If your nonprofit has been running the same fundraisers on repeat, you might notice a lull in results. To acquire new donors, your nonprofit must monitor and adapt to new fundraising trends. By doing so, you can stand out and ensure your fundraisers continually excite your current supporters and bring in ones.
For instance, peer-to-peer campaigns have extensive room for creativity and innovation. After all, each volunteer fundraiser who joins your campaign brings their own experiences and expertise to your campaign, ensuring each peer-to-peer fundraiser is unique.
We’ll cover four out-of-the-box tips to help you generate new fundraising ideas that will energize your peer-to-peer campaign.
1. Encourage participants to share their stories.
Personalized fundraising pages are a staple of all peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns. During onboarding, teach participants how to customize their pages so they can show off their unique personalities and earn more donations.
While every fundraiser has a story to share, they might have trouble putting their experiences into words. Help them by:
- Providing templates. Ultimately, personal stories drive donations. Help your supporters get started by providing templates that outline a structure for the story and even specific phrases they can use. Encourage supporters to use these as a starting point rather than a strict guide for how stories must be written.
- Sharing statistics and facts about your cause. Inspire supporters by sharing facts, statistics, and talking points about your cause. For example, a statistic you provide might relate to a supporter’s experience, and they can then use that as the centerpiece for telling their personal story.
- Encouraging creative formats. Some of your participants may want to forgo writing their stories and instead share them through photos and videos. Ensure your peer-to-peer donation pages can support multiple content formats to accommodate these supporters.
Supporter input is one of peer-to-peer campaigns’ greatest strengths, but remember that that means participants might deviate from your brand voice. Share your brand guidelines and volunteer expectations to ensure supporters represent your nonprofit in the best light, but accept that you won’t have the same control over their posts as you would your marketing team’s.
2. Gamify the fundraising experience.
Give your peer-to-peer participants some extra motivation by gamifying your fundraiser. Gamification is adding game-like elements to make tasks feel more rewarding. For example, you might gamify your peer-to-peer fundraiser by:
- Creating badges. Assign point values to various tasks, milestones, or achievements related to your peer-to-peer campaign. Then, when a supporter earns enough, award them with a digital badge they can display on their personal donation page. For example, you might have badges for selling a certain amount of merchandise, getting unique visitors on their donation page, or hitting a monthly fundraising goal.
- Maintaining a leaderboard. Instill a bit of friendly competition by maintaining a leaderboard where your supporters can see how they measure up to other participants. Your leaderboard can merely showcase your fundraisers’ stats or you can give out awards to the top placements at the end of your campaign.
- Issuing daily challenges. Motivate your supporters to do something related to your peer-to-peer campaign every day by creating daily challenges that expire at midnight. These should be small, easy-to-accomplish tasks that encourage supporters to stay active, such as posting about your campaign, sending a text to a friend asking for a donation, or sharing an encouraging message with another campaign participant.
Your peer-to-peer software should provide features that enable you to gamify your campaign. When reviewing software platforms, look for tools that can elevate your fundraiser.
3. Offer tangible incentives.
Donors give to peer-to-peer campaigns because they have a personal connection to your fundraisers. Leverage this strength by giving your donors a physical reminder of their support for a loved one with merchandise.
Peer-to-peer fundraisers can sell any product that fits your mission, but t-shirts are a common and popular option. To host a peer-to-peer t-shirt fundraiser, follow these steps:
- Partner with a t-shirt platform. Your nonprofit will need to partner with a t-shirt platform to create, sell, and deliver your fundraisers’ t-shirts. Assess providers based on their available shipping methods, costs, product quality, and design tools. Additionally, some t-shirt platforms offer nonprofits special perks and exclusive features to help promote their merchandise.
- Help fundraisers design t-shirts. Give your fundraisers the opportunity to create t-shirts that represent your nonprofit and their connection to it. Use your t-shirt platform’s design tools and templates to simplify the design process. Then, provide other assets fundraisers might want, such as your nonprofit’s logo or other images that represent your cause.
- Host an event. You aren’t required to host an event as part of a peer-to-peer t-shirt fundraiser, but doing so provides donors who bought a shirt an occasion to wear them and show off their support. Plus, fundraisers who need more contributions to reach their fundraising goal can use an event as an opportunity to sell their last t-shirts to supporters who would rather buy one in person.
You don’t need to limit merchandise sales to just your peer-to-peer campaign, either. Make t-shirts and other merchandise available in your online store, and consider how you can leverage tangible incentives like branded products into other fundraisers. For example, you might host a crowdfunding campaign and provide t-shirts to donors who give above a certain amount.
4. Get creative with digital fundraising.
Peer-to-peer campaigns thrive on social media as your volunteer fundraisers can reach their friends and family no matter where they are with just a couple of posts online. Your nonprofit can elevate supporters’ efforts by experimenting with unique digital fundraising strategies, like:
- Social media takeovers. A social media takeover is when someone, usually a well-known figure like an influencer, “takes over” your social media account for a short period of time and posts content outside your usual brand identity. As part of a peer-to-peer campaign, you might invite a few trusted participants to take over your main account for a day by submitting content they’d like you to post.
- Virtual challenges. Give your peer-to-peer participants a creative way to earn donations with virtual challenges. Challenge fundraisers to do a visually interesting activity where donors can give to influence whether they attempt the challenge or details about it. For example, you might challenge your fundraisers to eat hot peppers, do a viral dance, or even dump ice water over themselves, like in the famous ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
- Interactive content. Peer-to-peer campaigns attract new supporters who are unfamiliar with your nonprofit. As such, many of them will likely investigate your website or social media profiles before giving. Engage them by experimenting with interactive, shareable content.
While your peer-to-peer campaign might demand a significant amount of your attention, don’t neglect your regular digital marketing efforts. For instance, continue posting on your blog to keep up your search engine optimization strategy and consistently engage with donors on social media who aren’t part of your peer-to-peer campaign.
Staying up to date with what’s popular in fundraising can be a challenge, but even if your nonprofit isn’t up to date on the latest trends, you can still think outside the box.
Study your campaign’s performance to adjust your marketing strategy, identify new opportunities, and deviate when potential challenges arise. Then, when it’s time for your next peer-to-peer fundraiser, implement the creative strategies you know will have the best chance at success.