :O)