The Heart of Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Operations

• Show real-time goals.
• Reward top individuals and teams.
• Make it easy to find the calls to action.
• Help people engage their peers by making it easy to find people, teams and events.
• Use real-time tabulation.
• Encourage donations, and prominently display donations from others.
• Minimize the choices for individual and team pages.
• Easily direct the user to a task.
• Minimize the steps for creating pages/teams.
• Make it simple to follow.
• Make it easy and clear to process a payment in one step.
• Focus on responsive/adaptive design so your website works no matter the device — one screen for all devices.
• Don’t forget tech support — Who will support your participants? How? Phone? Chat? You’ll need tech support both during the workday and after hours.
• Include gamification. “This is a virtual incentive,” Schmitz said. Provide badges for achievements such as starting a team as a captain, raising a certain amount of money, hitting your goal, bringing in team members, etc. “The psychology of giving recognition creates more engagement,” he added.

Schmitz also said gauging success is vital on the website, both for the organization and participants. He suggested showing the overall goal of the event on the homepage as well as the goal for participants.