Peer to Peer Fundraising and Social Media
Peer-to-peer fundraisers can use social media to raise both awareness and money for your cause when they make it their cause.
How many times have you already hit up your favorite social media site today? This has become one of the main ways we communicate with friends and family, and consequently one of the best avenues for people supporting your nonprofit organization to reach out to their peers for donations.
Social media is clearly a powerful fundraising tool, especially for raising awareness. With this in mind, you’ll want to make sure you have a strategy in place that optimizes your social media presence before launching your fundraiser. Here are some tips to help you plan.
Clear communications
Enthusiasm and good intentions combined can make for awesome kindling. One of your most important tasks is to find ways to capture and maintain the energy of your supporters while simultaneously avoiding letting your fundraising effort be diffused by supporters who don’t really get what you’re trying to accomplish.
It shouldn’t take long for your supporters to discover that their peer-to-peer fundraising efforts are more successful when the people they talk to know exactly what’s going on. While newby fundraisers will have their hiccups early on in the fundraising process, eventually your peer-to-peer fundraisers should be able to comfortably communicate why they’re raising money for you and how precisely the donations are being used.
The most important facts everyone should know are the fundraising goals, which can be summarized by two main figures:
- The overall amount you want to raise
- The individual amount each person needs to raise to reach this goal
You can also assist your supporters by creating templated information they can use for social media and freely incorporate into their own messages.
Social media loves storytellers
Your supporters have decided to help you with peer-to-peer fundraising because they believe in what you’re doing for reasons you want them to share. There’s a story behind this association, and that’s what will help them successfully raise donations for you from their peers.
Many supporters who approach peer-to-peer fundraising for the first time aren’t sure how to get started. When you encounter these supporters, help them by explaining that all they have to do is tell the story of how they got involved and why they’re supporting you. This will shift their paradigm so that they’ll begin to refer to your nonprofit as “my cause” instead of “their cause.”
This will encourage your supporters to go from tenacious spammers to engagers who share personal stories with their social media peers. Storytelling is one of the most powerful money-raising techniques for your volunteer peer-to-peer fundraisers. When supporters choose to utilize this technique over launching another ineffective soap box for their peers to scroll past, their fundraising project becomes a more compelling conversation piece.
Link love
Your army of supporters is reaching out to their respective armies using social media, and it’s a net that spreads far beyond what your organization could do by itself. Take advantage of casting a wider “net” in this network by creating as many links to donations as possible. Here are some tips to consider:
- Give each peer-to-peer fundraiser the ability to design a personalized donation page.
- Create an online repository where fundraisers can go to snag information to add to posts they make on social media.
- Impress the importance of including a link every time they make a post.
- Include a collection of graphics and infographics for your peer-to-peer fundraisers to use in their posts.
- Video? Absolutely, if you have the resources available.
It’s likely that your fundraising effort will be over before any of the search engines give you attention, but your supporters can make up for this by spreading the word—and their links—across their respective peer networks.
Acknowledge your supporters
Use the very social media platforms your peer-to-peer fundraisers are using to reach out to friends and family to validate and highlight them for their hard work.
React to their posts. Publicly recognize them with new posts. Where it’s possible, tag your fundraisers and share how they’ve made a difference with their decision to support you.
Modesty prevents most of us from admitting it, but we all appreciate being thanked for what we do. Thanks to social media, this has become easier to do than ever, making it a valuable way for you to energize your peer-to-peer fundraisers.
Keep it interactive
Social media users know a spammer when they see one. In today’s environment, a spammer is nothing more than someone who only cares about pushing out a message. It’s your job to see that supporters don’t fall into this mode with their fundraising efforts.
Social media requires interaction. It’s essential that your organization and your peer-to-peer fundraising supporters stay connected through regular communication.
Like I said before, most social media networks make this easy, but just because it’s easy doesn’t mean reposting and sharing gets done, as anyone who’s taken college electives knows intimately. Make it an ongoing effort to remind your peer-to-peer fundraising team to prioritize following up on posts.
It’s a social effort
Social media fundraising campaigns work best when the personality of your nonprofit organization is shared, too. It might take some getting used to, but your organization is a brand and social media is a way for you to establish your brand identity online. Your supporters will help you spread the word.
If you'd like more information about peer-to-peer fundraising, please download our guide, which goes into greater detail on how peer-to-peer fundraising works, as well as how to best implement social media with your peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.
