Charity on Twitch

Twitch streamers are exceptionally good at fundraising through their streams, with the amount of money raised growing each year. Of the $200m raised for charity since 2011, $110m was raised in 2020 alone. Over half of Twitch Partners say they raised money for a charity on Twitch in 2020.

These numbers are even more impressive when considering the effort it takes to run a campaign. Streamers have had to rely on third party platforms to manage and track the donations. This meant the donation experience for viewers was often sub-par, and streamers had to personally deal with legal and tax liabilities from their campaigns. Our team at Twitch believed a first party experience could reduce friction for all aspects of a charity campaign, and greatly increase the number of viewers who would donate to a cause.

Charity was one of the larger projects I oversaw as a manager, and one of the most rewarding. The majority of my time on the Commerce team was spent on revenue generation products, so being able to shift focus to something else our community valued was an exciting opportunity to stretch myself, and my team.

Why This Project?

Design took the lead on research and early ideation for this project. One of my objectives for the Commerce Design team for 2021 was to take a lead role in early stage product ideation. This project was a perfect example case for this, as the strong desire to really improve the customer experience of charitable giving gave us a great starting point. This project became a key example of the impact strong collaboration across product, design and engineering could have in the early stages of product development.

With this project I also saw a great growth opportunity for a designer on my team (Sarah) to continue her career development. She would be taking the lead on a complex project with multiple stakeholders, and be stretching her design skills with a larger scope of work. Charity required designing for two different user types - the creators setting up the campaign, and the viewers who would donate. The Creator and Viewer experiences on Twitch have their own styles and patterns to follow, and required an understanding of how Charity would fit into the wider user experience on the site. Sarah excelled at each stage, and this project became the primary example used to promote her to the next seniority level.

Customer Opportunities

Charity streams are unique, because they’re events where the creator is discouraging their community from supporting the channel, and instead asking them to support a cause they’re passionate about. We knew Twitch viewers want to help streamers achieve their goals. Especially because the causes were often ones that streamer has a personal connection to. Spending money on Twitch already fulfills a need of connecting with and supporting others; charitable giving was naturally aligned with that motivation.

The primary customer improvements we could make by moving the experience onto Twitch were:

• Streamers could track donations on platform
• Transparency to help lowering harassment
• Minimize legal and tax liability
  
• Donate to charity without leaving Twitch
• Transparency that donations end up in the right pockets

Research & Design Sprint

To begin this project Sarah initiated a series of 10 interviews with Twitch users. This research helped validate our assumptions while also adding additional context and deepening of understanding to the problems creators were facing. A number of the more specific customer opportunities outlined above came directly from this research phase.

After the research phase we took these learnings into a design sprint, which Sarah ran for a small group of product, design and engineering stakeholders. We found these 3-4 day sprints were a great way to quickly brainstorm ideas, create prototypes, and get customer feedback. They also gave Design a chance to lead early product ideation conversations, advocate for customer value, and build strong cross-team collaboration on the project. All excellent ways to demonstrate the impact design could have on product development.

Early Ideation

Two concepts came out of the design sprint, the first utilizing gifted channel subscriptions as a way to directly donate. The idea was to help the creator raising money for a cause, while still generating revenue and growing their community. However the experience felt confusing (especially for new users), and had the potential to increase creator harassment if it appeared self-serving.

The second solution was a far more traditional donation experience. We focused on making the easiest, most straightforward way for viewers to directly donate to the fundraiser on Twitch. Our goal was to ensure we created a very simple and clear donation flow that keeps viewers on Twitch during a charity stream. This would likely increase donations given, and we would also be able to reduce or remove all liability and tax challenges for the creator and clearly shows the creator is not doing this to get subs or increase their following, lowering the risk of harassment.

The Creator Experience

Twitch streamers would be introduced to Charity through a new menu item in their Streamer Dashboard. We believed the product was important enough to deserve it’s own top-level item in the navigation, making it much easier to discover for our streamers.

The landing page for charity went through a number of revisions to find the right balance of information. We were able to take learnings from the Twitch homepage on how to best structure the experience and onboard users. Having a set of spotlighted charities would help creators understand the intention of the product, and create a simple entry point to begin a campaign if they didn’t have a specific charity in mind.

Below this row was an overview of how a fundraising campaign would work. This included an example of how the campaign would appear to viewers on the channel. We wanted to help bridge the gap between the two experiences (Viewer and Streamer), and give context to streamers who would ultimately be talking about the campaign with their community. The other key goal of this section was to show the value of running a campaign directly on Twitch, that our product made it far simpler for their viewers to donate.

Once the streamer has chosen a charity they are taken to the Campaign Set-up experience. The top section gives additional detail on the charity, to make sure they had picked their intended fundraising target. Below that was an option to set a specific goal for their campaign. The copy above the form field helped to convey the value a target could have, giving the community something to work towards.

Lastly we show a final preview of the modal viewers would see, now with specific data related to the options chosen prior. We also highlight that we change the Subscription button on the page to ‘Donate’, with the campaign taking the focus from regular subscriptions. We wanted to make it clear the impact activating a campaign would have on a streamer’s own revenue while a campaign ran.

Campaign Management

After creating a campaign it was added to the ‘My Fundraisers’ tab. From the user research we knew streamers preferred to assemble their campaign plan separately from running it. This page allowed us to create two discrete phases, requiring the campaign to be activated instead of happening automatically.

When the creator was ready to go they would click ‘Start Campaign’. a final modal appears confirming their ready to proceed. Early designs were very dry, a little too focused on the seriousness of beginning the campaign. I asked Sarah to add a little more positivity and visual flair to the design to make sure it felt positive and exciting to continue.

Once the campaign was live streamers would be able to track progress during a stream from their dashboard in the same way they would any other Commerce product. No more managing multiple tabs and sites to track progress.

The Viewer Experience

When a viewer joined a stream for the first time after a campaign was started they would be greeted by a small overlay indicating a fundraising campaign was active. The notice was positioned next to the new Donate button, drawing the user to the new action on the page. The other change made to the channel page was swapping out the traditional subscription leaderboard at the top of the Stream Chat column for a campaign progress tracker.

With the donation experience we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We took inspiration from other fundraising platforms and went with a series of set amounts above a custom donation field. The focus was defaulted to $5, the amount we knew was the average chosen from user research. This meant a viewer could donate in just a couple of clicks.

Clicking Donate would open the donation overlay. The design was designed to feel familial with the existing subscription experience. We wanted to leverage existing patterns that we knew users were familiar with to help orientate themselves. They would still be able to use the tabs at the top to switch over to the regular subscription experience, but we wanted to priortise the campaign as the creator had explicitly chosen to prioritise it themselves.

Once they had chosen the amount the viewer would move into the checkout experience. The other key reason for partnering with PayPal was being able to offer checkout via PayPal (though a viewer could also still choose to use a credit card). PayPal was a hugely popular payment provider for our commerce products so we knew a large segment of our users wouldn’t need to enter in payment information, continuing to simplify the experience as much as possible.

After donating we used design patterns from our subscriptions product to announce the donations in the chat column. We were also able to send out the action via our API to the alert tools creators used to share alerts directly in their stream. This made sure creators wouldn’t miss a donation and could both thank the donor, and use it as another opportunity to spotlight the campaign.

Results

In Q3 of 22 we raised $245,000 for charity from over 10k donors and 3k creators. That includes 40k for the Trevor Project, 40k for St. Jude's. On a daily basis, 65-70% of US-based charity-tagged streams had a 1P charity campaign enabled (vs. 25% Q3 goal). We've increased the number of Affiliate and Partner channels streaming charity by +300% on a daily basis.

Creators who used Twitch Charity praised its ease of use in setting up a fundraiser; many said it was the easiest fundraiser they’ve ever created. Compared to prior fundraising experiences, creators say they are facing less harassment from chat around charity legitimacy and money flow. The majority of creators using the product have small/medium size audiences. We’ve seen little usage so far from our biggest streamers.

‍“It's been the easiest fundraiser I've ever done on my channel. Something that's so convenient, I don't have to constantly shoutout a link. It’s right there, no one has to go looking for it. I don't have to say anything and donations will come in.” - DAMZL