WOW. Well done Star Trek Online!
Last Thursday, Cryptic threw it’s support behind Chase Masterson’s Pop Hero Coalition with a special promotion to raise much-needed funds for the charity. The plan was to sell a number of T1 and T2 ships at the $1 level, and a bonus T6 Ship pack for the first 2500 players who purchased $10 or more. If the promotion reached the $25K level, then everyone who participated would also receive a Mirror Leeta holographic bridge officer.
What started out as a decent target goal of $25,000 dollars quickly ballooned into a short extension of the charity event and doubling the revenue to over 54,000 dollars USD!
To call this promotion a success would be an understatement. While I don’t have insight into the projections, reaching the 25K goal was likely thought as a best-case scenario. Ultimately this promotion helped raise over 35,000 dollars for Chases’ charity which focuses on an anti-bullying agenda. Approximately 70 cents out of every dollar raised reaches it’s intended target, a percentage that while decried by some in the community is actually quite good when compared to other non-profits.
The original promotion can be seen here. It is now closed.
The success of the promotion was one part serendipity in terms of timing with the Admiralty system and the other being the generosity of Star Trek fans in general. What really surprised me was the number of unique purchases – my guesstimate of over 4600 – in just a few short hours. If anyone doubts the longevity of Star Trek Online as a game needs to take a close look at how quickly these sold out.
I wonder if STO would consider this method of adding other ships to our roster? Perhaps a promotion for KDF and Romulan science ships?
The promotion was not without it’s share of momentary glitches. While I caught on to the sale early in the day, making it through the purchasing system was difficult at best. My experience was a bit of a downer, after a rejected credit card and a second attempt, my purchases didn’t make it through the system. The issues had more to do with the overwhelming interest of STO fans than the validity of my credit card 😉
Hopefully if they do this again – and I highly recommend they do – that the the donation page at Groupee’s can handle the volume.
My credit card is ready 😉
Lootcritter
Conversations with the Lootcritter 
It was great! Great charity, great rewards! I also hope they do it again.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Star Trek Online – Heidy's Thingies and commented:
Lootcritter had a post explaining this recent charity promotion. It’s over now, but I want to add a comment or two about my experience with it.
See, I live in the Pacific timezone. Like all other limited quantity promotions, by the time I woke up and checked online, half of the T6 bundles were already sold. By the time I had a chance to get on a computer that would allow me to use Paypal, the T6 bundles had long gone.This is not the first time that I miss out on promotional stuff simply because I live on the west coast, and I don’t expect it to be the last. I’m not sure if anything can be done to address this, or if anyone cares to look for a more equitable solution, but till then players like me are constantly SOL… and by SOL I don’t mean Earth’s sun.
Ultimately I did manage to get the T6 bundle; it was announced that there was a limited number of ‘leftover’ bundles, 75 in all, that would be made available 2 hours prior to the end of the promotion. I just happened to pop on at the right time — there were suddenly 62 T6 bundles left! Excitedly I hit the Buy button and anxiously waits for Paypal to process my order, which seemed to take an eternity (but was really about 45 seconds). By the time the order completed and it punted me back to the Groupees website, there were only 2 bundles left. Talk about nick of time!
LikeLiked by 1 person