Be The Change You Dream Of
As you reflect on this past year and plan for the next please add these top tips to your checklist to improve fundraising success for your peer to peer fundraising campaign. Below are some tactics that you can use to boost fundraising by your event participants. There is no doubt that people want to help! They just need a little push.
When considering the use of these tactics, consider how your organization spends its time supporting your fundraising campaign. Simply put, would ‘x’ hours spent on one of these below tactics better support your mission than the ‘y’ hours you spend on a current tactic.
Top Tips
Incentives – Create incentives for the top fundraisers. prizes, opportunities, recognition, etc. If cost is an issue, you can be creative about what the prizes are! Incentives have the dual benefit of giving people motivation to fundraise, and also giving you an excuse to blast more emails!
Feature top fundraisers – Play on the competitive nature of athletes! Profile top fundraisers as a challenge to others to get involved. Put these profiles in email blasts, on the marathon site, etc.
Email campaign – Planned and consistently implemented! For people who have signed up for the walk-a-thon or pledge but not the fundraising, send emails telling them how important the fundraising is. For people who have already signed up, they have made the first step already so you know they’re paying attention. Send them periodic emails about:
- Incentives
- Top fundraisers stories
- Who/how their fundraising helps the mission
- Sponsors
- Getting their friends to participate as fundraisers as well
Fundraising tips – An easy, scannable, top 10 style list of fundraising tips. Some examples: 1. Email Email Email! – Send emails to your friends, family and co-workers. Let them know that you’ll be running, and tell them why our cause is so important.” “2. Personalize your page. Share your story, put up pictures. People who visit your page are there because they care about you and what you’re doing!”
Strong messaging – All messages (the email, the website copy) should have a simple and clear message about what the fundraising is for and why they need to do. On websites, people tend to scan more than read properly. Be direct about why their help is needed and how meaningful their involvement is to your mission. Make it as short and striking as possible, because people have low attention spans when reading websites, and rarely make it to the end of a paragraph.
At Blue Sky Collaborative our goal is to help your organization maximize the benefits of online peer-to-peer fundraising to help achieve your mission, your Blue Sky. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you more easily raise funds for your cause.