Peer-to-peer fundraising is a powerful tool for nonprofits—it’s engaging, customizable, and puts less strain on your time and resources while empowering your supporters to take the lead. While peer-to-peer fundraising is not entirely hands-off, the payoff is well worth the effort!
One of the first areas where an investment of your time will pay dividends throughout a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign is participant recruitment. Who you recruit to fundraise for your campaign and how you empower them will ultimately determine your success.
Below, we walk through five key steps for effective peer-to-peer recruitment to give your nonprofit the structure and best practices it needs to recruit your highest-performing fundraising team yet.
While peer-to-peer campaigns can take many forms, we'll discuss time-bound campaigns (like a walk-a-thon or giving day) as opposed to DIY-style campaigns in which supporters can launch giving pages at any time (like holidays or birthdays).
1. Identify Your Target Segments.
By focusing on groups of potential participants who bring the highest likelihood of success and high levels of engagement, you’ll set up your campaign to meet and exceed its goals from the very start. We’ve identified several key groups that often make ideal ‘social fundraisers’ for nonprofits:
● Previous peer-to-peer fundraising participants
● Active donors
● Subscribers to your nonprofit’s newsletters
● Followers of your nonprofit’s social media feeds
● Active volunteers
● Frequent event attendees
● Partners in the community, like corporate sponsors, peer organizations, and local public figures who help boost your name
● Board members (especially if you’re looking for easy ways to get them more involved with fundraising!)
What do all these groups have in common? They all have proven histories of engaging with your organization, and they likely have emotional stakes in your success. As you lay out a segmentation strategy, start with this foundation of engagement.
From there, further refine your search based on the specifics of your campaign. Is it designed around an in-person event? Will it be held completely online? These details determine the scope and geographic reach of your pool of fundraisers.
Also, consider the fundraising context of your campaign. A gala event with a large fundraising goal might be best served by ambassadors who are well-known locally, while broader groups of engaged supporters could help with a more general, online-only annual campaign.
Think through all these factors to create one or two personas of ideal peer-to-peer fundraising participants.
2. Promote the Opportunity and Reach Out to Potential Fundraisers.
With your target audience(s) identified, begin reaching out to promote your fundraising opportunity. To cast the widest net, take a two-pronged approach:
- Filter your CRM using your personas to generate a list of individuals for direct outreach.
- Post about the upcoming campaign on your marketing channels and link to a sign-up form for interested participants. Then, screen respondents to find those who roughly fit your personas. Expressing interest is an excellent indicator of engagement, even if these supporters don’t exactly fit your target segments.
Of course, this second prong takes time—if you’re working on a close deadline, don’t have the work hours to commit to screening respondents, or simply don’t need that many participants, focus solely on direct outreach.
Once you identify potential participants, provide key information to attract them to your campaign. Details about the campaign, its objectives and fundraising goal, intended outcomes and impacts, and what fundraisers will be expected to do should all be determined and documented ahead of time.
Email is often the best channel to reach out, but if you have other proven means of connecting with a supporter via phone or social media message, these are also viable options. In your email, explain why you want them to join your peer-to-peer fundraising team and make the ask.
Pro tip: If you’ve hosted peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns before, gather social proof and/or impact material to really convince your prospects. You might even enlist past fundraisers to help with recruitment.
3. Create Campaign Materials for Your Fundraisers.
When recruitment is underway, develop campaign kits for your fundraisers to use once they’re on board. Recommended sections of your how-to guides for participants include:
● Explanations of campaign page functionalities
● Dummy fundraising pages to demonstrate best practices and ideal language for participants to use
● Collections of collateral for participants to use on their fundraising pages, like campaign talking points, impact statistics, sample language for asking for gifts, relevant images, videos, and more
● Calendars of the overarching campaign timeline with benchmark periods highlighted as ideal times for fundraisers to take stock of their progress and shift strategies, with your help if needed
It’s also a good idea to develop templated language your team can use internally to streamline communication with peer-to-peer fundraisers throughout the campaign.
For example, create templated welcome and orientation messages, encouragement and suggestion emails for when a participant is falling behind or lacking engagement, and general blasts to send as the campaign deadline approaches and you need to ramp up energy for a final push.
4. Outline a Fundraiser Journey for the Campaign.
Before you officially begin training your recruited fundraisers, consider the overall journey you’ll offer them. Today’s “journeys” and “experiences” are more than just marketing and design buzzwords.
Think through the holistic picture of when and how you’ll interact with participants. The results? More and better-defined opportunities for you to help, support, course-correct, and engage participants, which leads to happier supporters and better fundraising outcomes.
Your peer-to-peer fundraiser journey may consist of these key stages and touchpoints:
- The welcome and training processes
- A campaign kick-off gathering
- Any competition or incentive aspects for participants, like rewards, challenges, and other gamification strategies
- Regular check-in meetings with your team throughout the fundraising process
- Ad hoc meetings with your team for extra support or troubleshooting
- Final countdown messages before the end of the campaign
- A small wrap-up gathering, participant recognition ceremony, the main event of the campaign (like a walk-a-thon or gala), etc.
Of course, direct involvement requires staff time—plan ahead to ensure you’ll have the capacity to support fundraisers through their journey. You can also adjust or reduce these touchpoints if the scope of your peer-to-peer campaign doesn’t warrant all of them. A more casual campaign without particularly high goals can be a bit more hands-off than a major push from high-impact ambassadors before your year-end gala, for instance.
Defining these interactions ahead of time with a journey exercise helps you better plan and prepare, resulting in a better experience for everyone.
5. Train Your Participating Fundraisers.
When you’ve assembled your dream team of fundraisers, kick off the training process. You may choose to conduct training as a group or provide participants with training materials as soon as they join, depending on what will work best for your campaign.
As you prepare your training process, ensure it covers these essentials:
● An overview of the campaign, its purpose, goals, and timeline
● Specific fundraising goals you’ve set for your fundraisers or an exercise for them to set their own goals
● The packet of instructions, example campaign pages, brand collateral, and talking points that you developed in Step 3
● How and when you’ll check in with fundraisers to review progress
It’s recommended that you deliver your training both via meetings and in email for easy reference later. A webinar, virtual Q&A sessions, workshops, or other online gatherings, plus a PDF copy of all training materials will give all participants the guidance they need to push the campaign forward confidently.
Also, ensure your fundraisers know who to contact for help, like your lead event coordinator. This individual should both be familiar with the campaign and have the capacity to respond in a timely fashion.
Putting Your Plan into Action
Through these steps, you should have a reliable plan for consistently recruiting participants and equipping them with the materials and support they need to help you conduct your best peer-to-peer fundraising campaign yet.
When it’s time to put your plan into action, be ready to make adjustments as you go. Ensure your peer-to-peer fundraising technology works properly and facilitates easy performance measurement once the campaign is underway. Note any important trends that emerge, for example, in the supporter segments that express the most interest in fundraising opportunities, have the furthest online reach, or secure the most donations.
As the campaign progresses, actively engage your participants to offer support. Lay out a recognition plan (built around your competition/gamification strategy, if you have one). Easy follow-up messages of gratitude and campaign impact reports can go a long way toward reinforcing the connections you’ve built.