By Geneviève Cassan
A beautifully-designed website can attract attention, but the essence of a truly successful peer-to-peer (P2P) campaign resides in its participants’ ability to fundraise. If fundraisers aren’t engaged and sharing their campaign to their network, it defeats the whole purpose of P2P fundraising – no matter how much effort has been put into building the event.
In recent
Content Marketing blog posts, we have imparted tips to help you personalize the design of your charitable events. Today, we share a few more to give your participants the tools and content they need to run a successful fundraising campaign on your behalf!
1. Fully-customized participant pages
Participants’ personal and team fundraising pages are the most viewed pages in a P2P campaign. And while fundraisers may be passionate enough about your cause to sign up and fundraise, they may not have the time or background knowledge to compose content on their personal page that drives donations effecively. In fact, less than 25% of participants actually update their personal page.
Take the time, then, to treat participant and team pages
like a home page: Craft a well-positioned default page that includes a story with an impact statement, inspiring profile photo and video(s), and banner image. Photos from the field, collateral from previous years’ events and organization mission statements are a great place to start! Indeed, compelling default participant pages will ensure that donors are presented with meaningful content that inspires a gift – just in case participants choose not to customize their page.
2. Consistent communication through all channels
Furthermore, each fundraiser is given access to their own Participant Centre, which allows them to log in to the event and engage their network in many ways -- most notably to send communications soliciting donations to their campaign. Like with personal pages, be sure to prepare a diversity of email templates that can promote your cause. Messaging, including your impact statement, should remain consistent throughout all communication channels. These emails will be made accessible in each Participant Centre, so that your fundraisers can send messages more easily and efficiently.
3. Targeted tips and reminders
Remember that event participants are not full-time fundraisers. They have diverse background and careers, and may not be able to devote their time solely to collecting donations. It is thus important to guide them through the process via targeted communication. It starts with a welcome email that should encourage them to actively use the powerful fundraising tools in their
Participant Centre. They should strongly take advantage of tools such as the Facebook Connect feature and be solicited to share their progress on social media.
Scheduled emails are also available to steward your fundraisers every time they reach a milestone, and provide them with more tips to push their fundraising initiatives even further. Moreover, emails can be targeted to the different types of constituents and locations that your event contains. Team captains, for example, could receive additional information about tips to motivate their troops.
Related: Content Marketing Part 1: Valuable Content is Key to Fundraising Success
Related: Content Marketing Part 2: Creating Memorable Content for P2P Fundraising Sites
Don’t hesitate to contact us to get more information about how raisin's best-in-class suite of Participant tools can help your P2P event raise more money!