How to Make Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Messages More Impactful

With so many peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns out there, it’s critically important to capture attention for your nonprofit’s campaign or event. This starts (and ends) with your messaging. The more impactful your messages are, the more successful your campaign or event will be.

While it might seem overwhelming, creating impactful messaging doesn’t have to be complicated. As you build your story and write communications for your campaign or event, remember these basics:

Make It Powerful

To get your supporters excited about joining your event and helping you raise funds, you need a compelling story that’s easy for participants to share with friends and family. Make sure your messaging addresses these questions:

• What makes our organization unique?
• What impact are we having on our mission?
• What photos or images best reflect our impact on our mission?
• How is our peer-to-peer campaign solving a problem?
• How do we want people to feel about our mission and our campaign (emotionally touched, inspired, outraged)? 
• What will the funds raised from the campaign help our organization accomplish? (Try to tie donation amounts with what the funds will provide for your organization. For example, letting supporters know that their donation will help feed a family of four or educate a child for a year is more impactful than simply asking for a specified amount of money.)
• How can participants help us reach our fundraising campaign goals?
  What statistics are most compelling? (To avoid overwhelming readers, keep stats used in a single communication to one or two, unless it’s a more informative piece in which the user will expect more information.)
  

Make It Easy

A surefire way to lose people’s attention is to make it hard for them to find or understand information. Evaluate your website and emails, and make sure the messaging for your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign is:

• Easy to understand. Your messaging should make it obvious why your organization has launched the peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.
• Easy to convey. You may be solving a complicated problem, but your message should be simple enough for your supporters to explain to others.
• Easy to share. Sharing is the root of peer-to-peer fundraising, which means your peer-to-peer fundraising tools should make it easy for participants to share your message.
  

Make It Consistent

Your messaging should be in line with your organization’s brand. It should be rooted in clear and consistent branding, messaging and impactful imagery.

Consider creating a documented style guide for your organization as well as your peer-to-peer campaign/event to help ensure consistency. This should include mission statement, colors, fonts, logo(s), copy patterns, voice and tone guidelines, content types with examples, and any other brand basics.

A style guide sets the stage and provides guidance for your team, consultants, board members and others to create messages in the appropriate tone and use the best images to communicate and support your mission.

If you don’t have a style guide or the resources to create one, no problem! You can easily create your own mini style guide by keeping track of your communications. Start a document in which you record the types of things you use in communications — the stats, phrasing, tone, imagery, etc. Then, add to this as you go, and reference it as you create new materials.

Make It Visible

Once you’ve pulled your messaging together, make sure you include it in multiple locations, including website, email, social media, advertising and print material. Then, share a tool kit for participants and donors to use, so they can help spread the word. For example, Ride for Roswell’s Tool Kit helps peer-to-peer fundraising participants get the word out to their networks of friends and family quickly and consistently.

These basics will go a long way toward helping you create compelling peer-to-peer fundraising messages that get results.