Peer-to-Peer Fundraising done right when you work with Qgiv!
Learn all about how to find your fundraisers and engage with them for your more successful Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Campaign yet!
powerful tool for nonprofits. It can attract new donors, strengthen connections with participants, boost your nonprofit’s visibility in the community, and add a valuable revenue source for your organization. But peer-to-peer fundraising only works if you can find—and, more importantly, inspire—people to raise money for you. Coming up with the idea is the easy part. It’s the job of inspiring, empowering, and mobilizing your participants to advocate and raise money for you that’s the hard part! Luckily, we’ve worked with organizations all over the country who have come up with brilliant tactics to do just that. What follows is a breakdown of some ideas, tips, and best practices that will help you equip your peer-to- peer participants to raise money effectively and to work with you to reach your fundraising goals. We hope you get some wonderful ideas from this eBook—happy fundraising! -The Qgiv Team
participants is recruiting people who are passionate about your cause. Building a core group of fundraisers is the first step to attracting more people that want to get involved in your fundraiser. Start building that core group by: Looking Inward for Supporters You don’t have to start entirely from scratch when you start to build your base of fundraising participants. You’re already surrounded by people who are dedicated to your cause! Look to the people who are already working with you and ask them to consider participating in your fundraiser. Some people to consider recruiting include: • Current volunteers • Staff • Family members • Board members • Recurring donors • Major donors These groups of people have already shown their dedication to your organization by donating their time, talents, and money: they may be willing to get involved this way, too! Building a Story with Your Core Team Your core group of supporters has stories that compelled them to get involved with your nonprofit in the first place. What are those stories? We’ve learned from watching our nonprofit clients build successful peer-to-peer fundraisers, and the best fundraisers have two things in common: They have one simple, driving goal and overarching narrative; and They have dedicated participating fundraisers whose individual stories mesh well with the goal. Work with your core supporters to help them tell their own versions of the story that’s driving your campaign. Building your campaign’s narrative and helping them tell their own stories will keep your core supporters involved and will reinforce their dedication to your campaign. Step One: Find Your Core Peeps
easy to overlook the need to train your fundraisers. But, remember, you’re a professional fundraiser… they’re not. Unless your core team of participants is made up entirely of people from your development team, you’re going to be working with participants who don’t know the best way to ask people for donations. Some important things to go over with your core team of fundraisers are: • The basics of your organization’s mission • How to make good social posts • Best practices for solicitation emails • Storytelling techniques for the fundraising pages and other posts • How to recruit other participants • Ways to thank donors You might have other topics to cover based on your organization and your goal for this particular fundraiser, but those areas are an important place to start! Once you’ve built a solid base of supporters and given them the background they’ll need to raise money and recruit more participants, you can move onto the next stage, which is: Your core team is the group of people who will spread the word about your organization and this campaign to their friends, families, and coworkers. In step one, you will have given your core fundraisers the training they need to recruit more people to participate in your fundraiser. Now, it’s time for them to build their fundraising pages and start spreading the word about your campaign through their various social circles. Don’t rely solely on your core team to attract new participants; you’ll want to do your own recruiting, too. Here’s how to build on the base of supporters you’ve already established and trained. Step Two: Mobilize Your Peeps
participants if you can communicate with them in a way that’s relevant to them. You can accomplish this by identifying and targeting your audience ahead of time. Build a profile (or a couple!) of the type of participant you want to recruit. Consider things like: • Age • Status • Common experiences • Interests • Peer groups • The social channels they use If you can nail down a few details about the kind of fundraisers you want to attract, you can tailor your recruitment messages accordingly. For example: Assume you want to hold a walk to raise money to fund a playground for a local hospital. You’ll probably want to target your messaging to young families—mothers and grandmothers, specifically—who are likely to have children. You’d want to consider focusing your messaging around the children the playground will benefit and spreading the word on social channels like Facebook and possibly Pinterest, which is where that target demographic spends their time online. Imagine you’re holding an event to benefit your local animal shelter. The people who will probably be most interested in participating are probably going to be animal lovers; focusing your message around your goal and targeting that message to local pet groups and people who have benefitted from your shelter would be ideal. Seek out local pet supply stores or veterinarians, include information in your newsletter for pet adopters, and spread the word on social channels where people interact with you. Talk to Current Donors You’ll want to include your donors in solicitations for this event, of course. Consider asking your donors to share your event before you ever ask them to donate. Leave a few days or weeks between the asks—this can help you achieve two things. Asking donors to share your event with their circles without asking them to make a donation reinforces the idea that they’re an important part of your nonprofit’s community of world-changers. Asking people to do small, simple favors for you is a powerful way to build trust between yourself and them. This will strengthen your bond with your donors and boost visibility for your event.
or donate simply because you asked them to help spread the word. Make Sharing Your Event Easy Most successful peer-to-peer fundraising events depend heavily on social media sharing to attract new participants and to find donors. It is therefore critical that you make your event easy to share on social media (and email!). Make it easy to share your event by: • Adding social sharing buttons to team and participant fundraising pages • Adding social sharing buttons to donation forms and donation confirmation pages • Creating templates for social posts your participants and donors will make • Giving participating fundraisers a bank of images to use in their posts The easier it is for a supporter of yours to post about your fundraiser to social media, the more likely they are to do so. Give them as many tools as you can! Incentivize Participant Recruitment The beauty of peer-to-peer fundraising is that your participants act as ambassadors for your nonprofit, spreading the news about your mission and your campaign through their social circles. Participants who raise awareness and donations for your organization are wonderful. Participants who raise awareness and donations and recruit others to do the same are even better. To boost the likelihood that your participants will actively try to inspire others to get involved, try offering incentives for those who do! Not all incentives need to be tangible. Consider using incentives like: • Public acknowledgement of your top recruiters • Special opportunities like behind-the-scenes facility tours • Tickets to upcoming events • Raffle tickets • Tangible prizes like gift cards or event merchandise Offering the right mix of incentives for recruiting additional fundraisers can be a great way to encourage a little bit of friendly competition among your participants while boosting your registration numbers. Your job isn’t over once people register to participate in your fundraiser, though! If you want to set yourself up for a successful campaign, make sure you prepare participants to succeed.
raise money for charity… especially since you raise money for charity every day! It’s important to keep in mind that you’re asking participants who may have no experience in fundraising to actively ask their friends, families, and coworkers for donations. If you want them to do that successfully, you need to prepare them. You’ll probably want to take different approaches based on the types of people that make up your base of supporters. If you’re working with a small group of fundraisers (like board members for an annual campaign), you could have a workshop or brief meeting to teach participants how to use your fundraising platform, basic best practices for fundraising, and how to follow up with people who have donated to them. That approach wouldn’t work well for larger groups of participants! Regardless of how you get information to your participating fundraisers, here are some pieces you might want to provide to them: A Start-Up Guide Unless you’ve got a small group of fundraisers, you’ll want to offer participants a guide to getting started. Consider adding some tips for choosing great images for their fundraising pages, prompts that will help them tell their stories to their friends and family, ideas for things to post to social media, and basic fundraising best practices. Email Templates Studies have shown that peer-to-peer fundraisers who ask for support via email raise more money than those who don’t use email at all. The easier it is for your participants to send fundraising emails, the more likely they are to do so… and the more likely they are to succeed. Remember, you’re the fundraising expert—they’re not. Try giving fundraising participants access to email templates they can use to easily ask for support. Even if they don’t use the templates exactly as you wrote them, they can still serve as an excellent jumping-off point for participants who don’t know how to start fundraising. Step Three: Prepare Your Peeps
participants can use to personalize their fundraising pages or add some flair to their social posts and emails. Build a bank of resources your fundraisers can access and include things like: • Your nonprofit’s logo • A quick summary of your mission • A quick history of your nonprofit (useful for donors who may ask questions about your organization) • Pictures of your nonprofit’s clients or people who benefit from your services Participants might not need to use your resources, but they’ll appreciate knowing they’re available! Periodic Updates / Ongoing Support It’s important for fundraisers to have a point of contact in your organization that can answer their questions, whether they’re about how to write a powerful fundraising email or about how they change the password for their account. Most nonprofits have an easier time finding event participants than they do getting their participants to actively raise money for the event. In fact, most peer-to-peer event participants don’t even complete their personal fundraising page; they never move past registration into fundraising mode. Luckily, there are a few tricks you can employ to get (and keep) your participants involved in the fundraising process: Help Them Finish Their Fundraising Page Peer-to-peer participants who have completed a personal fundraising page are more likely to raise money for your organization, and they usually raise more money than participants who collect donations but never customize their page. 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% Step Four: Keep Your Peeps Involved
through the different parts of creating an awesome fundraising page. If that’s not an option for you, there are some ways you can encourage participants to build a page on their own. If an interactive tour or guide isn’t an option for you, consider creating a .PDF or other resource type outlining the major parts of a personal fundraising page and how participants can make them personal. Important areas to include are: • The fundraiser’s profile picture • A brief story or statement about why they’re raising money for your nonprofit • Supporting elements, like photo galleries or a video • Social media linking and posting • Email best practices Your particular nonprofit may have more (or even fewer) areas to cover in your guide to getting started. The biggest thing to keep in mind is the importance of encouraging as many participants as possible to complete and use their personal fundraising pages; the more engaged a participant is in their personal page and fundraising tools, the more money they’ll raise for your organization. Make Fundraising a Game People love playing games. Use that to your advantage when you’re working with your participating fundraisers; using gamification to make fundraising more interesting will result in a more successful fundraiser. Nonprofits have come up with some fantastic, creative ways to make fundraising fun for their participants. Here are four of the most effective tools we’ve seen in peer-to-peer fundraising events: Thermometers Thermometers have been used to show progress towards a fundraising goal long before the invention of the Internet. And for good reason—people love visual representations of their progress, and it’s exciting to watch a thermometer creep up as a fundraiser gets closer to reaching its goal. Aside from being an engaging way to keep participating fundraisers interested in your progress, thermometers can have a powerful impact on donors, too. It feels good to help someone—whether it’s an individual fundraiser, a team, or the organization as a whole—inch closer to their goal.
of fundraisers (if your event allows teams), and your overall event will all benefit from using thermometers. Leaderboards Many (we would hazard to say “most”) people who participate in a fundraiser, either as a participant or as a donor, are motivated by the positive feelings they associate with getting involved. Leaderboards help reinforce those positive feelings when people see their names displayed publicly. There are some different subjects you can include in your leaderboards. The most popular ones, of course, are leaderboards for top fundraisers and top teams. You can also include leaderboards for top donors or the highest-performing companies (if you have corporate partners whose employees are participating). Badges More and more social platforms are using badges to encourage users to engage with their product. Peer-to-peer platforms are no exception! The human brain is hardwired to actively work towards goals or milestones, and we love getting a reward for our successes… even if those rewards are purely digital. Badges are a fun way to reward participants for their involvement, and they also encourage participants to share their progress. Making it easy for participants to share their excitement when they earn a badge keeps them engaged and spreads the word about your event. Friendly Competition Perhaps the most powerful—and potentially the most difficult—way to make fundraising feel like a game is to gently encourage friendly competition between your fundraisers. The tricky part of this is encouraging competition without causing discord, jealousy, or frustration. Here are some ways you can do it: • Encourage team participation • Send periodic updates to participants that include updates on top fundraisers • Sponsor participant get-togethers where people can share their progress and ideas • Post social media updates about some of your most successful participants The possibilities are endless!
your fundraising because they’re passionate about your cause, the prospect of winning prizes can help inspire more engagement. There are limitless ways to do this. You can give prizes for amounts raised, percentages reached, number of donors, and more. You can reward top recruiters, those who have collected the biggest donation, or have shared the most posts on social media. Be creative! Tons of different options for prizes are out there—think about what you can offer to your participants that would motivate them. Try incentivizing participation with things like: • Event merchandise • Behind-the-scenes tours • Tickets to future fundraising events • Gift cards • Prizes that tie in with your event theme • Small trophies • Public recognition at your event Your prizes will vary based on your budget, event style, and level of participation. However you handle it, incentivizing your participants’ activity can have a huge positive impact on your event’s success. Encourage Creativity and Collaboration Engage your participants by encouraging them to get creative with their fundraising. Let them use their imaginations! They can hold their own fundraising gatherings, create silly contests, or pledge to complete a task once they’ve hit a fundraising milestone. Try giving your participants the option of moving offline. The fact that the majority of your fundraisers’ activities will take place online doesn’t mean they should limit themselves only to online fundraising tactics! Finding a platform that can accommodate mobile devices (like smartphones or tablets) and can also handle offline donations (like checks and cash) gives your participants plenty of flexibility. Help your participants come up with offline fundraising ideas, like: • Holding an informal fundraising get-together at a local restaurant, pub, or coffee shop. Use a smartphone or tablet to collect donations from friends
collect donations from coworkers and associates (like your coworker’s signup sheet for Girl Scout Cookies) • Organizing a fundraising “race” between two or more individuals to see who can raise the most in a set amount of time Your supporters can also try things like: • Pledging to complete certain tasks, like volunteer hours or other activities, when they reach certain fundraising milestones. • Making friendly (and funny) bets between teams or fundraisers. • Adding their own incentives to donors who give at different levels. Peer-to-peer fundraising can be so much bigger than individual fundraising pages! With a little bit of imagination and brainstorming, you can give your participants some ideas that will help them raise more money and will strengthen their emotional connection with your cause. Honestly, one of the best ways to build a great base of excited, engaged participants in a peer- to-peer fundraising event is to have a history of organizing exciting, engaging fundraising events. If you plan on running this particular peer-to-peer fundraising event in the future—say, for example, if it’s an annual 5K or yearly campaign—emphasize to your participants that they’re invited to join in on the fun next year. This is especially effective if you’ve done a good job engaging your participants in this year’s event. You’ll have more luck getting people to sign up for your next event if they’ve had fun raising money for you before. First-time participants in next year’s event will also be more likely to register if they’ve talked to enthusiastic participants from this year’s campaign. Peer-to-peer fundraising can be a powerful way to raise money for your organization, boost your nonprofit’s visibility in your community, and build a community of involved, enthusiastic supporters for your cause. The key to all of these things is finding and engaging a strong base of participants who spread the word about your mission among their circles. Doing so can take a little trial and error and a lot of experimenting, but they payoff is well worth the effort. Step Five: Prep Your Peeps for the Next One
Qgiv This eBook covers a lot of strategies that will work with pretty much any peer-to-peer fundraising platform on the market. But we do mention a couple (like badges and other cool stuff!) that are specific to the Qgiv platform. We’re passionate about peer-to-peer fundraising, and we’ve built a ton of tools that makes it fun for the people who sign up to support you. If you want to learn more about the features we’ve built to keep your P2Peeps engaged, we would love to talk to you. Contact us to learn how we can help you find (and engage!) your P2Peeps. 888-855-9595 [email protected]
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