P2P fundraising: Your toolkit checklist

Peer-to-peer fundraising is a great way to get a larger segment of the population involved in giving back to your organization. P2P campaigns typically fall into two categories: time-based campaigns or year-round (rolling) campaigns. Time-based campaigns are typically tied to an event or follow a finite period of time whereas rolling campaigns happen when supporters fundraise for you at any time of the year—these campaigns are not necessarily tied to any event you are holding.

Regardless of the type of P2P fundraising that happens, one of the best things you can do it provide your supporters with options in way of a toolkit to make their efforts seamless—and in turn raise more money.

P2P supporters = fundraising ambassadors

Set your P2P fundraising ambassadors and participants up for success with the following components of a peer-to-peer fundraising kit:

Kick-off call

While this may not seem like a toolkit item per say, a call with your lead ambassadors is a great idea to get everyone on the same page and telling the same story. You can record these calls and add them to your website as part of the overall toolkit or resources area if others want to listen on-demand for additional information.

Messaging

Create a one pager with the mission of your organization and information about who you are, who you serve and the importance of the fundraiser. What impact do you provide to the community? Why is it critical to receive community support? What story do you want to tell? Make it easy for your supporters to share these same stories.

Brand elements

Think color codes, logo files and other brand elements from your organization that may be helpful for supporters to use in email communications, social media or on their individual fundraising pages (if those elements aren’t already included or can be personalized in different ways).

Instructions for fundraising pages

This is a biggie. You want to ensure that your supporters are using online giving to the fullest. Provide easy-to-understand instructions for how they can set up their individual fundraising page or create group/team pages. Make sure you have a list of FAQs and/or contact information to handle any questions that may come up.

Sample social media posts

Sometimes our supporters don’t think to post to all their social media channels and sometimes they need help crafting those posts. Make it easy for them by drafting a one page of content with sample posts for all the major social media channels that they can copy/paste to their feeds.

Email or SMS/text templates

Same thing here; put pen to paper (theoretically speaking) and craft sample messages your supporters can also send to family, friends and colleagues via email or even text message.

Imagery

Visual elements of fundraising campaigns help elicit emotion. Add a library of images that your supporters can choose from to use on any communication piece—from email to social media to signature lines to their individual fundraising page(s). Make sure you have permission to share any type of imagery with the masses before you make those files publicly accessible.

Make your fundraising toolkit easy to access

A great place to house the items in your P2P fundraising toolkit is right on your website. You can also create branded templates and imagery using a platform such as Canva and provide a link out to those images so you don’t have to upload them individually to your site. Another idea is to host all your files and images in Dropbox or a Google Drive and place those access links directly on your website. If you use shared storage services such as those, be sure anything you put online is OK to be accessed by the public.

We’re just getting started

For more ideas and information on effective peer-to-peer campaigns, check out some of the following resources:

Don’t miss out on our free P2P giving campaign digital content cheat sheet as well! Grab this template for sample content for campaign solicitation emails, campaign thank you emails, and social media content for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Linked. Download your peer-to-peer giving content cheat sheet today.