3 Ways to Improve Peer-to-Peer Event Fundraising With Facebook

Facebook certainly has been getting its fair share of publicity lately. Whether it's founder Mark Zuckerberg being the biggest technology donor in 2012 or the ever-changing and ever-controversial privacy policies — not to mention the Facebook stock news — Facebook continues to be a hot topic.

As it turns out, it's also a great tool for peer-to-peer event fundraising. In a recent whitepaper, "Fundraising With Facebook," online fundraising solutions provider Artez Interactive examined how peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns were affected when event participants using the Artez platform were given the option to share their fundraising pages on Facebook or register for event with Facebook.

What Artez found was that Facebook directly affected fundraising more than any other social network in North America and is the preferred social platform for fundraising activity. Here are some of the key findings:

• 14 percent of all donation and fundraising pages on the Artez platform come from Facebook alone.
• On average, 15 percent to 18 percent of peer-to-peer donations are referred from Facebook.
• Allowing social login — which allows a user to register for a website using an existing social-media username and password — helps increase fundraising.
• Women are more likely than men to fundraise and donate on Facebook.
• 12 percent of traffic to fundraising and donation pages comes from mobile devices.

3 ways to capitalize
With this data in mind, Artez shared three tips to improve peer-to-peer event fundraising campaigns with Facebook.

Make social login options prominent. Allow registrants to easily choose Facebook loving when singing up for campaigns because studies that up to 77 percent of social-media users prefer logging in with social media accounts over creating new accounts. Further, Artez participants who connect their accounts to Facebook raise more than those who don't.

Create social-media toolkits. Provide your constituents with instructions and the tools to share messages, donation landing pages and fundraising pages on Facebook. You can do that in a number of way: a video demonstration, packets, etc. The easier it is for event participants to use social media wisely, the more they'll use and the more effective it will be.

Track your metrics. As with any fundraising medium, it's vital to track and quantify the impact of your fundraising activities on Facebook to make analytical decisions on how to leverage the platform in the future and make your fundraising better.

You can download the entire whitepaper here.