IQ Index Fund

The SSE Riga Alumni Association raises money for student scholarships. We built them a fundraising campaign that runs like a stock market: donors don’t just give, they “invest” in a charity stock called IQX, watch the price move, and race up a leaderboard. Custom WordPress theme built on Advanced Custom Fields, live for a fixed campaign window. One job - make giving competitive.

A charity stock that actually moves

The centrepiece is a live ticker. IQX has a price and a chart, and both move on their own - the market keeps ticking even when nobody is donating. Every gift pushes the price up, and the bigger the donation, the bigger the jump. Current price, the hero chart and the campaign market cap all read from the same donation data, so the “fund” reflects real money raised in real time, not a static graphic.

Leaderboards that reward the biggest backers

Donate and you land on a leaderboard, ranked by how much you put in. Buy more charity stock later and your ranking updates - the board keeps reshuffling for the length of the campaign. We split it in two: one leaderboard for individual alumni, one for companies, so a personal gift is never measured against a corporate sponsor. Two races, two sets of bragging rights, both feeding the same scholarship fund.

Built to run hot, then close

This was a campaign, not a permanent site - a custom theme built to spike attention over a fixed window and then wrap. The stock-market framing did the heavy lifting: it turned a donation page into something alumni wanted to check on and share, and the concept drew a strong response from the community.

Stack: WordPress, Advanced Custom Fields, custom-built theme.