The Secret Super Power to Motivating Your Peer-to-Peer Fundraisers 

How to Give Your Ambassadors a Plan and the Confidence to Surpass Their Fundraising Goals 

Peer-to-peer fundraising (also known as P2P fundraising) is one of the best strategies your nonprofit can use to advance the success of your mission. There are three main benefits it can deliver for you:

1. Donor Base Expansion

P2P fundraising reaches people you would never otherwise reach, friends of your supporters who aren’t on any of your mailing lists. It turns one donor into twenty.

2. Deeper Missional Ownership of Core Supporters

Peer-to-peer fundraising endears your current supporters even more to your cause because they’re going out and promoting your charity, making your message theirs.

3. More Donations

With more potential donors reached, and more committed supporters, P2P fundraising has the power to bring in funds for an immediate campaign, as well as to expand long-term recurring giving.

What is Peer-to-Peer Fundraising?

If you already know, you can skip to the next part. In short, peer-to-peer fundraising means that your supporters go out and raise money on your behalf. So, they go out and ask their friends, coworkers, relatives, and whoever else they can reach to give to your nonprofit.

So in effect, they are doing your fundraising for you. This has the distinct advantage of costing you very little. Once you get a system set up, your supporters go out and do the work for you.

All you need is a way for supporters to keep track of who has given to their campaign. Usually, this means using a CRM that has the ability to set up personal fundraising pages. But, P2P fundraising can also be done using a Facebook fundraiser, bypassing the need for a CRM that can do peer-to-peer.

The Challenge Facing All Peer-to-Peer Fundraisers

If you think about it, the biggest challenge of peer-to-peer fundraising is obvious: Fear.

Your core supporters might be devoted to your mission, but when they have to go out and actually ask people for money, their neck tightens, their tongue twists, and they can easily freeze up and decide to do nothing – especially if their first few attempts to ask for donations fall flat. I once got turned down by my own parents when doing P2P.

Your job, therefore, is to keep your peer-to-peer fundraisers motivated and inspired. You must continually feed them the confidence they need to keep going.

Think of it this way:

P2P fundraisers are your salespeople. And you’re the sales manager. You aren’t going out into the field with them. But you have to equip your people for success. Otherwise, nothing happens.

So what can you do to encourage and empower your peer-to-peer fundraisers? Here’s the answer:

The Secret to P2P Success: Ongoing Targeted Communication

There’s a lot to running a successful peer-to-peer fundraising campaign. But if you want to maximize your donations, ongoing communication targeted specifically at your fundraising ambassadors is the essential component you cannot do without.

What does this communication look like?

• Dripped email sequences
• Facebook messenger
• Text messages
• Phone calls
• Personal letters in the mail
• Live motivational rallies

How many of these you use depends on a number of factors, such as the length of the campaign, how many P2P fundraisers you have raising money for you, the size of your paid and volunteer staff, and the information you have on your supporters.

For shorter campaigns, focus on email and either text or messenger. For longer campaigns, a phone call and a letter a couple months into the campaign can provide the extra boost of encouragement your fundraisers might need to keep going. A live rally might be great to kick off a campaign, or a few months in if it’s a longer one.

P2P Communication – Plan It from the Start

This might seem obvious. Of course, we need to communicate, right? But actually doing it – this is one of the first balls that gets dropped when things get busy. Why?

Because timely and effective communication takes two things: Planning and writing. You need someone to plan out when communication will happen – in advance! And then you need someone to implement the plan and write it (or call them).

So when you plan to use a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign, communication with your fundraisers must be part of the planning from DAY 1. If you don’t have someone you know will deliver the plan and the implementation, seek out a fundraising copywriting professional and have them do it.

If you want ProActive Content to create your P2P fundraising communications, contact us here and describe the length of the campaign (timeline), the fundraising goal (dollar amount you want to raise), and how many times you’ve done peer-to-peer fundraising before.

We work with ANY SIZE nonprofit, no matter how small. We use pricing plans that adjust based on the size of your nonprofit.

Take Action Now – Get 10 P2P Fundraiser Email Templates

If you want to do all the peer-to-peer communications yourself but don’t have the time, then use what has already worked for someone else. All the forms of communication listed above are an important part of a communication plan. But email is at the top of the list for a reason.

Texts and messenger posts can’t be very long, and are very quick to read and delete. They are not the place for the more in-depth strategies and encouragements you want to give to your fundraisers. And direct mail and phone calls take more time and money.

Email is fast, can be automated, and will get opened by your fundraisers.

We created a 10-email sequence targeted specifically for P2P fundraising ambassadors, and have used it in real campaigns.

It overcomes all the challenges about fear and uncertainty that amateur fundraisers face.

These P2P email templates –

• Clearly communicate what your P2P fundraisers need to do
• Give tons of ideas and strategies they can pick and choose from to succeed in raising money for you
• Include examples of real fundraising ideas people have used in the past – with actual numbers
• Continually motivate and inspire your fundraisers

Again, these are templated versions of real emails we have used in past successful P2P campaigns. All you have to do is fill in the specifics for your campaign and nonprofit.

You can have the first 3 emails in the series for free.

Fill out this form and they’re all yours

If you want all 10, you can get the complete set for $49.

Click the Buy Now button to get all 10 – plus 2 bonuses. Learn more here!