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Fundraising Tuesday: 3 Exciting Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Ideas

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A guest post by Jacob Spencer of Donately

Donating is good, charitable, and meaningful. But can it be exciting? While it might not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about how to raise donations, injecting a new element or two into your usual fundraisers can help spice things up for long-term supporters while also intriguing new ones.

How can you make a classic reliable fundraiser like a peer-to-peer campaign more exciting? Like with most fundraisers, your data will be your guide. Put it to use to make informed decisions about what your donors want out of your campaigns. For instance, if donors have shown a preference for virtual events, start brainstorming more ways you can engage with them online during your campaign.

To help inspire your nonprofit, this article will dive into three peer-to-peer fundraising ideas to help change up your usual campaigns for the better. We’ll explore:

  1. T-Shirt Fundraisers
  2. Giving Days
  3. Events

1. T-Shirt Fundraisers

Donors give to peer-to-peer campaigns because of their connections to your volunteers who are fundraising on your behalf. You can make their choice to give even more meaningful by making them feel like they’re part of a team with custom t-shirts.

In t-shirt peer-to-peer campaigns, volunteers raise funds by selling t-shirts to donors. These shirts promote your cause and give donors something to hold onto that will remind them of your nonprofit. Here are a few tips for running this type of fundraiser: 

  • Design custom shirts. While you theoretically can make one t-shirt design and have all of your volunteers promote it, it’s much more meaningful for donors if they can buy a custom garment either designed wholly or with significant input from their friend or family member. Help your volunteers create designs that look good and represent their connection to your cause with design templates, color choices, and suggested fonts.


  • Gamify your campaign. Just like with sports jerseys, having everyone wear matching t-shirts can create a bit of a competitive vibe. Your nonprofit can leverage these feelings of friendly competition and gamify your campaign with a prize for the volunteer who raised the most.

 

  • Celebrate volunteers. At the end of your campaign, thank all of your volunteers for their hard work. Send a thank you card, give them a call, or even host an appreciation event where they and their friends and family can show up in their new t-shirts.

To get started with your t-shirt peer-to-peer fundraiser, you’ll need to partner with a platform that specializes in custom merchandise. Donately’s guide to online donation tools recommends Bonfire, citing their high-quality and discounted payment processing fees for nonprofits. Check them out or explore other options to find a partner that gets your nonprofit team and supporters excited.

2. Giving Days

Giving Tuesday has become a staple of nonprofits’ fundraising strategies. In just 24 hours, supporters are encouraged to give and see if they can reach your organization’s fundraising goal. While the short time span might seem like a detriment on the surface, creating a sense of urgency can help generate a lot of excitement in a limited time frame.

For your peer-to-peer campaigns, consider scheduling them around Giving Tuesday or create a giving day just for your organization. For example, many veterans’ groups make Memorial Day their giving day.

To prepare your volunteers for rapid-fire fundraising, share your nonprofit’s marketing and promotional tips ahead of time. Host an onboarding session where volunteers can ask questions like how they should discuss your nonprofit or if they can still accept donations made after the deadline.

Plus, giving days and peer-to-peer campaigns have an essential aspect in common: they both rely heavily on social media promotion. Online fundraisers can be more accessible for many volunteers, including those who live in remote locations outside of your core community. Make sure your nonprofit’s social media pages are set up ahead of time so volunteers can link to your organization when they make their #GivingTuesday posts.

3. Events

How do you end a peer-to-peer campaign? For nonprofits running continuous and rolling peer-to-peer campaigns, the answer might be never. But sometimes your organization will need to launch a campaign to raise funds in a short period of time. For these types of peer-to-peer campaigns, consider ending with a bang by hosting an event.

Peer-to-peer events give your volunteers an opportunity to meet with others who worked on your campaign, have one-on-one conversations with your staff, and introduce your nonprofit to members of their personal networks who attended. There are a variety of events you can host, including:

  • Walk-a-thons
  • Auctions
  • Community days
  • Advocacy events
  • Sporting competitions

Remember that an engaging event can also serve as one last opportunity for supporters to donate. If you’re close to your goal, let attendees know and keep them updated on your progress live throughout your event to drum up even more excitement.

Author: Jacob Spencer, Customer Success / Account Manager, Donately

Bio: I strive to make every step of our customer journey as enjoyable as possible. My goal is to turn everyone that trusts Donately into a raving fan! Raising funds can be daunting, but we know that with the right tools, it can and should be easy.

Fundraising Tuesday: What’s the Message TODAY? 3 Examples

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You’re sending a message to your nonprofit audience in every email, every social media post, every newsletter article you write. But is it a message they want to hear?

If you know your audience, you can tell there are some topics they’ll always be interested in, no matter what season it is or what else is going on in the world. We call those evergreen topics. It’s good to have a well of those you can dip into at any time. Posting them is a service to your audience, and it does well by your nonprofit, too, because it keeps your donors and potential donors interested.

There are also some topics that matter at a particular time and not so much at others. We’ll call them seasonal topics. Ideally, you’d like your message to stand out in your audience’s mind. Well, what’s a better way to make sure they do pay attention than to write about something that’s top of mind for them already, right at that moment?

Mother’s Day Messages

This past Sunday was Mother’s Day. It’s a time of celebration for some, and a bittersweet time for others, depending on their relationship to their own mothers and (perhaps) to their children if they’ve raised any. One thing it is for everybody, though, is virtually inescapable: it’s mentioned in all the media.

How did nonprofits tailor their messages to Mother’s Day?

Example 1: It’s in their name

MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization and feminist fund, had an easy connection to the day. Their organization’s name means “mother,” in Spanish.

MADRE made good use of Mother’s Day by 1) sending my wife an email that said:

Dear Rona,
Happy Mother’s Day! Today we celebrate all who care for families and lift communities in joy.Make sure you’re honoring the MADREs in your life.It’s not too late to send someone special a thoughtful Mother’s Day e-card!​In celebration,Yifat Susskind
Executive Director

MADRE pop-up messageand 2) by putting a pop-up on their website that says, “Honor mothers everywhere. For Mother’s Day, you can send an e-card with your gift to support feminist initiatives around the world. Give Today.”

These messages hit the spot. They might not make a difference if MADRE weren’t routinely great at telling stories that move the hearts of their audiences. Within a stream of donor communications, however, the Mother’s Day messages grab readers’ attention and call on them to act.

Example 2: From one mother to another

re Power Mother's Day message

re:Power took a different approach. Formerly Wellstone Action, this organization works to “build a future of inclusive politics where decisions about our communities are made by our communities at all levels.” In other words: run for office, mama!

For Mother’s Day, ED Karundi Williams laid out how being a mother and being and activist go together. In a long, thoughtful email, she shared these reflections:

Becoming a mother required me to establish some boundaries, out of a sense of responsibility to my daughter and her needs. 

At the same time, motherhood clarified my life’s work. It sharpened my focus and reignited my passion for this important work. 

Clearly, re:Power looked at where it was in relation to its audience and saw Mother’s Day as the right time to deepen and personalize that relationship. The message is consistent with what they would say every day of the year, but it’s couched in language that resonates with readers on Mother’s Day.

Example 3: Mothers are stronger than borders

RAICES provides free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees, especially at the Mexico-Texas border. They do not have “mother” in their name, like MADRE. Their mission is a hard sell to people in the U.S. who are skeptical about allowing more immigrants to enter the country. So, how did they use Mother’s Day to win their audience over?

 

RAICES Mother's Day message

Today, we honor Ms. N, pictured above with her children. We concealed their faces with flowers grown in Afghanistan for anonymity

 

They focused on mothers’ love for their children as a reason why immigrants come to the U.S.

“Mothers provide a deep love — a type of love that borders can’t contain.

This Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate the immigrant mothers and parents who will do whatever it takes to give their children a safer and brighter life.”

RAICES presented the children in the photo as a bunch of flowers, a typical gift for Mother’s Day. Both the photo and the language of the email they sent me put all the emphasis on family, on love, and on hope. The most hardened anti-immigration advocate might be moved–let alone the people on the RAICES mailing list, who already care about the future of immigrants and their children.

Mother’s Day is past now, but what’s the next date that your audience will be thinking about? Is it the date of George Floyd’s death? Memorial Day? Shavuot? The end of the school year? What message can you send them that they will pay attention to, and will it make them feel close to your organization, and give?

TY Thursday: Thank Like a Human

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Did you make donations online at the end of last year? If so, you probably saw a lot of email acknowledgments arrive in your inbox, automatically.

How many of these so-called thanks sounded like they were written by an automaton?

Most of the emails I received in response to my donation sounded that way. And for the nonprofits I gave to, it’s a missed opportunity.

A Donation is Part of a Relationship

Automation is a great labor-saving device. It means that a lot of fundraisers could celebrate New Year’s Day instead of working on Sunday and the holiday. But consider: how does it work for the donor?

First-time donors

bad dateWhen a donor gives to your organization for the first time, it’s like agreeing to a first date. Immediately, they wonder:

“Did I do the right thing? Do we have as much in common as I hoped we did? Am I going to be sorry I gave, or will it lead to something that can last?”

So imagine going out on a first date and hearing, “Thank you for agreeing to see me on December 29, for a dinner that cost $36.52. Your company for the evening meant a lot to me.”

Not very romantic, is it? And your date probably says that to everyone! So, there’s a good chance that first date–or first-time donation–will be the last.

Renewal donors

breakfast coupleGetting an impersonal message can be even more off-putting to the donor who’s been giving for years.

Imagine a loyal supporter of your organization. She has come to events, contributed items for your silent auction, and told her friends about you. This year, she has given her biggest donation ever, online, using her credit card. And what she got back from you was the same automaton response as everybody else.

It’s as if she’s sitting across the table from you at breakfast smiling because she’s left a present by your plate, and she says, “Happy anniversary, my love.” And you say, “Thank you. Please pass the salt”!

Nonprofits, we can do better than that.

Thanks! Auto-Responses that Show the Love

I want to give credit where credit is due. It takes some work to set up an automatic email to go out as soon as a donation comes in. And it’s better than nothing. Plus, some organizations write the ideal thank-you letter and send it in the mail.

But with just a little more effort, your nonprofit can thank donors like you mean it from the very first email you send. Here are good, better, and best ways of revising your automatic email to donors.

Good: Remind the donor what you do.

On the face of it, that seems silly. They just gave to you, right? They should know what you do! But you may be on their list from last year, and in any case, they may need a reminder before the memory fades. Give them the gift of a reminder.

Example–the Children’s Room in Arlington, MA says:

Your generosity supports our work with children, teens, and families who are coping with the death of an immediate family member, and the educators and professionals who seek to help them.

Better: tell the donor what their donation will do. Make the donor the hero.

Example–MADRE tells me:

Your gift enables women to provide food, shelter, emergency medical care and other critical resources for their families and communities. You give women the tools to build new skills and step up as leaders. And your dedication trains grassroots women to demand justice, and advocate for policies, locally and globally, that protect women’s rights.

Best: add a story.

Don’t just tell your donors they make a difference. Show them how they matter.

Share with them a story about one person (and possibly their family) in trouble, who is already better off “because you helped.”

So far, I am not seeing any of my favorite nonprofits tell stories in their automatic thank-you, and that’s a shame. But for your nonprofit, it’s an opportunity. Be the first one to add a story, and your donors will remember.

Using the Right Tools to Be More Human When You Thank

No matter what tool you’re using to acknowledge gifts, there’s a way to edit the acknowledgment. Before last year fades into memory, please take some time to edit it right now.

Whether you use the good, better, or best models above, you can certainly make your first response to a donor something that sounds like it came from a human being. When you’re done, it can be something you’re proud for your friends to receive!

And if the tool you’re using doesn’t give you enough room to tell a good story? Then this is the year to get another tool. The time you spend now will turn into happier donors this coming December…and forever

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