Peer to Peer

I have two teenage sons, both in superb physical condition. As their mother, I feel empowered to set them to mowing grass, painting, sealing the driveway and other character-building tasks whenever I see them in repose. Likewise, it’s fun to put the bright young minds at Turnkey to work in similar fashion. A frequent object of my "what do you think" spotlight is Julian May. He suffers from the ability to write, which makes him a target. I asked him, "In your mind what’s the most important thing right now in peer-to-peer fundraising?"...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising rallies your supporters together to reach your fundraising goal, as each person individually fundraises from their own networks. Since social media is a significant aspect of many people’s lives, creating a strategy for all the posting, tweeting and sharing can help you better reach your donors—and even reach beyond your fundraising goal.…

The nonprofit TD Beach to Beacon 10K has become wildly popular as Maine’s largest road race. Registration for Saturday’s event, which drew more than 6,300 runners, filled in less than four minutes. But while Beach to Beacon’s revenues have more than tripled over the past 15 years, its charitable contributions have declined as a percentage,…

Recently, my hubster Otis Fulton, Turnkey’s psychological expert, read Tom Ahern’s book, “Seeing Through a Donor’s Eyes: How to Make a Persuasive Case for Everything From Your Annual Drive to Your Planned Giving Program to Your Capital Campaign.” As promised, Otis said, the book covers a lot of ground. Ahern focuses on writing a “case for support” directed at various types of donors...

Believe it or not, an understanding of what causes post-traumatic stress disorder tells us a lot about what motivates people. How? We in nonprofit can make people feel necessary. We can give them purpose. We can give them ways to show competence, and to be part of something bigger than themselves. We can make them happier than they were before while accomplishing important goals for humanity...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising is built on the backs of multitudes of volunteer fundraisers. And the hardest part of P2P fundraising is finding people willing to lend their backs to the effort, also called acquisition. Acquisition is difficult. It’s hard because we often invite the wrong people to our P2P parties, in the wrong ways. At Turnkey, we classify events into two awkwardly named siblings: retail attractive and retail unattractive...

I spoke at a client’s conference this past winter. I was in Little Rock, Ark., with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) at its leadership conference. After my return home, I received a handwritten thank-you note from Nicole Dolan, my client and one of the organizers of the meeting...

Peer-to-peer is the fast food of fundraising. It is fundraising by the numbers. It is about setting up a system with known drivers and letting that system work. It is big. It is exponential. It is predictable...

As professional fundraisers, we often feel like fishermen. We dangle our best-case messaging like bait over a pool of potential donors and wait patiently (or not so patiently) until one takes it and makes a gift. But when it comes to peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising, the fishing becomes even more challenging. As a P2P fundraiser, you’re…

By all accounts, Monday's Boston Marathon was a huge success, both as a triumph of human spirit and for charity. If it were included in Peer to Peer Professional Forum's "P2P Fundraising 30," last year's event would have ranked 17th among all P2P programs in 2015 gross total and second among single events. This year's race raised $16 million, so far. That should be cause for universal celebration, but not everyone is thrilled with the idea of Boston Marathon as charity run...