Sweat with Pride is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most vibrant fundraising campaigns, encouraging thousands of Kiwis to move their bodies while raising money for Burnett Foundation and rainbow communities.
For 2025, we redeveloped the platform from the ground up — shifting from Raisely (see our previous Sweat with Pride project) to Funraisin, which unlocked a whole new level of creativity, data-driven features, and supporter engagement.
The challenge
After years of growth, Sweat with Pride had outgrown the limitations of Raisely. Fundraisers were asking for more ways to personalise their pages, connect with supporters, and track progress in real time. At the same time, the campaign team needed better tools to reduce admin workload and deliver more refined and personalised communications.
What we delivered
The move to Funraisin allowed us to design and build a truly engaging platform, leveraging Funraisin’s solid data platform and API access to take Sweat with Pride to the next level. Highlights are as follows:
Raise the Rainbow
We created a dynamic fundraising progress feature where colours of the pride flag animate as a rainbow, unlocking new levels as participants raise more funds. This gamified experience creates a clear sense of achievement and drives motivation to reach the next milestone. Funraisin’s data structure allows us to pull any number of data points to decide what level to show each fundraiser when they visit their dashboard, and ensures that fundraisers don’t see the same thing twice.
Raise the Rainbow: This animated, gamified feature motivates fundraisers to raise more money for the cause
Participant blogs
Research shows that people are more likely to donate to their friends and co-workers if they can see the effort that has been put in. Every fundraiser now has their own blog space to post updates, stories, and images for supporters, making each fundraising journey more personal and shareable. Fundraisers are added to an email journey that encourages them to share if they haven’t yet done so.
Teams and leaderboards to encourage competition
Funraisin’s data structure and database access allowed us to split teams into three different types — Friends/Whānau, Workplaces, and Schools — with each team type given its own page template that showcases the team or brand. Participants can join these teams and compete via live leaderboards, adding a friendly competitive edge.
Campaign Monitor integration
The Funraisin platform integrates natively with Campaign Monitor, sending data through every hour or two. We took this a step further and implemented dozens of custom fields, allowing for hyper-personalised supporter journeys with tailored messaging and timely updates. Our “set and forget” email journeys required very little in the way of ongoing admin for the Burnett Foundation team, as the custom data points took care of all segmentation and “to show or not to show” content on an individual recipient basis.
Zapier + AI reward management
We built a custom Zapier integration that tracks reward (think merch) redemptions and uses AI to intelligently group them for consolidated postage. This not only saves the Burnett Foundation team significant admin time but also reduces postage costs — obviously an important efficiency for a charity. Fundraisers are also kept in the loop with the status of their reward redemptions, via their dashboard and automated shipping emails.
Sweat with Pride 2025 achieved remarkable success by raising $884,251 (at the time of writing) for Rainbow communities!
Project highlights
- Interactive peer-to-peer fundraising challenge
- Migration from Raisely to Funraisin for greater flexibility
- Raise the Rainbow — animated, gamified fundraising progress
- Personal blogs for participants
- Team functionality and live leaderboards
- Campaign Monitor integration for automated, segmented supporter journeys
- Zapier + AI reward grouping for cost-efficient fulfilment
- Enhanced admin dashboards and support tools
- Fully responsive design with bold rainbow-driven visuals
- Visit Sweat with Pride
Expertise we provide for Sweat with Pride
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