Gaming to End Duchenne

What better way to plan a DIY fundraiser than with a built-in community? Patrick Denger wanted to do something to support PPMD’s mission, so he reached out to his community of gamers and raised close to $7,000 in one weekend!

They formed a team and used StreamLabs, in addition to PPMD’s DIY fundraising tools, to create a successful fundraiser quickly and easily. Patrick shares his advice and lessons learned:

Q: Tell us a little bit about your event and why you chose to do it.

A: We chose to do this event because we had recently started our own stream team on a site called Twitch. We all play video games and people watch our streams. We were trying to think of a charity we could raise money for kind of as a well to kick off our team. We thought about a bunch but decided it would make sense to do one that hits close to home, and that was PPMD since I have Duchenne and there’s also someone who watches our streams who also has Duchenne. How our event worked is we each streamed for 4 hours, we shared a save file of a Pokémon game and passed it on to each other and continue from where the previous person left off. I’m pretty proud that we were able to raise so much money in such a short amount of time!

Q: How did you fundraise?

A: We all had our own incentives and each raised money during our own streams. Some of us had smaller incentives such as putting a sticker on our body or nicknaming a Pokémon within the game.

Q: How did you adapt your event to make it COVID-safe?

A: Our event was completely online so we didn’t really have to adapt for COVID-19. Although we weren’t expecting as much support as we got because we figured money is a struggle right now, but people were still so generous.

Q: Is there anything you would do differently next time?

A: Now that we have a bigger team we would definitely make the 48 hours rather than just 24 hours. Also, we would add some more creative incentives. For the most part I think it went better than we expected, and there’s not a lot I would change.

Q: What is your advice for someone planning an event in 2021?

A: My advice to people planning an event in 2021 is to definitely give yourself a lot of time to plan. Also be prepared for people to not be able to give as much because of COVID-19. Doing events over a live stream is a pretty cool way of raising money. Obviously not everyone is a gamer on Twitch but there’s lot of stuff that can be done over a live stream!

CREATE YOUR OWN DIY EVENT

You too can join the fight to end Duchenne! Reach out to the PPMD team so we can help you create your personalized DIY virtual event for your community!

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