Peer to Peer

Peer-to-peer fundraising events continue to grow in popularity across the nonprofit sector, and the most common form is the run/walk/ride event. They’re a great way to raise awareness, raise money, and actively engage participants and supporters. Plus, the participants and their friends do a large portion of the fundraising for you.

In its whitepaper, "Fundraising With Facebook," Artez Interactive provided three ways to improve peer-to-peer fundraising events with Facebook.

By now, anyone in the fundraising sector knows about the St. Baldrick's Foundation and its head-shaving events to raise money for childhood cancer research.

While peer-to-peer fundraising has been amplified with the rise of the Internet and especially social media, the strategy itself is not new. As Eleventy Marketing Group's Angie Moore noted on her Navigating Off the Napkin blog last year, "This strategy has been around forever and has gone through a lot of shifts but continues to be a fantastic source of new donors, new volunteers and bottom-line revenue for organizations."

In a little more than a month, FundRaising Success hosts its brand-new conference, Engage P2P: Redefining Peer-to-Peer Fundraising. We have a wonderful lineup of presenters and advisors, including Cassidy Richards, principal consultant at  online marketing agency and a sponsor of Engage P2P Charity Dynamics.

If your organization does P2P fundraising — or if you wish it would — I hope you'll join us in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 21.

Fundraising software provider Blackbaud shared an interesting, interactive infographic on peer-to-peer fundraising. The infographic and accompanying 2013 Blackbaud Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Study look at the key performance indicators for walk, 5K, cycling and endurance fundraising events. Those KPIs are loyalty, donation, level and fundraising performance.

The unprecedented success of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge does beg a few questions, of course. Will the ALS Association be able to retain those ice-bucket givers and convert them to regular donors? Or are they too adrenaline-motivated to go into the usual new-donor stream? How did they give? What kind of data was collected? How does an organization handle a huge and sudden spike in giving (aside from the obvious, “Why, happily, thank you very much”)? Where does the organization go from here? Can it replicate the giving surge with a campaign of its own making? (Probably not.) Or does it just thank its lucky stars and recognize this for the fluke that it was?

Let’s talk peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising, shall we? I took part in a roundtable discussion at the 2014 Engage Conference by FundRaising Success that consisted of an open share of ideas on how to get a P2P campaign off the ground. I compiled five of the best ideas that you can implement quickly without much headache (or overhead)!

Online fundraising platform RallyBound recently unveiled the "Top 5 Wildest Nonprofit Fundraisers," highlighting five extremely creative — and successful — peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.