Haku Sports
2026
Bridging ticketing and fundraising through a unified platform
Fundraising organizations often rely on both ticketing and auction experiences to engage guests and raise donations. While these experiences were closely connected operationally, they existed as separate products within the platform.
This created additional work for event staff who needed to prepare attendees for fundraising activities, manage bidder information, assign paddle numbers, and support guests across disconnected workflows.
Linked Events introduced a way to connect ticketing and fundraising experiences, creating a more unified journey for organizations, attendees, and event staf
Challenge
Ticketing and fundraising were disconnected experiences
Fundraising organizations often use ticketing and auction experiences together, but the platform treated them as separate workflows. As organizations prepared for events, staff were forced to manually bridge the gap between attendees and fundraising participants.
When product friction became a retention problem
Problem 2
Event preparation relied on manual setup and coordination.
Problem 3
Guest information was spread across disconnected experiences.
Goals & Constraints
What I aimed to achieve
Reduce manual event preparation
Minimize the administrative work required to prepare guests for fundraising participation.
Improve event-day readiness
Help organizations prepare attendees and fundraising activities before guests arrive.
Constraints
Flexible fundraising workflows
Organizations use different event structures, bidder setups, and operational processes.
Shared guest data
Changes needed to work across attendee, bidder, paddle number, and payment workflows.
Design Process
Understanding the fundraising journey
How organizations prepared for fundraising events
Through conversations with Customer Experience teams and fundraising organizations, we discovered that preparing guests for fundraising participation required work across multiple disconnected experiences.
Design Process
Identifying the operational gap
What organizations experienced
While the platform treated ticketing and fundraising as separate experiences, organizations viewed them as a single guest journey—from registration to fundraising participation.
Design Process
Defining the Connected Experience
Linked Events created a relationship between ticketing and fundraising experiences, allowing organizations to prepare attendees for fundraising participation while reducing manual setup across events.
Key Decision 1
Linking ticketing and fundraising events
Key Decision 2
Creating a shared attendee-to-bidder journey
Outcome & Learnings
From separate events to a connected guest journey
Impact
Reflection
Designing around customer workflows, not product boundaries
While ticketing and fundraising existed as separate products, organizations viewed them as a single event experience. Understanding that distinction helped redefine how the platform supported fundraising events.
Operational efficiency often comes from reducing setup work
The biggest challenge wasn't creating new fundraising features—it was eliminating the manual work required to prepare attendees before event day.
Connected systems create opportunities beyond the original problem
By establishing relationships between events, we created a foundation for future experiences such as bidder preparation, payment sharing, and deeper fundraising integrations.
