7 Ways to Make your Peer-to-Peer Fundraisers Successful

When it comes to campaign success for your nonprofit, peer-to-peer (p2p) fundraisers can be some of the most valuable contributors to your overall fundraising efforts.

Because these fundraising champions are essentially volunteering to raise money for your nonprofit without asking for anything in return, you’ll want to give them everything they need in order to: feel good about what they’re doing, do their best at it, gain new supporters and increased donations for your campaign, and want to fundraise for you again in the future!

You can make your fundraisers more successful by doing the following things:

1. Provide Clear Guidelines from the Beginning
2. Offer Your Personal Support
3. Provide Continuous Motivation
4. Establish Fundraising Teams to Encourage Friendly Competition
5. Give Prizes for Additional Motivation
6. Keep Them Updated
7. Show Your Appreciation

1. Provide Clear Guidelines from the Beginning

• Have an informative blog or web page available, even if it isn’t your own, for your fundraisers to reference. The page should give them all the information they need in order to be successful!
• Request they share your campaign via their personal social media accounts to ask for support from their social contacts. Provide them with messaging examples they can simply copy and paste if they’re not sure what to say.
• Tell them to share the campaign directly with their close family and friends, either in person, over the phone, or through email. Encourage them to share a personal story about why they feel your campaign is so important. You should provide a sample message for them to work from to make this process as easy as possible!

2. Offer Your Personal Support

• Your individual fundraisers should be made to feel like you have their back if and when they need you. They should feel they’re a part of your nonprofit’s team.
• Send personalized emails to your fundraisers and provide them with an email address that you’ll respond to if they reach out, and/or give them a phone number where they can reach you quickly.
• Being easily accessible and willing to answer questions will make your supporters much more likely to get involved and to ask the right questions in order for them to be as successful as possible.

3. Provide Continuous Motivation

• Be an advocate for your fundraisers! Give them encouragement whenever they get a donation, no matter how small it is. This can be made easier by setting up automatic email alerts that thank them whenever a donation is made through their personal or team efforts.

4. Establish Fundraising Teams to Encourage Friendly Competition

• Separating your p2p fundraisers into teams, given that you have enough fundraisers to do so, is a great strategy for boosting motivation, and ultimately, incoming donations!
• There’s an extra push to get more donations when you’re fundraising on behalf of your team members and not just yourself. Also, team members can help and inspire each other to raise more!
• Team fundraising is especially effective for active fundraising events, like walkathons!

5. Give Prizes for Additional Motivation

• They don’t even need to be tangible prizes, but receiving a prize as an outcome of doing something special helps satisfy our natural craving for a reward.
• This could be something as simple as an online certificate of fundraising achievement that you send by email and/or display on your website and social media channels. You can get creative, aligning prizes with your particular campaign theme!
• Use product fundraising to add more incentive. Though products technically aren’t “prizes,” they do reward donors for making a donation!

6. Keep Them Updated

• Whenever someone makes a donation, your fundraisers should get an email alert letting them know: a.) who donated, b.) through what particular fundraiser and/or team the money was donated, and c.) the progress of the overall campaign or how much has been raised/how much is left to be raised to meet your campaign goal!
• It’s safe to assume that people who signed up as p2p fundraisers care about your campaign and how they in particular are doing in their efforts to help you out, so you should be updating them all the time (within reason!).

7. Show Your Appreciation

• By showing sincere and personalized gratitude, you can acknowledge your supporters’ great work in your campaign. In return, they’ll be more likely to experience pride for helping your cause, feel a deeper connection to your organization, and want to contribute to future campaigns.
• Showing your appreciation is something you can implement throughout the duration of your campaign, which is part of keeping your fundraisers motivated.
• Consider reframing your messaging so that your supporters feel like they are the heroes of your nonprofit’s mission.

By following these 7 steps, your peer-to-peer fundraisers will have every opportunity to be successful and bring more donors and donations to your organization! Plus, you’ll increase the likelihood of keeping these supporters involved with your cause in the future, and the circle of giving will continue. Happy Fundraising! 🙂

Marcy Ogborn of GiveGab, a nonprofit giving platform, authored this post on P2P fundraising. 

To boost your P2P fundraising, start a Booster fundraiser today! Custom t-shirts are the perfect products to pair with P2P fundraising. Check out our Design Lab for more information.