Alongside the Tokyo 2021 Paralympic Games, Paralympics Australia ran our first ever Virtual Seats campaign, raising $2.3million and generating 40,000 new donors – the most successful fundraising campaign we’d ever run. In 2024, alongside the Paris Games, we ‘levelled up’ the Virtual seats campaign creating an exciting, interactive ‘Virtual stadium experience’ where donors could get exclusive, behind the scenes content, learn more about athletes and Para-sports, engage with various strategic upsell opportunities and with daily updates, we gave donors a reason to come back, prompting them to give again.

With our amazing agency SLIK, the campaign was developed with ‘accessibility’ at the forefront, to not just align with our brand and values, but set a benchmark in accessibility. There’s a common misconception that accessibility would stifle creativity, but we found it did the opposite, inspiring us to ask “how can we do this differently?” Engaging a panel of Paralympians with various impairments for real testing and feedback on the site’s accessibility throughout the process, we learned a LOT about what being truly accessible means. Our intention – for our learnings to set a new standard of accessibility to be applied across all fundraising.

Navigating various challenges, we threw everything at this once-in-a-four-year opportunity to maximise revenue and new donors acquired and achieved great results.