Announcing Our 2021 Hackathon FINALISTS

We know how valuable Hackathon is to the growth of Dance Marathon. It was the winning idea from your peers that launched the journey to the new DonorDrive Charity Fundraising app! Dance Marathoners truly are the most passionate, creative, and innovative minds out there and we are thrilled to announce the 2021 Hackathon top four finalists!

These incredible finalists will present their “big ideas” to revolutionize Dance Marathon in a Shark Tank style presentation, showcased for Dance Marathon attendees and a judging panel of industry experts on August 19, 2021.

The top four finalists advanced to the last round after being reviewed by the following subject matter experts.

• Daniel Almanza Academic Learning Specialist, University of Illinois
• Courtney Buzan Assistant Director for Campus Programs, University of South Carolina
• Suraj Hinduja Managing Director, RTRX
• Stephanie Underwood Senior QA Analyst, DonorDrive

We are excited to announce our final four ideas:

Read more about each idea at the links below:

Stewardship Platform Hub

Stewardship is an essential part of one’s campaign for change. Year after year we try to find ways to make this easier by focusing on improving the participants’ end of things. We overlook the very reason we focus on stewardship, the donors.  Our vision is to create a platform on which donors have the streamlined ability to access all things Dance Marathon. Donors will with ease be able to see updates of their miracle makers, access important documents such as donation receipts, and much more.

RebelTHON Rewards – Monthly Subscription Service

To appeal to participants, our idea is to to implement a subscription service of $20 a month that features benefits such as the entire subscription “fee” donated to their personal donor drive page, free admission to any special events, a small monthly freebie of whatever we decide to sell while tabling, and several entries into a monthly raffle for donated gift cards from local businesses. This would help participants meet their dancer minimum, decrease $0 participants, and increase participant engagement.

Forecasting Tool for Data Driven Decision Making

As our Children’s Miracle Network Dance Marathons continue to grow, it is important that our community reevaluates our approaches to strategy and operations. One important piece of this puzzle for the University of Oklahoma’s OUDM has been utilizing data to drive our decision making. Using this data-driven approach, OUDM’s most valued input to success has been its automated forecasting tool. Quantitative forecasting allows our executive team to understand the trend that online donations should be following. Additionally, there are essentially three forecasting models that could be integrated into this tool to provide a wider and more accurate scope for fundraising: yearly (total fiscal year revenue), monthly (revenue across each month), and daily (revenue within each push day).

Donor Drive Stewardship

DonorDrive is used year-round by Dance Marathon fundraisers and with the ability to personalize your fundraising page and share your story to potential donors, improvements can be made when it comes to donor engagement.

For both one-time and recurring donors, the experience on DonorDrive is bound to glancing over a fundraiser’s story and making a quick donation. By prolonging the donor experience to the time they make their first donation all the way until the end of that year’s Dance Marathon, donors have the opportunity to connect more to the cause and be part of the fundraiser’s year-long journey.

This by no means creates an excessive commitment for donors to constantly be checking a fundraiser’s DonorDrive page. The increased donor engagement would be driven by the Dance Marathon fundraiser through four new and improved features on DonorDrive: Fundraising Updates, Donation Comments, Improved Thank You Messages, and Program Updates.

Congratulations to our final four! Watch out for more information coming your way this Monday about your next steps, and the subject matter expert you’ll get to work with to refine your idea. We can’t wait to see your presentations next month!

All Hackathon Terms and Conditions can be reviewed here.