Chat Bots are a great way to have pre-created messages provided to your community when you are fundraising! Rather than typing out all of the information every single time, Chat Bots can explain your charity effort, the organization you are fundraising for, and provide that ever-so-important donation link to your Tiltify campaign in a matter of 1-2 seconds vs 20-30 seconds (which can definitely add up over a broadcast).
Choose Your Bot!
There are some great public chat bot options you can use with plenty of functionality baked-in (no coding necessary!) For the purposes of this article (and to prevent it from getting too bloated with pictures), we will be referencing Moobot in all screenshots and usage. Streamlabs and StreamElements also have their own chat bots as well!
Please Note: most public bots are very similar - so if you're looking for options for YouTube, Facebook Gaming, etc. they'll operate in a similar way!
How Chat Bots Work
Chat Bots will have plenty of amazing functionalities baked-in, including (but not limited to): Recent Activities, Song Requests, Moderation Tools, and even Community Engagement Features! We definitely suggest you check out their respective help portals to learn how to best make use of their functionalities for your next livestream.
But the two main functionalities you should focus on for charity livestreams is the use of Commands and Timers.
Commands are programmable scripted text that you can have shared in your livestream chatroom whenever a keyword is typed in chat - whereas Timers will allow you to set those commands to not only be posted when the keyword is typed, but will automatically post it every x amount of minutes. This is especially useful when you want to share donation links or pertinent information about the charity regularly - or when you don't have too many moderators assisting with your event in chat, you can always rely on the bot to back you up!
Before you can use the bot, you must first ask the bot to join your chat.
Navigate to their respective pages and login using your livestreaming account:
And then find out how to have them join your channel:
Adding Commands
Adding commands could not be any easier! Navigate over to the Commands section of the website interface and choose Custom (you can also look at default commands to see what is already built into the bot that you can turn on or off depending on your need).
From here, you can create your commands! For most bots, they will always start with an ! to indicate that you want to input a command in chat (for example: !donate to trigger your donation link message or !charity for more information on the charity). This is to ensure that commands do not accidentally appear when its a commonly used word.
Next, put in the information that you want to provide when the command is used. For Moobot, they also have the ability to set the command to automatically post while chat is active!
Under Advanced Options, you will see a lot more customization options, including things like: only allowing moderators to use the command, setting a cooldown so the command cannot be spammed, or even set commands to be game-specific! You can also set commands to expire in case they're only temporary for special events.
Adding Timers
As for Timers, they are also really easy to setup and, in most bots, they can also allow you to group your commands together in case you have multiple messages you want to share about the same topic!
Navigate over to Timers on the interface and choose a name for your timer.
After that, you will be presented with the options of:
- How long before the command should post, and
- How many chat lines should pass before posting (in case you want to prevent a quiet chat from posting the same message too many times)
For Moobot and other bots, you might also have the option to throw multiple commands into rotation. This will allow you to have timers set for a group of commands to be shared - which is perfect for charity fundraisers!
Conclusion
Chat Bots are a great way to engage with your community and to ease the burden on yourself or your moderation team when it comes to your charity fundraising efforts. Plan ahead and create commands for anything/everything you think your community will ask you about regularly - ie. Donation links, more information, or even schedule if you plan on doing a series of broadcasts!
Want to find other people fundraising with Tiltify? Head over to our official Discord!
Need to start your fundraising journey? Head to Tiltify.com to create your first campaign and support the cause you care about today!