DIY fundraising is a wonderful way to engage with your community and provide supporters with a meaningful and helpful way to get involved with your organization. Not only does DIY fundraising allow you to take some of the fundraising efforts off your team, but it also helps spread the word about your organization and mission throughout your community as participants reach out to their social circles and advertise their fundraiser on their social media pages.
For a successful DIY campaign with loads of participants raising funds and telling their friends and family, an important first step is to kick-start the campaign with an email blast letting your community members know about what you’re doing and how they can get involved. Once you’ve taken care of this initial push, and gotten some participants signed up, word of your DIY campaign can spread organically amongst the social circles of our participants.
The Invite Participants tool on your peer-to-peer DIY fundraising event record lets you quickly and easily upload a .CSV file of your existing contacts and send an email blast about your DIY campaign. raisin’s email tool allows you to schedule multiple ‘Invite Participants’ emails and tailor invitations for specific groups of contacts. You may choose to use different language and messaging for students, seniors, professionals, parents’ groups, or religious and cultural groups.
Another good practice to kick-start your DIY campaign is to help your community members with ideas for fundraisers. When you invite folks to fundraise for you, inspire them with a list of ideas than can include:
- Birthday fundraisers in lieu of gifts
- Fundraisers to celebrate a wedding, graduation, retirement, or other life Event
- Fundraisers to celebrate recovery from an illness or remission from a cancer diagnosis
- Baby shower fundraisers in lieu of gifts
- Fundraising in memory of a loved one
- Fundraising in order to meet community service requirements for students
- Holiday fundraisers
- Bake sales, garage sales, craft sales
- Gaming, crafting, running, playing a sport
Think of ideas that you feel would be of interest to your community and inspire members to support your mission with their own fundraiser.
Once you have a list of suggestions, you can optimize your DIY campaign site using the ‘Group’ feature of the Multi-Pledge module to let your supporters select their fundraiser type when they register.
Setting each suggested fundraiser type up as a multi-pledge group allows you to provide your participants with a list to inspire them when they register.
By reaching out directly to your existing community contacts, tailoring your message for specific groups, and inspiring participants with ideas for fundraisers, you can get your DIY campaign off to a great start and keep the momentum going with the support of your community.