Why Time-Windowed Leaderboards Outperform Static Ones

The Question

In fundraising campaigns, ambassadors are volunteers who leverage their personal networks to bring in donations on behalf of an organization. Managing and motivating hundreds or thousands of ambassadors at once is one of the hardest problems in modern fundraising.

Most fundraising platforms show a static leaderboard on a webpage. Ambassadors check it once, see they're in 47th place, and stop trying. The leaderboard becomes a monument to whoever got there first — not a tool that drives ongoing behavior.

We took a different approach with our FundGen Ambassador app. Instead of a static page, we send time-windowed leaderboard notifications via WhatsApp every 2-6 hours. Each notification only reflects the last few hours of activity — not all-time totals. This means the leaderboard resets with every notification. An ambassador who was #1 this morning is off the board if they haven't brought donations since lunch.

The question: does this ephemeral, recurring format actually change ambassador behavior? We analyzed production data across 4 campaigns with active leaderboard notifications.

The Data

Total: 12,546 donations, 2,186 ambassadors, ILS 5.6M + USD 387K raised

The Leaderboard Resets — And That Changes Everything

On a static web leaderboard, the top spots calcify within the first day. Latecomers see the gap and give up. Our time-windowed approach produces radically different dynamics:

Average: 94% of notifications introduced at least one new ambassador to the leaderboard.

This is the fundamental difference from static leaderboards. Because the window resets, the leaderboard isn't a monument to early effort — it's a rotating spotlight. In B'Derech Elchanan, 107 unique ambassadors appeared on at least one leaderboard out of 162 total — meaning 66% of all ambassadors got their moment of recognition. On a static leaderboard, the top 10 are the top 10 forever.

We know ambassadors are paying attention: during these campaigns, we received direct messages from ambassadors asking why a recent donation didn't show up on the leaderboard, or checking whether their donation would count toward the next notification. When people reach out to ask about their leaderboard position, you know the system isn't being passively consumed — it's driving behavior.

A Small Group Sets the Pace — Everyone Else Follows

While turnover is high, a small group of top performers consistently appears across leaderboards. Across all campaigns, the top 3 steady performers appeared on roughly 30-40% of all notification windows, bringing in significantly more donations per person than the average ambassador.

These consistent performers aren't just on the leaderboard — they're setting the pace for the entire campaign. The time-windowed format works because it creates two parallel dynamics:

1. The regulars keep showing up, establishing what "good" looks like
2. The rest see that the bar is reachable — because the window just reset — and push harder

This is the opposite of what happens with static leaderboards, where the gap between #1 and #50 grows every hour and becomes psychologically insurmountable.

Lose Your Spot, Fight to Get It Back (p < 0.001)

This is the strongest quantitative evidence that the leaderboard changes behavior — not just reflects it.

We tracked every instance where an ambassador appeared on the leaderboard in one notification window, then fell off in the next. The question: do they come back in the following window at a higher rate than their normal appearance rate?

To be rigorous, we compared each ambassador's recovery rate not against random chance, but against the average appearance rate of ambassadors who have ever been on the leaderboard — a much stricter baseline that controls for the obvious objection: "maybe good performers just keep performing."

In our largest campaign (Megashimim Chalomot, 1,893 ambassadors), the result was clear:

Ambassadors who lost their leaderboard position recovered it at 2.5x the rate you'd expect from their normal behavior. These aren't just good performers continuing their streak — they specifically had a dip (fell off the leaderboard) and then bounced back faster than their own baseline predicts.

This effect was strongest in the largest campaign, where each notification reaches the most people and the social stakes of being seen (or not seen) are highest. In smaller campaigns with tighter ambassador pools, the recovery rate matched normal behavior — suggesting the leaderboard's motivational power scales with audience size.

The Competition Day That Changed Everything

On February 19th, we activated a new team competition feature for Megashimim Chalomot. The challenge was simple: every ambassador needs to bring at least one donation per hour. We created a live dashboard comparing parent teams (communities, schools, chapters) against each other in real time.

The results were staggering:

The donation count nearly doubled. 87 additional ambassadors who were inactive the day before jumped in. Several teams saw explosive growth:

• One school went from 31 donations to 149 (+380%)
• A seminary team went from 31 to 98 (+216%)
• A housing program team went from 32 to 92 (+188%)

Peak activity hit at 1pm with 255 donations in a single hour, followed by a massive evening surge from 9pm to midnight (215-240 donations/hour) as teams scrambled to hit their hourly targets before the day ended.

The team competition layer, combined with the existing leaderboard notifications, created a double motivation loop: individual recognition through the leaderboard + collective accountability through the team dashboard.

One Size Doesn't Fit All — Smart Defaults Matter

Our data reveals a clear pattern: notification frequency and leaderboard size should scale with campaign size and ambassador count. What works for 1,893 ambassadors doesn't work for 46.

In smaller campaigns with 40-50 ambassadors, engagement was already high (87%) through organic social dynamics — people know each other, and personal accountability does the heavy lifting. In larger campaigns with hundreds or thousands of ambassadors, the leaderboard notifications become the primary competitive mechanism, because personal relationships can't scale.

Based on this analysis, we built automatic notification calibration into the system:

The goal is to hit the sweet spot where notifications are frequent enough to maintain competitive pressure, but not so frequent that they become noise — and where the leaderboard is large enough to give the "middle tier" a realistic shot at appearing, while still feeling exclusive enough to be worth chasing.

What This Means

1. Time-windowed leaderboards beat static ones. With 94% turnover, the leaderboard is a rotating spotlight that gives 66% of ambassadors a moment of recognition — not a static monument to whoever started first.
2. The leaderboard provably changes behavior. In our largest campaign, ambassadors who fell off the leaderboard recovered their position at 2.5x their expected rate (p < 0.001).
3. Team competition is a game-changer. Adding a collective layer on top of individual leaderboards produced a +82.6% donation increase in a single day.
4. Ambassadors are emotionally invested. When people message you to ask why they're not on the leaderboard, you know the system is working.
5. The system now auto-configures itself. Campaign managers don't need to guess the right notification frequency or leaderboard size.