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TRANSCRIPT
Marketing Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Event
Introduction
You’ve planned the perfect peer-to-peer fundraising event. You’ve pulled out all the stops, from booking a killer venue to picking a stellar menu. Trouble is, no one is registering! It’s a fundraising event planner’s worst nightmare. What could you have done differently?
Invest more time (and maybe a little money) to marketing your event to the community. This eBook provides you with the ins and outs of creating and implementing your event marketing strategy.
When planning your marketing strategy, you need to get to know your audience. If your fundraising event has a target demographic, try to figure out what strategies reach that group. Homing in on a target audience should tell you if potential attendees prefer digital appeals, direct mail, or word of mouth. If you’ve got a large community of followers, word of mouth can be an incredible force for driving people to register, form teams, and get fundraising for you. If you’re reaching out to different demographics (like people from different age groups), you’ll need to determine if using different marketing mediums to advertise your event is your best bet. You’ll most likely want to use a few different types of media to get the word out!
Qgiv can help you host successful peer-to-peer fundraising events. Visit our website to learn more about how we can help you reach your event fundraising goals through easy online event registration, the ability to create individual and team fundraising pages, and more so your supporters can confidently raise more funds for your organization.
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Peer-to-Peer Text FundraisingDonation Forms
Table of ContentsBranding Your Peer-to-Peer Event
Market Your Peer-to-Peer Event With Email
Make It Easy For People to Find And Use Your Event Page
Use Videos To Draw Attention To Your Peer-to-Peer Event
Use Social Media To Spread The Word And Build Excitement
Creating And Advertising Incentive Plans
Use Blogs To Share Your Event
Promote Your Event With Local Media
Make The Most Of Your Community
Conclusion
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Branding Your Peer-to-Peer Event
What’s your goal for your peer-to-peer event? If you’re anything like most nonprofits, your goals are twofold—you want to spread the word about your nonprofit to people who may never have heard of you, and you want to inspire those people to donate to your event. For both of those goals, success is going to be largely dependent upon how you brand your event.
Some nonprofits use their organization’s brand for their event. Others choose to brand their events with unique names, logos, and color palettes. A few do a little of both! Whatever route you decide to take, you’ll want to ensure you have a grasp on a few branding elements, including:
• A name for your event
• A logo—either your organization’s logo or a unique event logo
• A color palette you’ll use for your event
• A catchphrase, if you think it will suit your event
• An overarching story and mission that will drive your event
Big Brothers Big Sisters of Jasper and Newton Counties
If you have a well-defined brand for your nonprofit, for your event, or for both, you’re in good shape! If you’re still working on getting your brand together, check out this webinar about branding for nonprofits.
Once you’ve solidified your brand elements, you’ll be ready to add a personal touch to the different pieces of your peer-to-peer campaign. This is an important step! Not only does your brand serve as a sort of online personality for your event, it’s also a valuable marketing piece. When people see your participants posting about your event on social
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media, your brand is what will stick out to them. Your brand is what they’ll see when your participants email them about donating. It’s what they’ll notice when they land on your donation page. It’s a big deal!
Use your branding to create a cohesive experience for donors and participants alike. You’ll want to use your branding on:
• Your event homepage and sub-pages
• Social settings that determine how your event appears on social channels
• Emails to donors and potential participants
• Appeal templates for emails and social posts you’ll create for your participants
• And more!
Want to know the best part about having your brand extend to various assets in your peer-to-peer campaign? It saves you so much work! You won’t have to try to decide what colors to use on the participant fundraising pages and the team fundraising pages. You’ll already have a story in mind that can guide content creation. You won’t have to worry about what logo to use on your emails or social posts. You’ll already know ahead of time!
Qgiv Branding Tips
• Using your brand’s color palette, logo, and associated images is easy with our event builder. Tools like the color picker help you use exactly the right color for various elements on your event pages, and it’s easy to upload all your logos and images for simple retrieval later. It’s also easy to add text, upload pictures, and embed videos that tell your event’s story and show people how they can make an impact by getting involved.
• If you want your participants to have easy access to your design assets, you can upload them to the “Resources” area of your control panel. Once uploaded, participants will be able to access those files from their participant fundraising dashboards. Then, it just takes a click or two for them to find logos, images, taglines, or any other elements you want them to use.
• Build a few email and social media templates for your participants! You can include brand elements in those templates so participants will be able to build effective branded messages to their friends, families, and colleagues. It’s faster and more convenient for them, and you’ll have peace of mind knowing your brand is in front of tons of potential donors.
• Use the “Social Settings” area of your control panel to optimize how your event pages will appear on social media. You can pre-set an image that will display when people share your event page, and you can control the text that accompanies those links. It’s a great way to make sure your event is presented in the best possible light!
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Market Your Peer-to-Peer Event with Email
You’ve got your branding handled and your event set up and ready to share. What’s next?
It’s email! Email is one of the most effective marketing tools you have at your disposal, and it’s a great way to start drumming up support and recruiting participants. In this section, we’ll look at two different ways you can use email to market your event. In one, you’ll be marketing directly to your audience. In the other, you’ll use emails to encourage your participants to recruit family and friends to be donors or to participate themselves.
Use email to market your event to your supporters
The people on your email lists have already expressed an interest in your work. Their levels of commitment to your mission are varied—someone who signed up to receive your newsletter isn’t as engaged as a monthly donor of 5 years—but they’re all ideal prospects for your peer-to-peer campaign.
The first step in marketing to your list is to segment that list based on people’s experiences with you. A few segments to consider using when marketing your event include:
• Existing donors
• Existing volunteers
• Past participants (if your event is more than 1 year old)
• General emails
Once you’ve identified your segments, you can tweak your marketing emails to appeal to each of them.
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If you were going to use the four segments outlined above, you could target your emails like this:
You’ll want to be more specific in how you thank past donors, participants, and volunteers. You should also have real-life impact statements and stories in your emails that are more compelling than what’s included in the examples above. The goal here is to communicate how people’s involvement will further your mission, then to ask them to get involved.
For each email you send, make sure you include content that is relevant to the audience you’re addressing (don’t thank people for past support if they’ve never donated). As you write each message, ask yourself what you want the readers to do when they open the email, then ask them to do that thing. Do you want this list to register to participate? Ask!Do you want them to donate? Ask them to give!
Existing donors:“You’ve been an amazing partner with us, and we’ve loved working with you to make a positive difference in our community! We wanted to invite you to get involved with this upcoming event. Whether you want to sign up to participate or donate to your favorite fundraiser, your involvement would make a world of difference.”
Volunteers:“You’ve been an invaluable part of our family in the past, and we can’t thank you enough for the time, effort, and dedication you’ve shown as a volunteer. Please join us as we raise money to fund this important cause! Your involvement as a participant, donor, or volunteer will help members of our community in a big way.”
Past participants:“Last year, you joined us for this event and made a big difference in our community. Join us again this year! Your experience with this event, your enthusiasm for the cause, and your dedication to last year’s event would be an amazing addition to all the fun that will happen this year.”
General emails:“It’s time for our annual peer-to-peer fundraising event! If you’ve ever wanted to make a difference in your community while having fun with other supporters in our community, this is a great opportunity to get involved. You can register to participate as a fundraiser today!”
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Once you’ve got a base of participants signed up for your peer-to-peer event, you can use our next strategy: help your participants market your event for you using specialized email tools.
Example Outreach Calendar for Non-Participants
Send a few emails to various segments during your campaign. Some good emails to schedule include:
• Teaser emails sent before registration opens
• Two or more invitations to register sent during the early stages of registration
• An appeal for donations as your participants start building momentum
• An invitation to your in-person event (if you’re having one)
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Example Outreach Calendar for Participants
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Qgiv Email Tips
• Use your reporting tools to identify and pull lists of people who have supported you in the past. You’ll want to use your CRM to make sure your segments are active; luckily, we have integrations with many of the industry’s CRMs available!
• Edit your peer-to-peer event’s thank-you pages and receipts to include language about sharing your event with others. When new donors or participants complete their transaction, your reminder will be front and center!
• Creating email templates for your participants is easy. Write your template using your favorite word processor, then upload them to the “Resources” section of your control panel. To get to the resources area, click on the “Content” option in your control panel.
• Encourage your participants to stay engaged using our Email Campaigns tool! In your control panel, go to “Share Your Event” and click “Email Campaigns.” Choose what type of email you want to send and get typing! You can even schedule emails ahead of time, which is handy if you and your staff won’t have time to email your participants once the campaign has launched.
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Make It Easy for People to Find and Use Your Event Page
People who see and react to your marketing emails, social posts, and other promotions are going to need a place to go for more information. That’s why your event home page is one of the most important marketing assets you have on hand.
Here are a few strategies you can use to make your event page an effective tool for your fundraiser.
Build an amazing event page
A great peer-to-peer event page is more than a registration form and a campaign thermometer! It delights those who visit it, gets people excited about participating, and provides all the information people want to read before they get involved.
When you’re building your event page, outline what pages you’ll want to include and how those pages will help you market your event. Some great pages you might want to build include:
Sponsor page:Show off your sponsors! This shows sponsors that you appreciate their support, and it will make their marketing departments happy. It also increases the odds that a sponsoring company will share that page with their own networks.
Event details page:If your peer-to-peer fundraiser is centered on an event like a 5k or bicycle race, this is important! Add a page that includes important details like your event’s date and time, where it’s being held, and any other information attendees need to know.
An impact page: Many people prefer to do a little research before registering or donating to an event. Consider building a page that includes different stories about people you’ve helped, pictures from projects your fundraiser will support, and other materials that are sharable and will inspire people to get involved.
A team leaderboard page:Fundraising participants LOVE being in the top spots on a leaderboard. Create a special leaderboard page that displays your top-performing teams or individuals. They’ll love sharing their victories with their friends and family, and that means more eyes on your page.
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Once you’ve built a great page, spend some time making your event search-friendly. Say you’re building a page for your annual event, which is called “Hike for the Cure.” If you don’t do anything to your event page, someone might search “Hike for the Cure” and find old events, blog articles, news stories, and lots of other links that could make the actual event hard to find. Making a few simple tweaks — like adding page headers, page descriptions, and page titles — will make your event rank higher on search engines, which will increase traffic to your page.
Make it obvious
Whether or not you decide to use a microsite, it’s important that your event be easy to find from your organization’s website. This can be as simple as including a link to your event page on the homepage! You may also want to consider adding a banner or image to your other pages, which ensures your event is visible on every page someone visits.
It’s also important that your event is easy to navigate. When you create buttons or add calls to action, make sure your users know two things. They need to know what you want them to do, and they need to know how to do it. Once you get your event page set up, the best way to check usability is to have someone like a friend or a family member take a look at it. Do they know how to register? Is it easy to make a donation? Can they find your social sharing buttons? If they struggle with your layout, so will the rest of your audience!
Set up a redirect
This is a simple tactic that can have a HUGE impact! If you’ve run your event before, google your event. Do you see pages for your past events in the search results? If you do, so do your potential participants… and it can throw them off. Make it easier for them by redirecting old events to your new page. This is a tactical tip that will reduce participant confusion and ensure they can sign up easily. Just do it!
Qgiv Event Page Tips
• Use Qgiv’s Event Builder tool to build your own microsite! You can build a great event home page, add pages, tell your story, and use the design tools to make sure the branding is perfect. Then, just add a link to your event homepage to your website.
• It’s easy to customize the wording on your event’s buttons, fields, and navigation items. Feel free to play with the wording you use to move others to action. Just remember it needs to be intuitive!
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• Set up specific page titles, descriptions, and headers for each of the sub-pages in your event page. On each page, use the “Advanced” tab in your Event Builder control panel to customize your pages and make it easier for people to search for your event.
• When your event is over, go to your “Event Settings” area in your control panel. You can set up a redirect right there! You might want to consider redirecting the page to point to your organization’s home page. When your next event starts, you can change the redirect to point to the new event.
Train Your Participants to Market Your Event for You
One of the best parts of peer-to-peer fundraising is watching people sign up for your event, then seeing them go into their social circles and raise money for you. Here are several ways you can make that happen.
Train current participants to market your event
You wouldn’t expect new staff to raise money without training. Don’t ask that of your participants! Fundraising can be intimidating, and everything you do to take away the intimidation factor will make you more successful.
When you train new fundraising staff, you give them lots of pointers. You teach them best practices for telling their stories, writing a great fundraising email, and how to make an appeal on social media.
Do the same for your participants! There can be a lot of anxiety associated with raising money for another organization. But they’ll be most enthusiastic about doing it if they’re confident in the process. While you can’t do all your participants’ fundraising for them, you can give them resources that will help.
Try:
• Holding an in-person training session• Recording and posting an online “how-to” video• Sending an email (or even a whole email series!) full
of FAQs and tips• Offering how-to guides or resources• Making staff available to answer questions
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Give your participants some fundraising templates
It’s hard for inexperienced fundraisers to know how to ask for financial support. Give them templates they can use to communicate with friends and family! Providing templates for emails, social posts, and other appeals gives participants a framework for effective fundraising. They also save fundraisers time, which is important! Your participants are balancing raising money with jobs, family, and other obligations. The easier it is to ask for support, the more likely they’ll be to do so.
First, create some fundraising email templates for your participants. Remember: the majority of your participants have never raised money before, and they’re trying to fit volunteer fundraising into their busy schedules. If you want them to send fundraising emails between work, kids, family, and social obligations, you’ll need to make it easy for them!
Put together one or two templates they can customize and send to their friends, family, and colleagues. Make sure they’re short, readable, and friendly-sounding—you don’t want your fundraisers to sound like robots!
Sample email template:
Hi, [FIRST NAME]!
You might know that I’m running in this year’s [Event Name]. What you might not know is that I’m running the 5k to raise money for [Organization Name]. [Change stat as needed: Our hometown ranks in the top 5 cities in the country for food insecurity], and I’m working to change that alongside [Organization Name].
Would you please support me by donating to [Organization Name]’s event? [Change impact information as needed: $10 can feed a family for three days, and your support would make such a huge difference for hungry kids!] If you can donate, you can do so right here on my personal page. If you can’t donate, would you please share that page with others who might?
Together, you and I can [feed Lakeland families]. Thank you!
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Sample social post template:
Create a toolkit for your fundraising participants
Another great way to encourage participants to send fundraising emails is to share some simple best practices with them. Sending them a participant toolkit with some images, a couple email best practices, and some ideas about how they can share their story with their networks will alleviate a lot of nervousness around asking others for money. Here’s an article that includes two different participant toolkit templates!
What email best practices do you follow when you’re sending appeals at work? Share those!
Then, once you have a few fundraising email templates for your participants, put together a brief outreach calendar that spans the fundraising period of your peer-to-peer event. The emails in this outreach plan should be designed to keep your participants engaged in marketing and promoting your event.
Use these emails to share encouraging messages, tips and tricks, noteworthy milestones, and anything else you feel will motivate people to stay involved. Remember: the more your participants share your event with their networks, the more successful your event will be. Keep your participants excited about raising money and sharing your event!
Get past participants involved
Do you have a group of veteran participants who are already familiar with your event? Get them involved! They’ll already have at least one year of fundraising experience under their belt, and they’ll already be well-versed in how your event runs, what participants can expect, and what the event will accomplish. This is a huge advantage!
Did you know that [Change stat as needed: thousands of families in Lakeland are hungry? We have one of the highest rates in the country for food insecurity]. That’s why I’m [running in] the [Event Name] and raising money for [Organization Name]. Join me in [Change action as needed: helping feed our community]! Please donate to my fundraising page: [Change impact as needed: $10 can feed a family for three days]. We can accomplish so much together!
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Turn these participants into marketing partners by:
When you ask your repeat participants to take on extra responsibilities, make it worth their while! One great way to do this is to create a branded “club” for returning participants who are going above and beyond to help. They can have their own shirts, get a fun piece of event merch, receive extra recognition—whatever you choose to do, make sure you’re showing them how much their extra work means to you. They’re going to be some of your biggest advocates during the event. Show them some love!
How do we know your participants will market your event for you? We’ve done it ourselves! Here’s a personal story that Abby Jarvis, our Nonprofit Education Manager, shared with her networks as she raised money for a peer-to-peer event hosted by Lakeland Volunteers in Medicine. If you’re interested in learning about peer-to-peer fundraising from a participant’s perspective, you can read her “Diaries of a Peer-to-Peer Fundraiser” series here.
• Encouraging them to recruit additional participants
• Asking them to serve as team captains
• Inviting them to serve as points of contact for new participants who need help
• Highlighting their stories and testimonials on your page and social channels
• Asking them to mentor new fundraisers (Just like Lakeland Volunteers In Medicine does to inspire their new fundraisers!)
Qgiv Tips for Marketing with Participants
• We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: use the “Resources” section of your peer-to-peer control panel! It’s a great place to offer email templates and other resources your participants will need to effectively market your event.
• Use the “walkthrough” feature to guide participants through customizing and sharing their fundraising pages. We’ve noticed that participants who complete all the steps in a walkthrough raise more money than those who don’t!
• The badges system is a great way to encourage your participants to share their pages with their networks. Rewarding fundraising milestones with a snazzy badge makes staying engaged more fun. You can even tie certain badges to fun incentives!
• Use your “Email Campaigns” tools to reach out to team captains and other highly-involved participants. Regular emails from you and your staff will keep them encouraged, make them feel good about being extra-engaged, and keep their momentum going.
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Use Videos to Draw Attention to Your Peer-to-Peer Event
You’ve probably noticed the growing prevalence of video on websites and social channels. Video marketing is growing in popularity for one simple reason—it works!
According to a Google survey conducted in 2013, 57% of people who watch a nonprofit video will go on to make a donation to that nonprofit. 57%! That’s an immense percentage that really shows the power a video can have.
Videos should play a major role in your peer-to-peer event marketing strategy. If you’re concerned about the cost of putting together an effective video, don’t worry! There are tons of options available to you that will help you. Videos these days don’t have to be perfectly-polished productions. In fact, many people respond to the sense of informality, personality, and transparency that accompanies simple videos. You can, of course, go all out on a high-quality promotional video to promote your event. But other kinds of videos can be equally as effective if they’re shot on a smartphone.
What kinds of videos should you consider putting together? Here are some ideas:
You don’t have to come up with all the content for these videos, either. Try interviewing your board members, CEO, or volunteers about why they’re involved and why they’re excited about your event. Ask participants to share their stories. Do a live stream at someone’s fundraising event or at the venue as you’re planning your event.
There are a ton of free (or nearly free) tools available to nonprofits who want to use videos to market their peer-to-peer campaigns. Recording a short video on your phone
• Trailers for your event
• Invitation videos
• Updates and announcements
• Sneak peeks into planning
• Fundraiser spotlights
• Stories and testimonials
“57% of people who watch a nonprofit video will go on to make
a donation to that nonprofit”
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and uploading it to YouTube is easy! Instagram and Facebook also have video-hosting capabilities, and you can even use them to live stream interviews, stories, and other videos to your audience.
If you want a great example of a video that’s simple and effective, check out this video from Purple Plunge 2019! It’s a fun recap of their event, and it’ll be a great marketing tool as they work to recruit participants for next year’s events.
Here’s another short, effective video (less than 1 minute!) filmed by the director of NuPath, Inc. explaining why people should get involved in their event. It’s shot directly on a cell phone and features a short, to-the-point appeal for participation—and it worked!
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Qgiv Video Marketing Tips
• Make the most of your videos by using them wherever you can! Embed them on your event home page. Give them to your participants. Add them to your thank-you pages. Send links to them in your receipts. If you put work into creating videos, make sure you show them off!
• Encourage your participants to make their own videos! Include a short list of best practices, ideas, and resources in your participants’ resource center to help get them started.
• Include calls to actions in your videos and encourage participants to do the same. Ask people to donate, to visit your event page, or to share your video to raise visibility for your organization. If you have text fundraising options available, include your keyword and the number they can use to text!
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Use Social Media to Spread the Word and Build Excitement
Peer-to-peer fundraising is an inherently social fundraising method. Your supporters reach out to their social networks for support and, hopefully, more and more people start donating to and sharing your event page. In today’s digital world, the most popular channels for these interactions are social media channels.
Because a majority of peer-to-peer fundraising activity takes place on social media, we’ll split this section into several smaller sub-sections that address different strategies you can use to put together a solid social media marketing plan for your event.
Create shareable content
Spend some time making your event as shareable as possible. And “shareable” doesn’t just mean “easy for people to actually share by pressing a button.”
Shareable content captures people’s attention and moves them emotionally. It inspires people to get involved, inspires people to share it with their networks, and sticks in their head. Think about the videos, images, and text posts you see floating around Facebook or other social channels. What common denominators do they possess? What makes people share them?
When you’re building your peer-to-peer event, make it shareable by building emotion and inspiration into the fabric of the event itself.
Create shareable content by:
• Helping people visualize the difference they can make by participating or donating. Either center your content on a particular project donations will fund or by relating the dollars you raise to tangible outcomes in the community.
• Using powerful images. A good image can have a huge role in connecting viewers to your cause! Humans are visual creatures, and we’re hardwired to seek out and respond to images. Use this to your advantage! When you build your event, include a photo gallery to highlight your event and the impact it makes. Include good photos in your participants’ resources, too! Try to use
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images of people having fun at past events, photos of the people who benefit from your fundraiser, and other images that will get people excited about participating in your event. Since people love photos so much, image-based posts are some of the most successful posts on social channels. They’re eye-catching, more shareable, and more emotionally significant.
• Encouraging people to share their own stories. Some of the most compelling fundraising stories are ones your supporters and clients can tell. Do you have a participant who’s benefited from your work? Ask them to share their story! Does one of your fundraising participants have a personal story that inspired them to raise money for your cause? Ask them to share it! One key element of peer-to-peer fundraising is the element of “social proof.” You telling your own story can be effective. But it’s even more effective when other people share your story for you. Does your post about offering services to your community make an impact? Sure. Does a story from someone who’s raising money for you because they benefited from those services make a bigger impact? Heck yes! Encourage others to share their stories, then ask their permission to share them as well. Those stories are great materials for blog posts, videos, social posts, and other marketing assets!
Put together a social media marketing calendar
Before your event really gets going, spend some time planning out a social media calendar. Some types of posts you’ll want to schedule include things like:
• Teaser posts Spend some time getting people excited about your event before you open up registration. Show them pictures of people at past events having a blast and explain why people should get involved. Get people hyped!
• Recruitment posts Once your event is live, it’s time to spread the word! At this point, many people will be aware of the upcoming event and the basic reasons they may want to participate or donate. You’ll want to make this type of post periodically, especially in the early days of registration.
• Persuasive posts Do you have any cool incentives available to people who recruit a certain number of teammates? Are there prizes people can win if they’re in the top 10 fundraisers? Do they win any neat swag if they raise a certain amount? Let people know!
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• Milestone posts Celebrate your participants’ progress! When you reach certain percentages of your fundraising goal, hit noteworthy recruitment numbers, or process significant dollar amounts, make a post to celebrate! This is a great time to thank your participants and your donors alike.
• Participant spotlights Show your participants how much you appreciate them and inspire people to stay involved! In this type of post, highlight people who have done a remarkable job raising money and awareness for your cause. You’ll want to have their permission before you post about them, of course.
• Countdown posts These are especially effective if you’re very close to your fundraising goal or nearing the day of the event. Creating a sense of urgency is a tried-and-true fundraising strategy, and it applies to peer-to-peer fundraising!
• Trivia posts Looking to increase engagement on your posts? Ask trivia questions about your event! You could take these posts to another level by associating prizes with them; try entering people who get the correct answer in a drawing to win prizes or give away event merchandise.
Not sure how to make a social calendar? Use our event-specific social media calendar template to get started.
Once you’ve got a social media calendar built, schedule out what posts you’re able to write in advance. Not all posts can be automated, but many can be!
If you know you want to post 3 days before the event to push for last-minute donations, go ahead and schedule that post. It’ll be one less task to handle as you approach the day of the event.
Even when you can’t schedule posts in advance, having a social calendar means you’ll still have a solid plan each day. Forget trying to come up with a post topic when you’re fried from organizing last-minute details—you’ll already know what you need to post!
#explorehashtagpossibilities
When you’re planning a social calendar, work on coming up with a good hashtag to include in your campaign. Using a campaign hashtag accomplishes two goals: it reiterates your event’s brand, and it makes it easier for you and other interested parties to find information about your event.
Try to create a hashtag that’s easy to remember, easy to spell, and pretty self-explanatory. If your event is called “Hike for the Cure,” you might try something like #HikefortheCure.
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If this is a multi-year event, you can always add the year to the hashtag, too. That way, you can search for past examples quickly and easily.
Once you’ve chosen your hashtag, use it in your marketing materials! Include it in your posts, add it to images, reference it in videos and flyers, and encourage your participants to use it, too. You can even use it as a basis for text giving keywords! Not #hashtagsavvy? Here’s a great article on why hashtags work and how to use them effectively.
This campaign for the Ronald McDonald House Charities of the Carolinas emphasizes the hashtag #forRMHC. The event was a social media-based campaign, and the hashtag made it easy for people to find information about the fundraiser. Their social strategy worked: they raised 137% of their fundraising goal!
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Creating and Advertising Incentive Plans
Some groups of attendees are more motivated to register and fundraise if there’s something in it for them. Offering incentives for event participation can also be a great strategy to get your target audience to register early (when you need an accurate headcount). The incentive doesn’t have to be a costly part of your marketing plan. However, the incentive should be something your fundraisers are going to value. Consider some of the incentives below if you’re thinking of marketing your event using an incentive-based marketing strategy. Here are some incentive ideas that will help you attract participants.
Discounted Registrations
Some events require you to get a close estimate of the total number of expected attendees early. This ensures there’s enough food if the event is catered and that the selected venue won’t be overcrowded. More importantly, you’ll want to inspire your supporters to claim their spots sooner rather than later if this event is limited to a few participants and tickets are issued based on when attendees registered.
One way to get more registrants is to offer early bird discounts for those who register before a certain cutoff date. You lose a little money initially from the reduced registration fees for early registrants, but you can make up for it at the event and with formation of peer-to-peer fundraising teams. An earlier registration means more time to begin fundraising. If you allow team captains to register early, make sure that you have supplied them with the information and resources they need to recruit family and friends to their teams and start fundraising. You can offer discount registration promo codes to past event attendees you’ve identified as strong supporters of your organization. If your next event caters to past event attendees’ interests, target those who’ve participated in your peer-to-peer fundraisers to give them the first opportunity to sign up and secure their spots. Offering a discount if they sign up to fundraise guarantees that a good number of your attendees are donors who know how to fundraise for you.
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Early Bird Discounts
If you’re hosting an outdoor fundraising event and the number of participants isn’t limited, consider offering a discounted rate for joining a fundraising team as well. Create a special promo code for team captains to give to interested team members. The team members then get a discount (that isn’t as large as the early bird discount) for signing up early to fundraise on a team. For instance, if you had an early bird registration discount for fundraising team captains that gave them ten dollars off the registration fee, those team captains could recruit their team members using a special promo code that offers five dollars off registration fees for each team member.
Recruit dedicated team captains that you know have no problem recruiting fundraising teams. Take a look at previous peer-to-peer event participants or, if you’ve never done a peer-to-peer event, your most dedicated supporters and volunteers, and reach out to them with a personal email giving them the promo code and asking them to be a team captain for your upcoming event. When they sign up, send a follow-up email with the team member discount code for everyone they recruit for their fundraising team.
Prize Drawing
An easy way to attract more participants for your fundraising event is to enter participants into a drawing for a desirable prize for registering early. This can entail giving a free entry to a drawing you’ll later charge attendees at the event to enter. Or, if you’re worried about violating anti-raffle laws, you could keep the prize drawing as a no-cost incentive for early registrants.
Make sure that the prize is something your target audience would appreciate. Are your attendees likely to be interested in winning an experience? Restaurant gift card? Branded merchandise from your organization? Or are they most interested in electronics? If your event has a theme, can the prize be related to that theme in any way? Come up with a great prize and tell your community about how they can win it just by registering early for your event. The right prize will see registrations pour in for your peer-to-peer fundraiser.
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Team Discounts
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Physical Merchandise
If you are part of a large organization with a well-funded event planning budget, another incentive to encourage team recruitment or donation solicitation is to make it possible for fundraising teams to earn branded merchandise for reaching certain recruitment and fundraising milestones. This makes forming a strong fundraising team and getting donations into a game. Fundraisers typically respond well when gamification is part of their fundraising experience.
Offer team captains exclusive prizes for establishing a fundraising team of at least five members. From there, offer the team prizes for additional recruitment milestones. This encourages team members to reach out to their network and recruit more fundraisers to register for your event and fundraise for the team. You can also reward teams with special prizes for reaching fundraising milestones. This can be done incrementally as well as having a team award for top fundraising teams. You should also consider individual fundraising awards for top-performing participants.
A great way to make prizes work for you is to brand these prizes with your nonprofit organization’s name and logo. Supporters will proudly show off their exclusive, branded items, which helps build brand recognition in your service area. Consider branded items you can have made in bulk for a relatively low cost. Personalized shirts, bags, hats, coffee mugs, cell phone accessories (like trickle charges or car AC adapters) can be inexpensive but highly valued by your guests. Get creative and come up with some exclusive branded merchandise that you can offer those who perform exceptionally well at fundraising.Honor top fundraising teams and individuals with trophies or medals honoring their success. If your event is recurring, hang a plaque at your main office and engrave the top team and individual fundraiser names on it and leave it up. Your supporters will be honored for a lifetime and you can keep adding names to the plaque until it’s filled. This is an inexpensive way to keep your top supporters motivated and make them feel appreciated!
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Top Participant Party
One of our customers, NuPath, Inc. has an exceptional way of honoring their top fundraisers, which they call Club 50. They host a huge blowout party after their peer-to-peer fundraiser. Their top fifty fundraisers get an exclusive invite to this after-party to celebrate the fundraisers’ success. By making the event exclusive, more participants give fundraising their all in hopes of earning an invitation to the exclusive after-party. To read more about NuPath’s Club 50 and other ways they succeed in peer-to-peer event marketing, check out this blog post.
To start using this kind of incentive program, you’ll want to communicate early to participants that there will be an after-party for top-performing fundraisers after your peer-to-peer event. Let participants know it’s an exclusive event only for your top fundraisers. You don’t have to open it up to a full 50 people if you want a more intimate event. You could also open the after-party up to a larger number of fundraisers if multiple individuals did an exceptional job.
It’s important to make sure that your after-party is an event that top fundraisers will want to go to. It may be fine to host the event in your conference room, but it doesn’t have the same wow factor as booking a local hot spot that will interest your fundraisers. If there’s a popular local bar or restaurant people really like, try and reserve that space for your party. If there’s an opportunity to host a unique, rewarding event like an evening of laser tag or an escape room, consider hosting that activity as a reward for your top fundraisers. The key is offering a unique and memorable experience that shows your participants you appreciate their efforts. Leave your top supporters feeling great about their success so that they’ll be more inclined to come out again in support of your nonprofit.
Bonus Tip: Make your peer-to-peer fundraising event calendar work for you. Create an after-party for after your organization’s event season ends. Host a party for top overall fundraisers rather than throwing a party for each event. Encourage participants to fundraise for multiple events throughout the year to raise as much money as possible and increase their odds of getting an invitation to the exclusive afterparty for top fundraisers.
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Use Blogs to Share Your Event
If your nonprofit organization has a blog to draw eyes to your organization’s website, it may also be a great way to get eyes on event announcements, recaps, and share client stories in order to inspire people to join you at your next peer-to-peer fundraiser. Using your blog to promote your peer-to-peer event works best if your blog has a significant following or a consistent number of readers. However, a lack of blog readers can be mitigated by posting your event announcement blog posts to your social media accounts. Because short posts work best on social media channels, linking to a blog post allows you to share all the details about your event without worrying about it being too long to read when shared on social media. Here are some ideas for a great blog marketing strategy.
Tease Your Upcoming Events
Your blog can be a great place to let your audience in on the event planning process and highlight some of the unique, exciting features of your peer-to-peer event. Is your 5K going to conclude with an adult-size slip n’ slide? That detail is something your supporters would want to know about ahead of time! Got great incentives for fundraising? Your blog is a great place to show your fundraisers what they can win.
Giving sneak peeks of your event on your blog gets interested people that much closer to registering for your event. When they’re reading your blog post, be sure to include the registration link to your fundraising event. Include links to your event on other pages, too.
Show First-Time Participants Past Events
Sharing pictures from past years’ recurring peer-to-peer fundraising events helps first-time attendees get an idea of what to expect at your event. You’re marketing all the fun that guests can have if they decide to sign up and help you fundraise. If there’s a staple activity that makes your event unique, sharing pictures from past years will give attendees a glimpse at what makes this event special–once-in-a-lifetime activities get people excited!
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Purple Plunge posts a gallery of pictures from each year’s event!
Share Participant and Client StoriesYour blog is an ideal place to share the stories of your participants and those you serve. When you tie in these stories with the importance of fundraising as part of a peer-to-peer fundraiser, those stories can provide serious motivation for fundraising individuals and teams. Not to mention, your fundraisers can point to these stories to sway their family and friends to give to your nonprofit.
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For instance, Purple Plunge, a nonprofit organization that provides grants to help people pay for cancer treatment costs, hosts a peer-to-peer fundraiser and shares the stories of grant recipients regularly. Those who benefit from these grants provide a first-person account of how the funds from Purple Plunge improved their situation. Then, at the bottom of the story, Purple Plunge makes a point to thank the donors and event participants because, without the funds raised at events, these grants wouldn’t be possible. One such story is that of the Frank family. Sharing these stories gives participants a solid understanding of how their fundraising efforts make a real-life difference. What a motivator!
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Promote Your Event with Local Media
Another way to have your event details shared within your community is to advertise it in local media channels. Writing press releases and submitting them to local area paper’s, sending save the date postcards, sharing the event with community calendars, and paying for advertising on local radio programming or on billboards are all great ways to get the word out. Using local media to reach people in your service area casts a smaller, more targeted net. This approach typically reaches more of your targeted audience within a smaller area. Here are some ways you can use local media channels to spread the word about your peer-to-peer fundraising event.
Write a Press Release
A well-written press release announcing your peer-to-peer fundraising event to your local papers’ readers is a low-cost way to recruit registrants for your event. However, the press release must be run or featured on the local newspaper’s website. Whether the papers in your area will choose to run your story is up to them. When you write your press release, you may also want to share your press release on your nonprofit’s website and social media channels to increase the odds people will read about it.
One way to make sure your press release has the greatest odds of being picked up by a local paper is writing a great press release. The most important information should be closest to the top, the style of writing should be concise and formal, and you must tell a newsworthy story. Hammermill Paper has a great guide to writing press releases and a downloadable press release template to make your story more likely to be picked up by journalists.
When sending your story out for consideration by local news outlets, you’ll want to find the journalists and anchors who most often cover your type of story. If there’s a local community news beat with a handful of writers contributing columns about community events, reach out to them with your press release as they have the most need for that type of content. You can often find local journalists’ email addresses on the newspaper’s website. But, if their emails aren’t listed, you can certainly always call the paper itself to discuss your story. Building a solid relationship with local TV stations and newspapers is key to getting eyes on your events.
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Send Save The Date Postcards
A cheap but effective way to alert your past participants about your event well ahead of time is to send them a save the date postcard. Postcards, if bulk mailed, are incredibly inexpensive to mail, you won’t go through a ton of envelopes, and your recipients have a handy reminder they can easily stick on their refrigerator or share with others.
The design of your postcard gives you more flexibility than you might think. But the United States Postal Service does have minimum and maximum size requirements for your mailing to be eligible for the postcard shipping rate. The shape of your postcard should be rectangular. The size of your postcard must be at least 3.5 inches high, 5 inches long, and .007 inches thick (think the thickness of an index card). To still qualify for the postcard rate, your card can be no more than 4.25 inches high, 6 inches long and .016 inches thick.
If you have more of an event marketing budget, you can easily have a local printer do all the printing for you. If you are going through a full-service print shop, there’s a good chance they can also mail your postcards for you if you print enough pieces to qualify for the USPS Bulk Mail rate. Sending via bulk mail will lower the cost of sending postcards to your mailing list and saves you the time of applying postage to each card.
However, if the look of bulk mail is unappealing to you because of the unsightly barcode (and trust me, your donors don’t like the look of it either), keep it personal by applying actual stamps to the corner of each postcard before mailing it out. Your recipients will feel like their invitation to your fundraiser was sent especially to them, rather than being one in a bundle of 200+ other postcards. If your mailing list contains donors you’re actively
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nurturing, personalize the postcard even further with a handwritten message on a blank space. Helpful Hint: Leave yourself enough whitespace to write that message when you design the postcards!
Get on The Local News
Your local news channels are often looking for community highlights and noteworthy events to talk about. If you’ve got an exciting, newsworthy event, it never hurts to reach out and share that information with your local news channels. Because news outlets make it easy to share community tips, finding an email or phone number to share your information is often a simple matter.
Pitch them the story of your event for their local news or feel good story segments. Be sure whoever is speaking with the media is great at telling your organization’s story and has been prepped with all the event details. Like the local newspapers, local news channels decide which stories to air. Being able to tell a strong story is key. Storytelling not your strong suit? This article teaches you how to tell compelling stories.
Mark Your Community Calendars
If the local news decides not to feature your story during one of their segments, don’t despair! Ask if your event can be placed on their local events calendar. They’re often more than happy to oblige these requests. Typically, being added to event calendars is free or inexpensive.
Organizations that typically have event calendars you can share your event to are local media and the local newspaper, your city and county government event calendars, and on your local chamber of commerce website (typically requires membership to post to a chamber of commerce calendar).
You’ll also want to make sure your own website has a calendar and that your peer-to-peer event is prominently displayed on it. If you partner with other local organizations, work closely with schools, or have other connections in your local community that
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maintain event calendars, ask for your fundraiser to be made visible on it. The worst they can say is no!
If your fundraising event is being held at a local venue with its own web page, make sure you reach out to the venue’s management to ask that your fundraising event be added to the venue’s calendar. Not only will this help prevent double-booking your event date, but people seeking out entertainment will see your event when looking at the venue’s calendar.
Bonus Tip: If you’ve already recruited sponsors, ask them if they wouldn’t mind sharing your event details on their company calendar. Not only are you then reaching that business’ employees, but their customers as well.
High Visibility on The Highway
If your service area has billboard space, consider renting one or two. It can be especially affordable to get your ad up on digital billboards that rotate your event advertisement with others. They may seem old school, but billboards’ ability to endure the test of time is a testament to their effectiveness. According to the Out of Home Advertising Association of America, billboards have been around since 1867. With the use of new, digital billboards, there is always space on a billboard for your event details.
You’ll want to choose the locations of the billboards you rent wisely. It’s easiest to search for available billboards in your service area first, then call the billboard leasing company to discuss your options. They typically have data on where the high traffic areas are and can help you select billboards your target audience will see. Sometimes, nonprofit organizations are even eligible for discounts when renting billboard space. It doesn’t hurt to ask if there’s a nonprofit rate when you call!
If you’ve never designed a billboard for advertising, use these design tips from Lamar, a leader in the out-of-home advertising industry.
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One of Qgiv’s local clients, Lakeland Regional Health, regularly uses billboard ads to advertise their Promise Run 5K fundraiser. Their billboards are simple but eye-catching. They use Lakeland Regional Health’s brand colors (blue and white) and use very little text. The date of the event and the web address to register are the most prominent part of the billboard, while their logo and event name are to the side to provide more context to those with more time to observe the billboard.
Turn Up the Radio
FM radio stations may not have the lion’s share of music listenership anymore, but, depending on your target audience, they can be a great advertising resource. Many people still listen for local news updates, school closures, and to kill time when they’re stuck in traffic on their work commutes. Most cities have radio stations that are near enough to be viable for advertising. With radio, you’ve got access to a very wide net.
You may be surprised to learn that many different stations are owned by the same company. This is significant because your local stations cater to different audiences in your community. Reaching out to the company operating your local stations and telling them about your target audience will help them narrow down the best stations for you to advertise on.
When advertising your peer-to-peer event on the radio, you’ve got the ability to get creative and capture your listeners’ attention. Radio stations are typically more than happy to advise you on radio ad best practices. You’ll want to be concise and keep your information memorable.
Consider asking the station to cover your event that day. Fans of certain radio programs will flock to your event to meet their favorite hosts and DJs. Asking far enough in advance makes it easy for the show’s producers to fit it into their calendar and guarantee your spot. That way, a local celebrity is available at your event as entertainment. Often, if it’s a music station, they’ll be there playing tunes for the crowd during their radio show–as well as providing event info and updates live from your event!
Having a local station cover your event shows your community that your fundraisers are a good cause and a big deal.
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Make the Most of Your Community
One of the most effective and inexpensive marketing tools you can use to promote your peer-to-peer event is your local community. Use your connections to make meaningful relationships with people and businesses so they’ll not only support your organization, but advertise your fundraisers for you, too!
Local and Micro-Influencers
The term “influencer” isn’t limited to social media. In your community, there is always that special type of person who knows and gets along with everyone. Maybe it’s a popular city official. Maybe it’s the head of a religious organization. In your community, there are undoubtedly people who have earned the trust of your town. Their opinions are given extra consideration, their suggestions are valued, and they’re considered a valuable information resource about what’s going on around town.
These influencers are looked up to in your service area. Forming relationships with important figureheads in your community gets you on the local radar. Introduce yourself to the mayor and anyone else the public views favorably. When the time is right, ask them to support your organization by spreading the word about your peer-to-peer fundraiser. Often, influencers have vast social networks and can reach a large group of people who would be more than happy to support you at the influencer’s suggestion.
Get Support from Sponsors
If your P2P event has already earned itself sponsors from your community, reach out to them to ask that you’re included on the company event calendar. But that’s just the start of what you can do! Remember, your sponsors have a vested interest in making sure your event is well-attended and successful. Good outcomes for you tend to mean good outcomes for them.
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Have a meeting with the person who coordinates sponsorships and ask how you can partner with them to market the event. You could prepare resources like event flyers/posters or a stack of postcards and ask them to make your materials available to their customers and staff. Some places aren’t going to say yes to this due to their policies, but it never hurts to ask.
To reach people in your sponsors’ networks of followers, be sure to send personal thank-you messages tagging sponsors on social media. By tagging sponsors, you’re not just making sure they alone see your thank-you. Their fans become more likely to see it on the sponsor’s wall and in their own social feeds as well. If a sponsor has a large following, you could find your organization presented to hundreds of people thanks to a simple message. Thanking them publicly may also encourage your sponsors to promote your event to their followers on their social media as well. The best part, this exposure for your event is 100% free.
Promote with Nonprofit Partners
If your nonprofit organization has close ties with other organizations in your area, ask them if they wouldn’t mind helping promote your fundraising event. You can offer to help promote their next function in exchange. Make sure that the nonprofits you have partnered with have great reputations in your service area. By having a respected nonprofit promote the work of your organization, you gain instant credibility from those who didn’t know you previously.
Your partners don’t have to pay anything to help you market your event to their network. Just ask for a social media shout out and maybe have them hand out your event details or hang a poster in their lobby. These are simple steps that can strengthen your relationship with other area nonprofits, while also finding new supporters for your fundraising event.
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Conclusion
Marketing your peer-to-peer event to the right audience using the right methods of communication is a surefire way to improve your chances of attracting more participants and raising more money for your event. Once you’ve identified your target audiences, get your messaging in front of them using a targeted marketing strategy. Effectively using multiple channels to promote your event will help increase your reach. Advertising your events using a variety of media types helps your event be seen by multiple demographics in your community. Combine social media and other digital marketing with traditional marketing efforts like billboards, posters, and direct mail invites to maximize your reach. Free resources like fundraising event calendars and email lists composed of your supporters can also be a nice way to spread the word. Enlisting your advocates, sponsors, and non-profit partners to help lends credibility to your organization and your fundraiser. By building (and following!) a thoughtful marketing strategy and creating marketing messages that adhere to industry best practices, you’ll be driving attendees to your peer-to-peer event in no time.
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