peer to peer fundraising | Nonprofit Bridge

This week I joined many nonprofit colleagues at the Event Fundraising Table sponsored by the Run Walk Ride Fundraising Council, Blackbaud, Charity Dynamics and Event 360, focusing on ideas to stimulate peer to peer fundraising. Below is a summary of my takeaways:

How can I get more event participants to fundraise?

encourage participants to form and join teams, then ask their employers to sponsor corporate teams
offer incentives for specified fundraising levels
provide step by step instructions and coaching
ask on the registration form – are you planning to fundraise? Then prepare different messaging based on their response
encourage participant donations – makes it more likely they will ask others to contribute

How to Use Social Media for Event Fundraising

Sponsor live chats with top fundraisers (chats don’t only have to be about fundraising, but can help to build affiliation with nonprofit)
Create a mobile phone application, then push it out to social media (has worked well for March of Dimes and will be released soon by National MS Society)
Target Facebook messages based on location
Provide Facebook exclusive content
Give ‘white glove service’ to top fundraisers (at National MS Society – 50% of $ is raised by top 2% of fundraisers!)
In multi-site organization, national office can offer weekly highlights to provide content to local chapter / affiliate offices

How Can I Enhance My Marketing and Communication Efforts?

Event360 strongly suggested segmenting messages (my concern – do many of our orgs have staffing to provide strong content for different audiences)
Focus on customer service – offer a special hotline for top fundraisers
Use Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow‘ concept – find a way to differentiate your event from other organizations offering walks, endurance events etc.
Ask your nonprofit staff to come down on event day to cheer event participants (has been consistently used successfully by YAI)
Don’t rely on one person to handle social media (Autism Speaks has devoted considerable resources to build huge audiences on both Facebook & Twitter)
Visit your organization’s programs and tell great stories (suggested by YAI)

Thanks to roundtable participants who shared their expertise: Scott Archimbaud, March of Dimes; Paul Irwin-Dudek, Autism Speaks; Papa Kofi F. Baffour-Awuah, YAI; and, Nancy Palo, National MS Society (NYC-SNY Chapter) and to David Hessekiel of the Run Walk Ride Fundraising Council who moderated the panel.

It was also great to see many friends from across the country such as Shana Masterson who attended with several of her co-workers from the American Diabetes Association, Jono Smith from Event 360, and a few attendees from the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, where I first focused on managing peer to peer fundraising events.

I joined over 1800 at last week’s Fundraising Day, sponsored by the Association of Development Professionals. I focused on sessions covering online fundraising; highlights are below:

Many nonprofits are clearly still struggling to coordinate offline and online strategies. Per Sheeraz Haji, President of Convio, only a handful of their clients are doing this well. Steve Birnbaum of Jacobson Consulting suggested that the challenges are often not technical but organizational, e.g. getting people to talk to each other.
Online fundraising continues to increase dramatically, but overall it’s still less than 1% of total fundraising revenues. (Some large nonprofit organizations are doing much better than this, however.)
Harry Lynch and Paul Habig of SankyNet offered a variety of techniques to accelerate online revenues – their presentation is available online.
Tim Lash of International Rescue Committee offered tips on eadvocacy, and also suggested a simple three step approach currently in use by SaveDarfur.org
1. sign a petition
2. tell a friend
3. donate
A panel with representatives of Convio, Beaconfire Consulting & Carnegie Hall reiterated the need for synchronization of offline / online efforts, as well as how to make a site visitor ‘known’ by offering multiple reasons to submit an email address. ASPCA is particularly good at doing this.
Using peer to peer fundraising was also suggested since supporters will often prefer to use their own web pages for fundraising rather than an organization’s page created solely for an event or other fundraising initiative.

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