For some organizations ready to creatively boost its donation revenue, peer-to-peer fundraising and mobile donation tools are a match made in heaven.
Schools, community organizations, nationwide nonprofits, and more have discovered innovative ways to leverage these two new fundraising methods and better engage their supporters.
Whatever your organization’s focus or campaign goals, peer-to-peer fundraising and mobile giving technologies can be an excellent strategic choice.
If you’re familiar with peer-to-peer fundraising (or P2P) campaigns but have never employed mobile giving technologies before, you might be wondering how to best incorporate and market them to your supporters. Consider these 6 strategies:
- Offer training workshops for your core volunteers.
- Create fundraising challenges with tiered prizes.
- Incorporate mobile giving into all your fundraising events.
- Encourage your corporate partners to promote mobile giving.
- Create a viral video challenge to generate and direct traffic.
- Foster communication and suggestions from your core team.
Using one, several, or all of these strategies as a launchpad, you can create a campaign plan fully unique to your organization’s fundraising goals.
Read on to discover how your peer-to-peer fundraisers can incorporate intuitive text-to-give technologies and engage your base in new ways!
Offer training workshops for your core volunteers.
If you’re unsure of how to best market mobile fundraising tools to your peer-to-peer donors, your volunteers who host peer-to-peer fundraising campaign pages likely feel the same way.
Host a training workshop in-person or online to acquaint your volunteers with the mobile giving process, and be sure to provide volunteers with all the information they’ll need to spread the word.
This information will likely include:
- The number that donors will send their text to
- The special keyword that donors will need to send
- How payment processing will work
- How donors can specify donation amounts
- Any other relevant login or authentication instructions
It’s crucial that your P2P volunteer team fully understands the ins and outs of your mobile giving tools, primarily because they’ll be the first point of contact between potential donors and your campaign.
By giving your peer-to-peer fundraising volunteers the ability to fundraise on your behalf, it’s crucial that your campaign’s overall message and engagement strategies be clear and unified!
Create fundraising challenges with tiered prizes.
Mobile giving is a perfect complement to any kind of challenge-based fundraiser strategy!
All kinds of organizations find success with fundraising challenges, especially schools and other organizations rooted in a shared community. A little friendly competition between neighbors can be a great motivator and boost your fundraising to new levels.
Mobile giving can be incorporated into all sorts of peer-to-peer fundraising challenges, like:
- Pledges for charity walkathons. Which participant can successfully raise the most funds?
- Donations at large fundraising or sporting events. Which attendee or which team’s fans will hit their fundraising target first?
- Timed fundraising goals. Which of your volunteers can raise the most in a single week or special giving day?
These mobile giving challenges will easily figure into your wider strategies. Most peer-to-peer fundraising platforms also offer fun visual trackers and badges for your campaigns and donors.
Think of some tiers of special prizes or rewards that your donors and volunteers might appreciate as incentives to win a fundraising challenge, and then promote them heavily across your P2P pages!
The mobile giving aspect of these challenges is a great way to engage and excite donors, letting them donate spontaneously, and the peer-to-peer fundraising structure creates a more organized way to track the progress of individuals and teams.
Incorporate mobile giving into all your fundraising events.
Always include mobile giving as an essential part of your event planning strategy.
Optimization should extend to all of your fundraising events, both in person and online. Mobile giving and P2P strategies can be easily adapted to any fundraising event, like:
- Galas and dinners
- Auctions and raffles
- Street festivals and booths
- Food or merchandise sales
- Holiday parties or members events
- Social media and online events
Peer-to-peer fundraising campaign pages are the perfect outlet for spreading the word about your fundraising events and providing unique mobile giving keywords to track team donations before, during, and after these events.
By providing another donation channel, you can increase the effectiveness of your peer-to-peer fundraising team and give them more adaptable donation options to promote online or at any event.
Additionally, P2P mobile giving campaigns provide your organization with a perfect opportunity to thank your most dedicated volunteers. Host a special event for your team after the conclusion of your campaign and personally thank your highest fundraisers!
Encourage your corporate partners to promote mobile giving.
One often overlooked aspect of peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns is that these pages can easily be managed by an individual or even another organization.
If your nonprofit has dedicated corporate or local business partners, encourage them to set up their own fundraising pages for your campaign and include them in your special events and mobile giving challenges!
This can be a great way to engage your corporate partners on special occasions, like Giving Tuesday.
Broadening your scope from individuals to the entire extended networks of your partners can go a long way in increasing the impact of your mobile giving tools.
Think of some ways that your partners and sponsors can get involved:
- Creating their own peer-to-peer fundraising campaign pages can provide their employees with a dedicated space to connect with your organization and its relationship to the company.
- Hosting their own mobile giving challenge events over an extended timeframe can be a great way to boost office morale while supporting your work.
- Getting directly involved with live fundraising events, promoting them on their P2P pages, offering special tickets, and promoting your mobile giving options to their employees is an easy way for your partners to support your campaign.
To get your partners and sponsors more directly involved with your campaign, be sure to offer them attractive and customizable peer-to-peer page options so they can maintain their own branded identity while supporting your work.
Peer-to-peer fundraising and mobile giving tools represent a particularly easy way for you and your corporate partners to reaffirm and bolster your relationship.
Create a viral video challenge to generate and direct traffic.
We’re all familiar with some extremely successful viral video challenges that raise awareness for specific charities.
Why not try your hand at creating the next viral trend? The nature of viral content is often completely unpredictable, so your video might just be the next big thing!
Plus, viral video challenges represent a perfect tie-in for your peer-to-peer fundraising and mobile giving strategies.
While brainstorming concepts for a viral challenge campaign, remember that your video should follow some general guidelines:
- Your video concept should be short in duration and well-shot.
- Optimize your video for mobile viewing with clear titles and sharp focus.
- Provide clear and actionable steps for participants and donors.
- Clearly and quickly articulate your purpose and message.
- Your challenge should be safe and appropriate for participants of all ages.
- Provide explicit mobile giving instructions and peer-to-peer fundraising links.
Online fundraising is never easy work, but a successful viral video challenge is a goldmine for the smart nonprofit ready to craft the perfect message and connect all of its engagement and campaign outlets.
In a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign structure, viral content is able to spread more quickly and effectively because its audiences are pre-configured, already interested in supporting your work.
Providing mobile giving options is the perfect way to capitalize on this increased exposure. Even if a viewer might not feel like dumping a bucket of ice on themselves, at least they’ve got the option to simply pull out their phone and make a quick donation!
Foster communication and suggestions from your core team.
This strategy might seem straightforward, but it’s incredibly important to running a successful peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.
These kinds of campaigns are uniquely decentralized, that is, your core team of volunteers and P2P page hosts have a level of freedom in fundraising on your behalf.
While it’s crucial that you provide a unified direction, allow volunteers the flexibility to target their peer-to-peer fundraising pages as they see fit. You’ll boost volunteer satisfaction while creating a more adaptable campaign.
After all, they know their extended networks personally and probably have more insight into how to best get their attention. Your team probably has great suggestions relevant to every part of your campaign, including:
- Missed opportunities to market mobile giving tools.
- Completely unique viral content concepts.
- New ideas for mobile fundraising challenges.
- Suggestions for engaging specific groups in the community.
In any peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, communication is key.
Always encourage your core peer-to-peer fundraising team to share their observations, insights, and suggestions, particularly when mobile giving tools will allow your donors to so directly and quickly engage with your organization.
The combination of P2P fundraising platforms and mobile giving tools represents an incredible opportunity for organizations ready to craft a creative campaign strategy.
Use the core strategies listed above to figure out the best ways for your organization to configure, promote, and use them for unprecedented fundraising success!
Author Bio
John Killoran is CEO of Snowball (formerly @Pay), an exciting new fundraising technology that makes it easy for people to donate in two clicks from text, email, web and social media sites. John pioneered SMTP payments and has been a major innovator in the mobile payments space for the past 5 years. When he is not running a company, he is cooking food for his family and telling his dogs to stop barking.
